Since at least the early 1950s, scholars and critics from widely varying backgrounds have attempted to come to terms with the musics collectively known as rock, returning again and again to the issue of meaning. Predictably, their answers to the implied question are as varied as their intellectual standpoints. Some scholars, for example, have viewed rock through the lenses of mass and youth culture, drawing on the work of Theodor Adorno and a large body of sociological writing. Others, coming to rock from cultural studies and literary theory, have conceptualized it as a series of texts that comment on and reflect current debates on cultural identity, hegemony, resistance, gender and sexuality (Frith and Goodwin 1990; Hesmondhalgh 1996). Writers for the popular press, meanwhile, have tended to focus on issues of authenticity, originality and rebellion, particularly in canonizing iconic figures like Elvis Presley, Sid Vicious, or Kurt Cobain. In reading all this work, some fans or aficionados of rock (including scholars and critics) are likely to be dissatisfied. To them it might seem that (other) rock commentators are either focusing on too narrow a portion of the musical landscape-discussing it in ways that ren der it nearly unrecognizable-or missing the point of the music alto gether. Whatever the point, to such fans rock is potentially about than youth culture, the (re)production of ideology, or authenticity and rebellion. 2 The question, of course, is what more there might be and, relate dIy, how one gains access to and talks about it. In previous attempts to discern rock's meanings, three approaches have tended to dominate: content analysis of rock lyrics; study of rock's relation to varied social, historical, and cultural contexts; and examination of rock's formal and stylistic parameters. While each approach has the potential to illuminate different aspects of what rock might mean and how it achieves its effects, each is also manifestly incomplete. Their individual short comings cannot be addressed merely by producing analyses that combine them. To do so, in fact, would be to assume naively that in themselves those approaches exhaust all the questions that one might ask about rock. Getting at what rock means requires asking a different, but related, set of