It is hoped that this paper might serve as a starting point for the consideration of the different structural paradigms that can be discerned in popular music. The most obvious antecedents to the examples presented here might be The Velvet Underground and German ('Krautrock') groups such as Can, Faust and Tangerine Dream, all active in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and all of whom experimented with structure. Since that time, the number of rock artists who have made recordings where structures might be best described as labyrinth, immersive, or single-cell, is immense. In particular, there has been a great rise in single-cell and immersive forms in the first decade of the twenty-first century, with new stylistic fusions such as avant-folk (e.g. Six Organs of Admittance, Charalambides), avant- and psychedelic rock (e.g. Akron/Family, Animal Collective, Gang Gang Dance), and punk-art collisions (e.g. Castings, Black Dice).[1]
However, we need not confine ourselves to the fringes of rock music to find use for the formal categories introduced here. The funk of James Brown from the mid-sixties through to the early 1970s (for example) offers another opportunity to consider immersive forms. Though articulated by polyrhythms, we may experience many of these recordings as pulsating sound-masses rather than analyse the rhythmic components. Of course, this is true also of a great number of rock recordings, but most of these are overlaid by the quest narrative structure articulated by verse-chorus-bridge or strophic forms. By contrast, many classic funk sides by Brown—for example 'Mother Popcorn' (1969) and 'Sex Machine' (1970)-are virtually single-cell forms only broken up by a single detour to a bridge. A study of the structural paradigms presented by electronic dance music, or hip hop, using the categories suggested in this paper, might also be instructive, as it would help to explain the extent to which various examples are related to, rely on, or reject, structural conventions of pop and rock.
One of the most immediate uses of this approach to musical structure might be to rethink the ways in which recordings as texts are related, irrespective of style or genre. That is, the recognition of labyrinth, immersive and single-cell forms might be used to group pieces apart from stylistic types predicated largely by rhythm and gesture. This approach also invites the comparison of examples of rock music with narrative and non-narrative approaches to other disciplines, particularly film and literature. Straying from
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- ↑ The extent to which some of these artists, and/or individual recordings by them, might be described as rock is open to debate.
PORTAL, vol. 8, no. 1, January
