An examination of American progressive rock in the 1980s and 90s.

A discussion of the relationship of popular music within the context of musical scholarship.

An essay addressing methods of analyzing rock music within the disciplinary context of popular music studies in the 1990s.

Analysis of songs from the film, This is Spinal Tap, explored from the perspectives of stylistic competency and theories of humor.

Brad Osborn. 2010. “Beyond Verse and Chorus: Experimental Song Forms in Post-Millennial Rock Music.” PhD Dissertation, University of Washington.

Analysis of songs by the Rutles, explored from the perspectives of stylistic competency and theories of humor.

Analysis if title track from Yes’s Close to the Edge album.

Brad Osborn. 2018. Review of Music Theory Remixed: A Blended Approach for the Practicing Musician. Oxford University Press. Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy, vol. 31

Analyzing 3 Icelandic music videos

Math rock’s most salient compositional facet is its cyclical repetition of ostinati featuring changing and odd-cardinality meters.

Musicologists have recently begun applying the diverse philosophies of Deleuze and Guattari to music. Most contributors strive for rigorous adherence to early Deleuzian principles-a position I refer to as “orthodox”-and are therefore hesitant to posit any sort of musical objecthood or listener subjectivity. By contrast, this article espouses an…[Read more]

Since the dawn of experimental rock’s second coming in the new millennium, experimental artists have begun distancing themselves from Top-40 artists through formal structures that eschew recapitulatory verse/chorus conventions altogether. In order to understand the correlation between genre and form more thoroughly, this paper provides a t…[Read more]

Radiohead’s music regularly confronts the listener with structural elements—in the domains of pitch/harmony, timbre, form, and rhythm—which exist in a space between pure Top Forty convention and sheer experimentation.