Arguing that music not only affects our identities but shapes them, this work explores the interpretation of popular music. It examines the functions of pop music within a constantly shifting social plane from the 1980s onwards, suggesting various approaches for the analysis of pop music.

Contents: General editor's preface; Settling the pop score...: Introduction; Grounding aesthetic and ideological values; Musical codes and compositional design; Identity politics; Modelling identity; Interpreting ironic intent; Further discursions into the pop text; Towards a critical musicology of the popular; Mobilising the pop score; ’I’ll never be an angel’: stories of deception in Madonna’s music: Introduction; Reading musical codes in Madonna’s performance; Hearing, seeing, feeling gender; Spectatorship and seduction; Production and (post)modernist ’Survival’; Final concluding thoughts; Anti-rebel, lonesome boy: Morrissey in crisis?: Introduction; With a thorn in his side; Constructs of male identity in Morrissey; Characterisation and ’star’ depiction; Modelling empathy through vocal ’sound’; Interpreting ironic markers in pop texts; Conclusion; Annie Lennox’s ’Money Can’t Buy It’ - masquerading identity: Introduction; Opting for gender disguise; Questions of musical coding; Visualising sound through videography; Being totally Diva; Conclusion; ’Call it performance, honey’: The Pet Shop Boys: Introduction; Masculinity in the 1980s; Being boring and clever: style as rhetoric; Banality: political discourses of pleasure and power; Musical (dis)pleasures; ’Disco-Tex and the Sexelettes’: satirical musical address; Towards a PSB discourse; Conclusion; Subversive musical pleasures in ’The Artist (Again) Known as Prince’: Introduction; Dialectics of music and imagination; Identity as racial commodity; Stylistic and technical codes in Diamonds and Pearls; Sexing and ’spinning’ gender in musical expression; Carnivalesque musical display: signs of the times?; Conclusion; Bibliography; Discography; Index.