DAVID TEMPERLEY'S The Musical Language of Rock is a welcome and useful resource for the study of rock music. Designed for “people with a serious interest in rock music” (xi) who are literate in staff notation and conversant with basic harmony, it could serve as a textbook or supplementary reading for a course at the advanced undergraduate or graduate levels in the theory and analysis of rock music, if not popular music more generally. Temperley cites Allan Moore's Rock: The Primary Text, Ken Stephenson's What to Listen for in Rock, and Walter Everett's The Foundations of Rock as important precursors of his book (8). Among these, Stephenson's is the most similar because it was designed as an undergraduate textbook, with exercises for each chapter presented at the end of the book, while Moore's (now in a third edition, Moore and Martin 2019) is a scholarly monograph, and Everett's focuses on rock from the rise of Elvis Presley to the fall of the Beatles (1955–69) and is aimed at a general audience, eschewing traditional staff notation. Temperley's book seems to occupy a hybrid middle position among these works: the broad, definitive title and the questions following each chapter are typical of a textbook, but as his own description in the preface acknowledges, “it is not an overview of the current state of the field; much of the conceptual material is new and speculative” (xi), which is typical of a monograph, and Oxford is marketing it as such rather than as a textbook. Such hybrid texts may represent the future of academic publishing. As Christine Boone (2020: 243) notes in her own review of the book, however, much of its content is unlikely to be perceived as accessible to amateur readers.The presentation of the book's content could be more reader-friendly as well. Citations should include page numbers (particularly for references to specific information within book-length works). Musical examples, which show the beginning of the vocal part unless otherwise indicated, should nonetheless identify the song section, since it is not always the first verse. Ideally, example captions should also indicate what the example is meant to demonstrate. It would have been useful to include more transcriptions of the complete musical texture—or at least some drum and bass parts, especially in chapter 4, on rhythm and meter. More detailed chord labels would also have been helpful: in many cases chord extensions are reduced to triadic labels, which do not accurately reflect a chord's sound or level of dissonance, or in some cases its function. For instance, in the first notated example, the introduction of the Beatles' “She Loves You” (example 2.1, 18), the second chord should be labeled A7 rather than A (thus the melody note G is a chord tone, albeit a dissonant one), and the last chord should be labeled Gadd6, not G, as implied by the E notated in the vocal part. Similarly, the second chord of the Beatles' “I'm So Tired” (example 2.10B, 26) should be G♯7, not G♯, and the last chord of Prince's “Little Red Corvette” (example 2.11A, 26) should be a G♭ major seventh. This is symptomatic of a more general lack of attention to detail in the examples throughout the book. I list here a few other issues I noticed in chapter 2: In example 2.4D (20), an excerpt from Nirvana's “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” the harmonies should be labeled as power chords rather than triads. This may be because power chords are not explained until chapter 3 (43)—but it would not be difficult to find a triadic example of aeolian harmony that would fit better here.In example 2.5C (22), from Led Zeppelin's “No Quarter,” the label of a i chord in C♯ minor is a slight overstatement: tonic minor harmony is implied but not realized by the melody and pedal point. There is no harmony layer in the song at this point.In example 2.6 (22), the first chord is labeled “Id7,” presumably a dominant seventh on the tonic as described in the text—but the symbol lowercase d for dominant is explained only in note 2 of the following chapter (43). Since dominant seventh chords are presumably the most common in this repertoire, and dim7 is sometimes used in jazz and rock charts, it would make more sense to use an unmarked “7” for dominant sevenths and to symbolizemajor and minor sevenths with “M” or “maj” and “m” or “min,” respectively, which follows conventional usage in many jazz and rock lead sheets and chord charts.Another problematic aspect is the corpus study on which many of the empiricalgeneralizations regarding harmony are based, Temperley and Trevor de Clercq'stwo-hundred-song subset of Rolling Stone's (2004) “Five Hundred Greatest Songsof All Time.”1 Supporting the book's ideas and claims with empirical research is a laudable goal, but the derivations of both the original Rolling Stone list and Temperley and de Clercq's corpus are not ideal. The former, a list of critically acclaimed songs, was compiled by “172 rock stars and leading authorities” (Rolling Stone 2004), mostly unidentified, via an unexplained point system. It skews very heavily toward US and UK classic rock from the 1960s and 1970s and is also heavily white and male. Temperley and de Clercq's corpus of harmonic and melodic transcriptions is rather small in light of the