No Rock And Roll Fun

WRITING ABOUT MUSIC WRITING IS LIKE, OH, SOMETHING ABOUT DANCING AND BUILDINGS PROBABLY: There's an interesting post over on clap clap blog about music criticism, suggesting that if you write about songwords and nothing about the music itslef, all you're producing is literary criticism. Eppy believes this could be because we don't have a vocabulary to describe pop music, whereas classical music has a much more precise set of terms - your cadences, credenzas and so on. But I'm not totally convinced this totally holds water - a lot of music writers do try to describe the music, but the reason they don't use strict music theory terms to do so isn't because there's a difference between a rock cadence and a classical cadence; more that when you review pop, you're writing for a much less specialised audience for whom the terms are less likely to hold meaning than saying "the guitars are like horses screeching in a thunderstorm."