The study of popular music has experienced an astonishing growth in the past two and a half decades; however, the detailed analysis of musical texts has lagged far behind other areas, such as the sociology of the youth audience and analysis of the visual components of music video. This thesis undertakes a survey of recent approaches to popular music at the textual level, before examining the construction of an individual song, the Beach Boys' 1964 recording of "All Summer Long". While many parameters affecting the creation of the cultural significance of the text in question are discussed, ultimately the exegesis serves to problematize larger issues in scholarly work on popular music, particularly the dominance of the paradigms of rupture, rebellion, and authenticity in relation to the historiography and criticism of the formation known as "rock".

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From the release of their first single “Surfin’” in 1961 to the release of the album Pet Sounds in 1966, rock history traces the arc of the American rock group the Beach Boys in broad terms of the early-sixties Southern California surf music trend and the revolutionary effects of the Beatles’ stateside arrival in 1964. Typical claims for progress, autonomy, the significance of the album, and myths of authenticity in the study of the emergence of the rock concept, however, tend to promote an essentialist understanding of what rock music is about and what it is for. This study proposes an alternative narrative in which the regulating dichotomies of rock—art versus commerce, seriousness versus schlock, the authentic versus the inauthentic— are historicized, in the case of the Beach Boys’ transition from surf band to a complex studio recording project, as matters of creative practice and conflicting sensibilities. Questioning the conventional wisdom of rock history, this project suggests a counter-story about the significance of creative achievement, failure, and advancement