broad topic of rock harmony and, despite their efforts to even out the chronological span, is also biased toward the 1960s and 1970s—and, by my count, comprises 92 percent male and 64 percent white artists. Some level of gender imbalance is likely with any corpus focused on rock music but is particularly unsurprising in light of Rolling Stone's egregious history of sexism. I should note that I have used this corpus in my own work, as a foil for a series of single-artist corpus studies of metric dissonance (Biamonte 2014), but will not do so in the future, to avoid reinforcing the biases of the rock canon.Despite these issues, the book contains much valuable material for analysts of popular music. The introductory chapter outlines the book's structure and scope and defines the terms in the title. Temperley uses the term musical language to situate music as a symbolic system of human communication with style-specific grammatical norms; musical patterns can convey intramusical and extramusical significance, but whether these correspond to meaning in language is a matter of debate (2). He defines rock broadly as Anglo-American popular music of the late twentieth century, including a range of related genres such as soul, disco, and metal (5–6)2 but explicitly excluding hip-hop, because of its perceived lack of melody (255), and country, because everyone else excludes it (256). He asserts that his adoption of terms and concepts from art music is appropriate in light of its “profound commonalities” with rock (7), considers the qualitatively different nature of the musical work in rock as a collaborative recorded track rather than an individually composed and notated score, and offers a defense of his formalist approach as a valid if incomplete approach to this repertoire (8–11).The next five chapters are each dedicated to one or two musical parameters: scales and key, harmony, rhythm and meter (including harmonic rhythm and hypermeter), melody (including some discussion of phrase and register), and timbre and instrumentation. The following three chapters consider song trajectories that are influenced by multiple musical parameters: emotion and tension, form, and formal strategies. The penultimate chapter presents sample analyses of six songs, and the concluding chapter surveys rock in a broader context. There is no separate chapter concerning song lyrics, because the book's primary focus is theoretical rather than analytical (4), and thus it takes only purely musical features into account (there is some discussion of lyrics in the context of the analyses in chapter 10).Chapter 2 concerns scales and key, beginning with a brief overview of scales used in rock, comprising major, harmonic minor (admittedly rare), modes of the major scale (dorian, phrygian, etc.), and pentatonic major and minor. This is followed by a discussion of Temperley's “supermode” (24–27), a ten-note scale comprising the union of major and minor keys, containing both the raised and lowered forms of 3∧, 6∧, and 7∧.3 This scale excludes two chromatic degrees entirely, ♭2∧ and ♯4∧, as well as enharmonic equivalents of the other degrees, such as ♯2∧ and ♯5∧, reflecting their low distribution in pop-rock overall. Because of the scale's inclusiveness, however, its analytic utility is limited; Temperley describes it as a “‘global’ scale for rock” (24), essentially a background collection of which most songs use subsets. Like most common scales in tonal music, the supermode and its subsets can be generated from a cycle of perfect fifths and thus compactly mapped onto the line of fifths, an unrolled circle of fifths that does not assume enharmonic equivalence. This allows for comparison of the relative sharpwardness or flatwardness of a given pitch collection and its scale-degree mean (30).The advantage of assuming the supermode rather than the complete chromatic scale as a background pitch collection is not clear; perhaps this emphasizes that ♭2∧ and ♯4∧ are more rare in rock than in common-practice art music. Reframing the supermode as a scale with flexible third, sixth, and seventh degrees might better reflect rock-compositional practice, since the major or minor versions of these scale degrees are often correlated. Similarly, the other new scale presented here, the “pentatonic union” scale combining major and minor pentatonic, might be better interpreted as a mixolydian scale with a flexible third degree that is more likely to be minor in the melody and—especially in blues-based songs—major in the harmony. This is the case with example 5.12D from Temperley's chapter on melody (103), an excerpt of the Beatles' “Birthday” with a minor third in the topmost voice and a major third below it in the vocal harmonies.4 It would probably be fruitful to analyze scale-degree distributions more hierarchically, not assuming that all notes are necessarily part of the background pitch collection but assigning greater weight to notes that are metrically, durationally, registrally, or dynamically more prominent. The final section of the chapter does consider some hierarchical aspects in its preference rules for key finding, privileging interpretations where all pitches are included in a supermode or else a major scale, the tonic chord is hypermetrically strong, and