Closure in Pop-Rock Music: "Julia" by King's X

Guy Capuzzo, Texas Tech University

Music theorists have developed powerful tools for the analysis of common practice compositions that lack tonal closure -- the property of beginning and ending in the same key. Bailey's theory of directional tonality (1977, 1985), Harrison's linking analysis (1994), Schenker's auxiliary cadences (1935/1979), and articles by Agawu (1987), Krebs (1981), and McCreless (1991) are representative examples. But the jury's out on how to analyze pop-rock songs that lack tonal closure, since many of the techniques developed in the above studies apply to few (if any) pop-rock songs.

This proposal demonstrates one way that hypermeter, clock-time duration, and form can outweigh tonality in the creation of closure in pop-rock music. In "Julia," by the acclaimed Houston power trio King's X, these factors imbue the song with a firm, though different, sense of closure.

Many pop-rock songs "compensate" for a lack of tonal closure through strict hypermetric regularity, but few forge a tonal path as winding as "Julia." No functional relationship exists between the E and A tonal centers; hypermetric regularity and clock-time duration foster large-scale coherence in the absence of traditional tonal closure. The song ends with a tonal question mark, but an emphatic metric and clock-time period.