Musicians and music researchers have long been fascinated with similarities between the pitch and rhythmic domains (London 2002). Theorists, music cognition researchers, and composers have explored two main guiding metaphors: either scales = rhythm, or chord = meter. A subset of theorists taking the chord = meter metaphor have ascribed “tonic” function to hypermeter (Lewin 1981), meter (Cohn 2001), and beat class (Roeder 2003). In this paper, I argue for a new, more perceptually immediate guiding metaphor, tonic = tempo.

Tonic is the primary reference point in tonal music. Tactus, the primary felt beat that sets the tempo, plays an analogous role in metered music (see e.g. De Clerq 2016). I focus in this paper on three ways that metal bands use tempo in an analogous way to how tonal composers use tonic: in particular, through tactus parallels of tonicization, double tonic complexes, and absent/fragile/emergent tonics. This work also contributes to early exploration of the inventive ways that metal bands play with not just meter (Pieslak 2007, Lucas 2018, Capuzzo 2018, Hudson 2021, Kozak 2021) but tempo (Garza 2017, Hannan 2024).

Adapting well-established ideas from harmonic theory shows that, like tonal composers, metal bands create nuanced disruption, bistability, and ambiguity, but in the tempo domain rather than the harmonic domain. The ultimate goal of this work is to bridge the gap between abstract analogies and the visceral, perceptually immediate experience of struggling to determine what the tempo of a piece of clearly metered music is.

The rise of streaming has destabilized popular music genres in ways that academics are still coming to terms with due to the complex interactions of algorithms, metadata, and the collapse of older forms of musical distribution. Sleep Token is a band that has taken advantage of this destabilization by rapidly shifting between and blending genre signifiers, to critical and popular success.

In this paper, I provide a methodological framework that blends elements of Frymoyer's (2017) topic theory pyramids, Alcalde's (2022) framework for musical hybridity, and Brackett's (2016) levels of genre to capture the nuances of genre borrowing and blending in the streaming era. I then discuss various levels of genre signification and strategies of genre hybridization in Sleep Token’s song “Caramel” using said framework. I introduce two new mixture strategies, flattening and escalation, to account for the song’s innovations.

Sleep Token relies on genre as a formal and narrative agent. They are typically labelled a progressive metal band, but they minimize references to that sound world in “Caramel,” and instead showcase a wide variety of genres in relatively equal amounts—including genres that might be considered to be quite distant from metal like Reggaeton. I go on to discuss how Reggaeton and other genres in “Caramel” are modified through mixture strategies and the effects that has on the understanding of narrative, which mimics movement through various emotional states as a result of being famous.

Sleep Token’s music—which they insist is “post-genre” music—highlights the value of a methodology that considers genre as hierarchical, and genre signifiers as malleable. This proposed methodology, through its multiple components, offers a widely applicable model for making sense of genre fluidity in the streaming era. To conclude, I show, with reference to critical and fan conversations around “Caramel,” how important hearing genre is to listeners and how this framework takes a step in the direction of bringing theorists’ priorities in line with modern fan and critic consumption.

Responding to calls to deconstruct the mandate of legibility (Momii 2021) and politics of racial exclusion (Kajikawa 2020) inscribed in hip-hop formal analysis, this paper revisits the culture-theoretic tools developed by ethnomusicologist Tricia Rose as the foundation for a theory of form in hip-hop production. I argue that – despite Rose’s canonic reception in the fields of hip-hop studies, cultural studies, and other related fields – she has been rendered peripheral to music theory on account of its epistemologically white-and-male frame. She thus represents what Marc Hannaford (2021) has recently defined as a fugitive music theorist; more specifically, her conception of flow, layering, and ruptures in line (1994) provides a basis for analyzing hip-hop’s musical forms.

To consider these concepts as fugitive music theory, I demonstrate how they operate in an alternative theoretical space to popular music theory’s governing precepts of function, hierarchy, and syntax. I contend that Rose embeds the musical within the visual, conceptualizing hip-hop’s process of musical assembly in relation to fields like film editing and visual collage. I corroborate this re-mapping by exploring the visual art theory and practice presented by the Black cinematographer Arthur Jafa, to whom Rose attributes her development of the concepts: like his cinematographic technique, flow, layering, and rupture exhibit what Jafa terms the “polyventiality” of Black expression (1993/94; see also Bradley 2023). My analysis then turns to visual and sonic objects from Queens hip-hop artists amani and King Vision Ultra’s LP An Unknown Infinite (2020). Examining both the visual elements of collage demonstrated in the album’s “archive book” and their sonic counterpart demonstrated on the track “Scrapes,” I conclude that flow, layering, and rupture relationships expressed in these texts are irreducible from formal analysis, and contrary to pop-rock theory, remain embedded within hip-hop as a set of intermedial and intercultural practices.