notes of the tonic triad are emphasized in the melody.Chapter 3 discusses harmony. The first part of the chapter presents findings from a corpus study. Most chords in rock music are major and minor triads diatonic to the supermode (42–45). The most commonly used chords overall are tonic, then subdominant, then dominant, then subtonic, which offers empirical support to the widely accepted idea that rock inherited a subdominant bias from the blues. (The blues is also the source of the tonic-functioning dominant seventh chords mentioned on p. 43. Of the three examples listed, only Chuck Berry's “Johnny B. Goode” is a twelve-bar-blues form, but the other two songs, the Beatles' “I Saw Her Standing There” and Aretha Franklin's “Respect,” are both strongly blues-inflected.) Root motions are less directional than in common-practice art music—but not opposite to them, as argued by Stephenson (2002); V moves to IV in rock almost as often as IV moves to V (47). The flat-side triads ♭VII, ♭III, and ♭VI are strongly correlated, and loosely correlated with the minor primary triads i, iv, and v. Similarly, the sharp-side triads ii, vi, and iii are correlated, and loosely correlated with the major primary triads I, IV, and V. These correlations thus outline two basic systems, of flat-side and sharp-side triads (51–52), which supports my proposed reframing of the supermode as having flexible 3∧, 6∧, and 7∧ rather than two separate versions of each degree.Temperley surveys various common chord patterns, and in a few cases explores potential derivations of them. He describes the chord progression of the Eagles' “Hotel California” verse, Bm–F♯–A–E–G–D–Em–F♯, variously as a root-motion sequence of descending fourths followed by ascending thirds, as a way of supporting the inner-voice chromatic descent B–A♯–A–G♯–G–F♯, and as a linear elaboration of i–V (57–58). I find this last interpretation the most compelling, because the underlying descending tetrachord progression i–♭VII–♭VI–V is a widespread schema in rock as well as in earlier popular and art music.5 Each of the first three chords of the descent is followed by its dominant, and these chords can be played on the guitar with minimal hand movement between each pair. Temperley describes this interpretation as “Schenkerian” (57), but it is simply hierarchical. He sets the terms hierarchical and structural in scare quotes, implying skepticism of their applicability, but as his own research presented earlier in this chapter has shown, and as he admits on the following page, tonal structures in rock are hierarchical.Near the end of chapter 3 is a brief discussion of cadences. Temperley's definition is overly restrictive: “a harmonic move to I coinciding with the end of the vocal line of a chorus (or refrain)” (61). This excludes instrumental cadences, as in many intros and outros; cadences in other song sections, as at the end of the verse of Billy Joel's “Piano Man”; half cadences, as in the Eagles' “Hotel California”; and other nontonic cadences. I hear the chorus ending on ♭VII in AC/DC's “Back in Black,” example 3.12D (61), as a modal half cadence, with ♭VII replacing the dominant. Analogously, Everett (2009: 257) describes the opening phrase of Otis Redding's “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay,” which ends on II♯, as “a sort of hyper-half cadence.” I have construed II♯ at the midpoint of the Grateful Dead's “Brokedown Palace” chorus (Biamonte 2010: 98) similarly as a lydian substitute dominant, and Drew Nobile (2020: 37) makes the same point about a “half-cadential II♯” at the end of the verse in the Left Banke's “Walk Away, Renee.”Chapter 4 opens with a discussion of meter, heavily influenced by Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff's (1983) model of metric structure. The main body of the chapter is concerned with syncopation, and it concludes with brief sections on harmonic rhythm, hypermeter, and irregular meters. Most rock is in 4/4, with straight duple subdivisions becoming prevalent from the late 1960s onward (68). In popular music from earlier decades, both swung (unequal duple) and compound (equal triple) subdivisions were more common—a distinction that Temperley occasionally conflates. For instance, he transcribes Toto's “Rosanna” (example 4.4B, 71) and Elton John's “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” (example 3.10A, 60) in 24/16, but both songs are swung at the sixteenth-note level, with unequal duple subdivisions rather than equal triple. Because “the anticipatory syncopations of rock and related styles are not usually heard as destabilizing the underlying meter,” he interprets them as early displacements of a deeper-level consonant rhythm (75). In his foundational book Studying Popular Music, Richard Middleton (1990: 212–13) espouses a similar interpretation, treating syncopated rhythms as transformations of simpler consonant ones. Temperley asserts that listeners mentally resolve such rhythmic dissonances by understanding them, possibly unconsciously, as belonging to the following strong beat (75). Allan Moore (2012: 64–66) argues against this interpretation, describing syncopation as “endemic to popular song” and observing that “syncopation by anticipation is . . . so normative as to be