Conference Agenda

Grindcore is an extreme fusion of metal and punk music, known for very short songs, such as Napalm Death’s infamous 1.316-second track “You Suffer.” Given this reputation, one might not expect grindcore to exhibit elaborate formal processes. Yet the form of longer songs by Napalm Death and other pioneering British grindcore bands challenges our current understanding of form and embodiment in extreme metal music. Recent analyses of metal music (Kozak 2021, Hudson 2022) have built on the embodied cognition paradigm, these authors stress how bodily movement helps listeners make sense of complicated rhythms. However, I suggest theorizing the experience of extremity that grindcore aims for requires theorizing a formal process that stages bodily failure, not mastery.

I argue that early British grindcore did have a defining formal process in the late 1980s: a groove-blast juxtaposition that systematically invites and then frustrates coordinated embodied engagement. I theorize this formal process by drawing on Anne Danielsen’s work on the interaction of groove, micro-timing, and timbre and by consulting interviews with key musicians. The etymology of grindcore’s name points to a dichotomy that defines its form: groove riffs borrowed from metal and blast sections that speed up punk.
Groove riffs establish a meter that participants can entrain to. Diatonic rhythms and shifting groupings complicate this meter. Blast sections do not allow listeners to entrain or move to any meter. The full effect of groove and blast riffs depended on the low-fidelity recording of grindcore in the late 1980s. The clinically precise production pioneered by death metal bands deflated this contrast, prompting grindcore bands to recompose blast riffs in re-recordings of earlier material. These re-recordings no longer frustrate bodies as they used to, even if the number and succession of riffs remain unchanged.

Ultimately, I suggest that theorizing the stylistic distinctions in extreme metal and adjacent fusion genres requires us to consider function, not just repetition schemes. (Hudson 2021) The groove-blast juxtaposition also explains how grindcore fused metal and punk: Napalm Death sped up verse-chorus punk songs until the original verse-chorus structure was obscured, and then framed this blast section with metal grooves.

This corpus study explores the distinctions between verse and chorus melodies in four Katy Perry albums. This data-driven approach compares relative relationships within a song and abstract relationships with all choruses considered as one group and all verses as another. Analyzing pitch mean, duration, range, ambitus, loudness, and contour, the study identifies patterns in formal identity. While confirming expectations, such as higher pitch mean in choruses, it reveals a complex landscape of exceptions. This multi-parameter analysis challenges conventional assumptions and lays preliminary steps for understanding melodic properties in verse-chorus forms.

This presentation combines two aspects of popular songs that have individually received lots of scholarly attention but are generally assumed to be unrelated. On the one hand we have song form—the sections and formal functions that make up a song’s temporal organization and the musical aspects that contribute to or respond to that formal structure. And on the other, we have the song persona—the individual who is singing to us, the lyrical narrator whose identity, thoughts, sounds, and emotions compose the song’s primary expressive content (Burns 2010; Moore 2012; Auslander 2021). Though studies of popular song form have recently been incorporating “secondary” parameters such as instrumental texture (Spicer 2004; Peres 2016; Barna 2020; Smith 2021; Nobile 2022a; Osborn 2023), grooves and riffs (Attas 2015; Easley 2015; Hudson 2021), drumbeats (Geary 2024), etc., these discussions generally exclude matters of identity, expression, embodiment, or socio-cultural meaning that are central to the study of song personas. A hidden implication of this exclusion is that the persona and its related topics are non-structural aspects of a popular song—an implication that bears reexamining as our field continues to expand our conception of musical structure.

In this paper, I instead demonstrate how the song persona’s expression both depends on and contributes to a song’s formal structure. I focus in particular on the relationship between verses and choruses, showing how this formal opposition synchronizes with expressive oppositions in three domains: lyrics, vocal delivery, and sonic space. These three domains are the song persona’s primary communicative tools, and my analyses show how changes in one or more of them articulate formal function just as strongly as a song’s notes, chords, rhythms, and textures.

Through numerous analytical examples, I show how the song persona uses the verse/chorus opposition to communicate an expressive opposition. This connection demonstrates both how formal structure can carry extramusical meaning and how extramusical aspects of the song persona can affect formal structure. Examining the interrelation between form and the song persona might thus challenge the postmodern idea (Subotnik 1995) that music can be neatly divided into “structural” and “non- structural” elements in the first place.