The Sentence and SRDC in Recent Popular Songs

Jeffrey Ensign, University of North Texas

While recent popular music scholarship has begun to address the definition of phrase in the repertory, it is still a topic of debate among scholars. Despite the attention sentence structure has received in Western art music scholarship, it has gone relatively unexamined in popular music study. In this paper, I make a distinction between the sentence within a single phrase and the SRDC (Statement-Restatement-Departure Conclusion) phrase group by examining several songs from a variety of genres that have all charted in the top 20 of the Billboard Hot 100 year-end charts since 1990. Focusing on lyric, rhythmic, melodic, harmonic, and performance aspects I examine these in relation to the sentence model and compare them with larger SRDC patterns. In so doing, I contribute not only a more nuanced interpretation of the sentence and SRDC pattern in recent popular songs but also a greater understanding of phrase in the repertory.