expected,” and I make a similar assertion elsewhere in a discussion of this chapter of Temperley's book (Biamonte 2020: 130–32).The most important insight in this chapter is the idea that syncopations in rock and related genres, as well as in earlier styles such as jazz, blues, and Tin Pan Alley, are normatively anticipatory displacements. This is borne out by Temperley's examples and presents an interesting contrast to Harald Krebs's (1999: 35) analyses of displacement dissonances in the music of Schumann, which may be early or late, but late displacement is the default, following “the direction of musical flow.” If it is indeed the case that displacements are normally early in popular music but not necessarily in common-practice art music, this might be because the explicit beat maintained by the drum kit allows listeners to entrain more fully, making it easier to perceive events that arrive early. The rhythmic complementarity of melody and accompaniment would be easier to understand if the instrumental parts had been included in Temperley's examples, which are mostly in lead-sheet notation comprising a single staff with a notated melody and chords above it. Only a handful of examples have a second layer of notated rhythm in small notes. As noted earlier, this is the biggest shortcoming of this chapter: despite their essential rhythmic functions in rock-song textures, no complete drum or bass parts are shown.Chapter 5 focuses on aspects of melody: grouping structure and its relationship to the meter and hypermeter, beginning- and end-accented motives, the relationship of melody to rhyme (which is also an important formal determinant in hip-hop, a genre not considered here), the rhythmic stratification of melody and harmony in melodic-harmonic divorces, mediant mixture (juxtapositions of ♭3∧ and 3∧), and microtonal blue notes. Temperley observes that melodic sequences are rare in rock, suggesting that general ambiguity of the background pitch collection is responsible (96); with greater specificity, Everett (2009: 182) asserts that sequences are “fairly widespread” in pop music but rare in rock because its underlying structures are often pentatonic. As with Temperley's preceding chapter, it would have been helpful to transcribe the accompaniments in at least some examples, especially in the section on melodic-harmonic divorce (97–101), where the melodies are described as conflicting with accompaniments represented only by chord symbols and roman numerals. From a study of the Jackson 5’s “ABC” and “several passages from other songs,” Temperley concludes that blue notes are rare in rock but admits that these results are preliminary (107). A study of blues-based rock rather than pop music, such as songs by Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, and similar artists, would undoubtedly yield numerous clear examples.Chapter 6 on timbre and instrumentation is particularly welcome, as these are understudied features of popular music that are nevertheless highly perceptually salient as well as important in defining genres, styles, and form. In rock, timbre is particularly complex because of the wide range of electronic sounds and effects available as well as the timbral variety within individual instrumental parts—and within vocal parts as well, because a much wider range of vocal timbres and techniques is acceptable in rock performance practice (e.g., vocal fry, very nasal timbres, unpitched delivery) than in classical performance. Temperley presents an interesting collection of isolated snare-drum hits and considers them in terms of Eric Clarke's (2005) model of ecological perception in music (table 6.1, 114). The discussion broadens out to a survey of guitar and keyboard effects and then guitar techniques (strumming, picking, constructing a solo) and a drum primer: notation, a variety of elaborated backbeats, and drum fills as a structural marker—ideally this chapter would have preceded the one on rhythm and meter, which ideally would have included drum transcriptions like these. Brief sections on “other instruments” (bass, piano, saxophone, harmonica, strings, sequencers) and the recording process round out the chapter. Vocal timbre is addressed in one paragraph (117) and figures briefly in some of the analyses in chapter 10, but it certainly deserves more attention than it is given here. Likewise, just over two pages are dedicated to recording techniques (132–34), although it is one of the most important expressive parameters that differentiate popular-music recordings from those of classical music and jazz, which generally aim to replicate the acoustics of a live performance. The useful analytic model of the “sound box” pioneered by Allan F. Moore and Ruth Dockwray (Dockwray and Moore 2010; Moore and Dockwray 2010), which depicts register, stereo pan, and prominence in the mix, goes unmentioned. The section on instrumentation would have been enriched by some engagement with another model, developed by Moore (2012: 19–21), of the functional layers in a popular-music texture: melody, harmonic filler, bass, and explicit beat.Chapter 7, a short and novel consideration of emotion and tension, draws on the author's background in music psychology and cognition. Temperley adapts a two-dimensional model