PTE Reading MC Multiple Answers: You may have noticed it’s a bit awkward, even comical, to consider lyrics in written fo…

You may have noticed it’s a bit awkward, even comical, to consider lyrics in written form, or to ask things such as “What is a ‘groove,’ exactly, and how do I go about getting into one? If a groove sets me free, what is otherwise holding me down? What can I find by losing myself in the music? What is the definition of ‘to rock’?” The answer to all these questions may be that if you have to ask, you just don’t get it. Explicating lyrics is such a strange endeavor because in most cases, they are not supposed to be read out of context. The message, the sound, and the contextual experience of listening are tightly bound together, people who study popular music take it as their task to pry apart the many different layers of social energies and power relations that combine to make music a universally meaningful phenomenon, and to hold each of these elements up to the light of critical scrutiny. Some such as Lawrence Grossberg attend to music’s affective aspects, its ability to record and create feeling states as well as to foster “effective alliances” between like-feeling people in music subcultures. Others such as Adam Krims attend more to the structure, form, and content of the music as if it were a static object or aesthetic product considered apart from its lived immediacy or its affective experience.