What is a ‘hook’? Delson's Dictionary defines it as ‘[t]hat part of a song, sometimes the title or key lyric line, that keeps recurring’ (Hurst and Delson 1980, p. 58). According to songwriters Al Kasha and Joel Hirschhorn, hooks are ‘the foundation of commercial songwriting, particularly hit-single writing’. Hooks may involve repetition of ‘one note or a series of notes … [or of] a lyric phrase, full lines or an entire verse’. The hook is ‘what you're selling’. Though a hook can be something as insubstantial as a ‘sound’ (such as da doo ron ron), ‘[i]deally [it] should contain one or more of the following: (a) a driving, danceable rhythm; (b) a melody that stays in people's minds; (c) a lyric that furthers the dramatic action, or defines a person or place’ (Kasha and Hirschhorn 1979, pp. 28, 29).

Current musicology has not developed such a methodical or systematic knowledge of melody as it has of other aspects of music. Music schools have courses and examinations in harmony, counterpoint, musical forms, etc., but not in melody; in the same way, books dealing with melody are rare exceptions.

The very existence of popular music research in its various aspects can be considered, with its investment of attention, as a general value judgement on the music's potentialities. Moreover, we should not forget that a serious interest in popular music research would probably not have been possible without the emergence of more ambitious musical products testifying to a need for emancipation. Even so, perhaps because of a bitter awareness of its own roots in the same cultural and political processes, popular music research has somehow more and more tended to ignore ‘quality’ products in the field, whether because of their decline since the 1970s, or for the sake of some ‘scientific’ suspension of value judgement.

Gypsy folk music is of a distinctive character compared with that of the other East European ethnic communities. The pecularities differentiating it from these other forms of folk music – improvisation and a readiness to adopt new influences – have continued to be of significance. While in several cases the folk music of peoples who have established themselves in national states is kept alive by artificial means (e.g. by promoting folk singing groups, by teaching folksongs in schools and by various revival movements), the vast majority of Gypsies have preserved their traditional music as an almost exclusive musical language.

Subversion of satisfaction is the name of the game in pop rock music. The constant changes in artists and sounds perpetually subvert conventional meanings of desire and pleasure, and we ‘can't be satisfied’. Consumer mythologies of style and fashion work to condense the fulfilment of our desires into the act of buying that which is ‘new’, now. Clearly, such change seldom includes any significant disruption of the everyday acceptance of the ‘natural’ order of things. Since meaningful change is a threat to corporate control, it is the superficial change of the subversion of satisfaction – vital to increasing profits, it seems – that has been institutionalised.

Writing about popular music in 1977 from what I would describe as a ‘classical’ Marxist perspective, Steve Chapple and I proclaimed unequivocally that:

The position of the music as an increasingly important cultural commodity within a consumer economy weakened any of the explicit anti-materialist content of the music.… Musicians and the creative personnel within the industry were integrated into an entertainment business now firmly part of the American corporate structure. (Chapple and Garofalo 1977, p. 300)

In 1981, four short years later, British sociologist and music critic Simon Frith described the structure and functioning of the music industry in much the same terms that Chappie and I had put forth, but his analysis shifted the emphasis considerably. Declared Frith:

Cultural commodities may support the contemporary power of capital, but they have their civilising moments, and even as the most effortless background music, rock is a source of vigour and exhilaration and of good feelings that are as necessary for the next morning's political struggle as for the next day's work. My argument is that rock fun is as much a quality of the music's use as of its form. (Frith 1981, pp. 264–5)

Attempting to avoid what he saw as an economically reductive position, Frith de-emphasised the role of monopoly corporations in controlling the marketplace and shaping popular culture. In the tradition of ‘cultural’ Marxism, he focused instead, and somewhat optimistically, on the power of the consumer to reappropriate the music in unintended ways, to ‘resignify’ its meaning, if you will.