from psychology that represents positive and negative valence on one axis and energy level on another, defining four quadrants that correspond roughly to happy (positive valence, high energy), angry (negative valence, high energy), relaxed (positive valence, low energy), and depressed (negative valence, low energy). Western listeners are culturally conditioned to correlate positive and negative valence with major and minor keys, respectively, but because this distinction is often blurred in rock, Temperley uses the sharp and flat directions of the diatonic modes arranged along a line of fifths (138). Thus phrygian and locrian, the flatmost modes, are the most negatively valenced. This makes sense in light of their prevalence in heavy metal, which is often negatively valenced in other domains as well (140). Major is the most positive—not the sharpmost mode, lydian, because its ♯4∧ is perceived as unexpected and undesirable (145). But his claim that the Beatles' “She Loves You” is more positive than the Rolling Stones' “Satisfaction” because its scale-degree mean is somewhat sharpward (139) is not convincing. This difference might be subtly audible if other parameters were equal, but they are not. “She Loves You” uses clean vocal and guitar timbres, foregrounds consonant vocal harmonies, and has a standard backbeat at a brisk tempo of about 150 bpm. By contrast, “Satisfaction” features a highly distorted guitar, hard-edged vocals with dissonant microtonal inflections, and a drum kit playing a more aggressive four-on-the-floor pattern at a slower tempo of around 130 bpm. Temperley assigns many of these parameters to the energy axis rather than valence: tempo, rhythmic density, register, loudness, and timbral brightness (which can also affect valence). He postulates a third dimension, complexity, based mostly on rhythmic density and unpredictability, which increase tension. He concludes, with some empirical support, that a moderate level of complexity is most pleasurable (142–47).Form in rock is the subject of chapter 8. Temperley surveys three basic formal plans—simple verse, AABA, and verse chorus—and usefully generalizes about how these are deployed in a song structure. He describes simple verse as a strophic form concluding in a lyric-invariant refrain. But not all verses have refrains, as in many songs by Bob Dylan and other folk-influenced artists, and not all refrains occur at the end of a section. Two 2012 dissertations on form in rock music, one by Temperley's former student de Clercq (2012) and one by Jason Summach (2012), make a helpful distinction between “head refrains” that begin a section and “tail refrains” that end a section. These could have informed this chapter but did not, and Summach's dissertation is not listed in the book's bibliography. Whether a refrain is a stand-alone section (Temperley's position) or a subsection of a verse or other section (Everett 2009: 145; Nobile 2020: 60) remains a matter of debate, although this stems in part from different definitions of a refrain, either purely in terms of its unchanging lyric or also requiring the musical phrase to have a cadential or closing function, at least for tail refrains (de Clercq 2012: 62).A discussion of the twelve-bar blues begins with its most typical phrase structure, an AAB pattern in which the first two phrases subdivide into two groups of two bars, and the B phrase is a contrasting answer (which may or may not subdivide) that typically serves as a refrain (157). Temperley also presents an alternative phrase structure observed by de Clercq, a pattern better described as ABB, with an initial verse-like phrase comprising four one-bar motives, and two B phrases that are harmonically different but often melodically and lyrically parallel. He provides the example of Elvis Presley's recording of “Blue Suede Shoes” and comments that “de Clercq gives examples,” but he cites neither the examples themselves nor their location in de Clercq's three-hundred-plus-page dissertation (157). Throughout Temperley's book citations lack page numbers, putting a nontrivial burden on readers interested in consulting the original sources. In this instance, de Clercq (2012: 137) discusses an alternative phrase structure in a section called “hybrid 12-bar blues,” but he describes it as ABC, and the first phrase subdivides into 2 + 2 but not necessarily 1 + 1 + 1 + 1. The examples de Clercq mentions that conform to Temperley's AAB model are Howlin’ Wolf's “Evil,” Presley's “Stuck on You,” and Little Richard's “Long Tall Sally” (135–39).Much of the rest of the form chapter surveys other song sections: verses and choruses and their respective loose and tight organizational strategies, bridges, prechoruses, solos and instrumentals, intros, links, and outros and codas. Coda is not generally used in reference to popular music (with the exception of Stephan-Robinson 2009: 102–3), but Temperley argues for using it to designate final sections with strong cadences, known colloquially as cold endings, rather than fade-outs (174). Cold endings have become much more common in recent decades, in part because of the decline in artists' incomes from commercial recording sales; this means that touring and live performances have become more important than ever, and