One evening in Leeds, in about 1913, the young J.B. Priestley had a brush with modernity:

… hot and astonished in the Empire, we discovered ragtime … It was as if we had been still living in the nineteenth century and then suddenly found the twentieth glaring and screaming at us. We were yanked into our own age, fascinating, jungle-haunted, monstrous … Out of these twenty noisy minutes in a music hall, so long ago, came fragmentary but prophetic outlines of the situation in which we find ourselves now, the menace to old Europe, the domination of America, the emergence of Africa, the end of confidence and any feeling of security, the nervous excitement, the frenzy, the underlying despair of our century … here was something new, strange, curiously disturbing … (Priestley 1962, pp. 66–7)

The tenor is a rhythm instrument and the best statements negroes have made of what their soul is have been on tenor saxophone. Now you think about it and you'll see I'm right. The tenor's got that thing, that honk, you can get to people with it. Sometimes you can be playing that tenor and I'm telling you the people want to jump across the rail. (Ornette Coleman)

The monstrous machinations of the reissue CD market are reorganising our relations with ourselves, with our own and other peoples' pasts. This, in conjunction with the fact that baby-boomers have grown up, that pop music is no longer simply youth music, means that yesterday's and tomorrow's songs are not necessarily heard in that order, and that styles no longer grow and change in a linear fashion. In the simple act of repetition, thousands of albums, which, like Haydn's symphonies, were never intended for anything more than local consumption, are being underlined as worthy of recall, blessed with the glamorous radiance of digital sound. Musical nostalgia is highly seductive, but whilst it has resulted in considerable beauty and vigour in the hands of both Elgar and Stravinsky, it sounds predatory in the context of all those sixties music advertisements. More seriously – ‘lest we forget’ – political nostalgia, in the form of the search for the lost German Spirit, eventually proved genocidal. So, at a more personal level, I should be cautious about celebrating such a relic from my own past within the candy-coloured world of hippy psychedelia as the Incredible String Band.

This article began, quite simply, as the presentation of a stage in the mapping-out of those harmonic practices which serve to distinguish rock and closely cognate styles (hereafter simply ‘rock’) from those of common-practice tonality on one hand, and jazz on another. It soon became apparent, however, that such a task necessitated some detailed consideration of the means by which the conclusions might be presented and, therefore, some careful consideration of analytic method. To my knowledge, there is as yet very little concern for theorising analytic method in rock music and, therefore, what follows may act as a tentative opening of a difficult debate. The issue at present is, simply, whether or not Schenkerian theory can be adequately applied to this music. My conclusion is that as yet it cannot, and I shall present my findings in that light, but the reasons for my position must, I think, be spelt out. Thereafter, my specific concern will be to investigate varieties of the use of the diatonic ‘flattened seventh’ in rock, which I shall do by focusing in turn on three issues, investigating them through the analysis of particular examples rather than through any larger generalisations.

The phrase ‘big in Japan’ has become a popular cliché, used to describe acts which are meant to be enjoying Japanese success: anyone from Kylie Minogue to Primal Scream; from Dead or Alive to Blur. It seems that even the most unregarded artists can make it in Japan. Even Spinal Tap – the fictional, washed-up heavy metal band from Rob Reiner's film of the same name – were finally able to find success in Japan. The implication seems to be that the Japanese hunger for Western culture is so strong that even bands who have failed in their own countries can succeed in the Japanese market. Indeed, an expressed belief that Japanese listeners could not get enough of Western music was the usual reaction when I told acquaintances that I was studying the Japanese pop music market. This belief is perpetuated by music magazines, which regularly print stories detailing bizarre acts of devotion by Japanese fans.

Postmodern aesthetics has come to be recognised as a salient feature of much popular culture, including music. Urban subcultures, and especially migrant subcultures, may have inherent inclinations toward postmodern aesthetics, while at the same time retaining ties to modern and even pre-modern cultural discourses. The syncretic popular musics created by such subcultures may reflect these multiple cultural orientations by combining postmodern and more traditional characteristics. Thus, for example, punk rock and rap music can be seen to combine postmodern techniques of pastiche, bricolage and blank irony with modernist socio-political protest. Similar eclecticisms can also be found in the musics of some urban migrant subcultures, whose syncretic musics, like their senses of social identity, often self-consciously juxtapose or combine ancestral homeland traditions with the most contemporary cosmopolitan styles and attitudes. Interpretations of such musics may call for a particularly nuanced appreciation of the distinct aesthetic modes which may coexist in the same work.

There is a shared view among insiders that the release of the recording ‘Od izvora dva putića’ ([There are] ‘Two paths leading from the water spring’) by Serbian female singer Lepa Lukić in 1964, marked the beginning of the ‘market history’ of Yugoslav novokomponovana narodna muzika (newly-composed folk music; henceforth NCFM). The song's lyrics depict a young woman in a rustic village whose love is thwarted when her lover moves to the city. The music evokes a motif typical of the Central-Serbian region of Šumadija: a tuneful melody, steady 2/4 rhythm, and a caressing quality in the narration. The title of the song is highly symbolic of the divergence of Yugoslav folk music into a continuing narodna muzika (folk; literally, ‘people's’ music) and an emerging pop stream.