ABSTRACT
The term ‘text’ has traditionally been used to refer to an author’s original words, or a prose work – especially one recommended for student reading. More recently, as a cultural studies term, text refers to any media form that is selfcontained and conveys cultural meaning, including television programmes, recordings, films and books. Popular music texts are quite diverse, embracing both sound and visual examples, with these at times combined. The most prominent are aural texts: sound recordings, in various formats, the focus of this chapter. In addition, there are graphic texts, most notably album covers, and audiovisual texts, primarily music videos. Other forms of popular music text include music magazines, posters, t-shirts, tour brochures and fan club merchandise. Musical performances, especially concerts, and DJ discourse have also been analyzed as forms of musical text. These various forms are frequently interconnected and mutually reinforcing. Following a brief consideration of the nature of textual analysis, I turn to
musical texts with particular reference to issues around musicology, the analysis of song lyrics, and the nature and status of ‘covers’. Chapter 6 considers texts as ‘collectivities’, through discussions of genre and the album canon. Due to its close association with MTV and YouTube, music video, the main example of an audiovisual music text, is discussed in Chapter 8. It is obviously difficult to express through language qualities that are often
visual and aural, rather then linguistic. Accordingly, the book’s associated website provides links to websites where album cover art, song lyrics and recordings can be accessed.