fade-outs are difficult to pull off effectively in a live performance. Temperley comments on the decline of the fade-out ending but ascribes it to “the changing conventions of radio” (259). Postchorus sections, which have also become much more common in postmillennial popular music, are not discussed. The chapter concludes with a survey of ambiguous examples, among them the bridge-like choruses of the Beatles' “She Loves You” and whether Def Leppard's “Foolin’” has a prechorus (174–78).Chapter 9, “Strategies,” explores a variety of larger structural patterns involving multiple parameters. Temperley compares different techniques for enhancing both continuity and closure at the boundary between verse-chorus units: simple juxtaposition, overlap, and instrumental stops (183–89). Within verse-chorus units (VCUs), he investigates “tensional curves” that build up complexity either between verse and chorus, comprising a “middle-peaking VCU,” or late in the chorus, constituting an “end-peaking VCU” (196–200); he also surveys trajectories of tension across entire songs (200–204). A final section considers shifts of key and mode, particularly between the core sections of verse and chorus (204–10). Earlier in the chapter, a section titled “The Cadential IV” explains Temperley's concept of the plagal stop cadence, which follows a subdominant or other nondominant pretonic harmony with an instrumental stop before the final tonic, and also discusses deceptive resolutions to IV (189–96). These models are clearly demonstrated and the examples are convincing, but they function within phrases or sections rather than between them and thus are not on the same structural level as the other strategies. This section would work better in the harmony chapter, which could be expanded and divided into two chapters, one on chord types and their frequency of occurrence and the other on progressions, including cadences.Chapter 10 attempts to synthesize the concepts presented thus far in six demonstrative song analyses that focus on various different parameters. The analyses are not fully fleshed out for reasons of space, and, as Peter Silberman (2019: 160) points out in his review, the parameters are mostly discussed separately and a synthesis is never achieved—yet they provide abundant material for discussion. The applications of concepts discussed in the book will be especially helpful to students, and the prompts for additional analyses at the end of the chapter point toward interesting aspects of six other songs and suggest some salient questions to address. Each of these prompts could be the basis of an analytic term paper. This is also the case with the more open-ended questions following earlier chapters, although many of these questions are simpler and ask for lower-level information, and would thus be more appropriate for review or low-stakes assignments.The concluding chapter, “Rock in Broader Context,” situates its musical development historically. Temperley identifies the features that rock shares with common-practice art music, Tin Pan Alley/jazz, and blues, along with the harmonic and formal conventions that make rock unique. He argues that rock styles of the late 1960s have defined the genre for the next three decades, and differences in later years are primarily due to changes in instrumentation and sound production (250). A section on “Interactions and Fusions” considers the influences of folk music, Latin and Caribbean music, electronic dance music, rap, and country. A final section offers an appraisal of rock since 2000. Extensive new developments in music technology have made production more accessible and also more powerful, allowed the rise of sampling, and changed how we consume music (258). Some specifically musical postmillennial changes in rock music are slower tempos, shorter note durations, the decline in fade-outs mentioned earlier, fewer guitar solos, reduced emphasis on harmony, increasing reliance on chord loops, and a general tonal shift flatward—but many striking commonalities with twentieth-century rock remain (263).The book's end matter helpfully includes two separate indexes, of artists and songs and of subjects and authors. Songs are listed only under artist name; indexing song titles as well would be still more helpful. An open-access companion website (which is not typical of textbooks, unfortunately) provides readily available recorded excerpts for many of the notated examples in the book, along with a downloadable list of Rolling Stone's (2004) “Five Hundred Greatest Songs of All Time,” with the two hundred songs used for Temperley and de Clercq's corpus study marked (de Clercq and Temperley 2011; Temperley and de Clercq 2013). Another useful component that could be added to the website is a select bibliography for further reading, which would be especially valuable to students.In this review I have foregrounded my own points of disagreement and identified issues that could be addressed if the book goes into a second edition. But much of this book is groundbreaking and valuable work, and the author is to be commended and thanked for giving theorists and analysts of popular music several new tools to use and a treasure trove of information that will both facilitate and inspire future research.