Analysis and Popular Music: a Challenge for Music Education

Over the past few decades popular music has become accepted as a viable topic for music education. However, ways of studying and teaching popular music are still developing. One of the main problem areas in this developmental field is analysis; musical analysis of popular music is rare, and methods used are not always appropriate to popular music's character. Through a number of analytical approaches to the guitar solo from 'Whiplash' by Metallica, solutions to this aspect of the relationship between popular music and music education are investigated, and challenges to the further development of popular music studies are examined.