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The Special Liveliness
of Hooks in Popular
Music and Beyond
Steven G. Smith
The Special Liveliness of Hooks in Popular Music
and Beyond
Steven G. Smith
The Special Liveliness

of Hooks in Popular
Music and Beyond
Steven G. Smith
Jackson, MS, USA
ISBN 978-3-031-23975-5 ISBN 978-3-031-23976-2 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23976-2
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2023
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.
Cover illustration: Marina Lohrbach_shutterstock.com
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
To Bruce,
my Revealer
Acknowledgments
The book that more than any other opened the field of aesthetic reflection
to me was Susanne Langer’s Feeling and Form, and I hope to have paid
tribute to Langer by thinking freshly about the powers of art and art forms.
I was fortunate to learn some basic concepts of music theory from high
school and college teachers. In later life, I’ve learned a great deal about
popular music aesthetics from discussions with Ted Ammon, Allen Burrows,
Steve Esthimer, Rien Fertel, Bruce Golden, Howard Pickett, and Katy
Smith. And I’ve been enlightened on many points of interest by my fellow
writers on the Hooks website (hooksanalysis.wordpress.com): Jonathan
Bellman, Richard Grant, Eric Griffin, Matt Smith, and the too- soon-
departed Andrew Goodwin.
I’m heavily indebted to art historian Elise Smith for my awareness and
interpretation of visual art works, and for a lot of great feedback on my
writing. I also got some good suggestions for this book from an anony-
mous reader for the press.
Some years ago Annie Blazer gave me a brilliant piece of advice that led
to the creation of most of my “grab-backs.”
An earlier version of Appendix B appeared in my article “Hooks” in The
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 67 (Summer 2009), pp. 311–319.
Without the encouragement and astute guidance of my editor, Robin
James, this book would not exist.
S.G.S.
Jackson, Mississippi
January 2023
vii
Contents
1 Introduction 1
2 Some
Relevant Aesthetic Principles 7
Special Liveliness 8
Usable Models 14
Ringing Realizations 18
3 Inauguration Hooks 25
What Is It to Start? 25
Characterization 28
Gateways 30
Transgression 31
The Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship 34
Inauguration Hooks in Other Art Forms 36
4 Problem Hooks 41
Problems of Musical Tone 43
Problems of Passion and Attitude 45
Problems of Time 53
Nifting 58
Problem Hooks in Other Art Forms 60
ix
x Contents
5 Resolution Hooks 65
Examining the Elements 65
Concentration 71
Demonstration 73
The Decisive Synthesis 77
The Potent Blend 78
Repurposing 79
The Grand Solution 79
Resolution Hooks in Other Art Forms 80
6 Termination Hooks 85
The Plenary; The Lush 87
So Be It: The Amen and the Fiat 87
The Clear-Your-Palate; The Hand-You-Over 88
The Twist 89
The End as New Summons 90
From Cosmos to Chaos 90
The Nifty 92
Termination Hooks in Other Art Forms 92
7 Interlude: Are There Bad Hooks? 97
8 The
Problem of Love103
The Problem of Physical Urgency 105
The Platonic Problem 106
The Sartrean Problem 110
The Patriarchal Problem 113
The Greatest “I Love You” 115
Love Hooks in Other Art Forms 115
9 The
Problem of the People121
The Musical Mobilization of Pronouns 122
Dances for Everyone 125
The People in Crisis 127
Utopia and Dystopia 128
The Geographical People 131
The Historical People 133
The Religious People 134
People Hooks in Other Art Forms 137
Contents xi
10 Hooks
in the Development of Aesthetic Interpretation141
Qualities to Identify 141
Complexities to Sort Out 145
Implications to Unpack 151
Master Metaphors and Models to Install 153
Resources for Interpretation in Other Art Forms 156
11 Epilogues161
A 161
B 162
Appendix A: More Detailed Analyses of Some Time Hooks165
Appendix B: Larger-Scale Interpretation: Hooks in Andrei

Rublev173
Index177
About the Author
Steven G. Smith is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Religious

Studies at Millsaps College. He is the author of The Argument to the Other
(1983), The Concept of the Spiritual (1988), Gender Thinking (1992),
Worth Doing (2004), Appeal and Attitude (2005), Full History (2017),
Centering and Extending (2017), Scriptures and the Guidance of Language
(2018), Full Responsibility (2022), and journal articles in ethics, aesthet-
ics, and philosophy of religion. He is also a recording artist with The
Assemblers and Woodpecker Street and writes music for theater. He is the
main writer and moderator for the Hooks website, h ooksanalysis.word-
press.com.
xiii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
The great last shot in Truffaut’s film The 400 Blows (1959) shows the
young protagonist Antoine Doinel wandering alone on the beach, seem-
ing to have no direction home. (Note that I’ve just borrowed a great
phrase from a work in another genre, Dylan’s song “Like a Rolling Stone”
[1965].)1 When I think back on The 400 Blows, or Truffaut, I may recall
the beach shot and reconstruct my Truffaut experience from it. It’s one of
a number of vivid bits in the film that have affected my sense of human life
(along with the ecstatic shot of Antoine in the centrifuge, the little kids
entranced at the puppet show, and the funny pronunciations in Antoine’s
English class).
For the last ten years, the monthly film magazine Sight and Sound has
run an Endings feature on its last page with short essays on final shots that
are charged with meaning like the shot of Antoine on the beach.2 These
final shots evidently hold the status of great hooks (again, using language
from the realm of popular song), and the essays support several notions of
broad relevance: first, that a particular component of a work of art can be
decisively influential on an aesthetic experience; second, that we can
declare ourselves and enrich our relationships with each other by freely
1
“How does it feel?/To be on your own, with no direction home/A complete unknown,
like a rolling stone” (second chorus, “Like a Rolling Stone”).
2
It started in September 2012, with an essay on the finale of The Third Man (Carol
Reed, 1949).
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2023
S. G. Smith, The Special Liveliness of Hooks in Popular Music and
Beyond, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23976-2_1
2 S. G. SMITH
picking out such components for appreciative attention, using artistic

hooks as personal hooks; and third, that such components can reward our
close attention richly, disclosing objective grounds for our appreciative
response to them and furnishing valuable insight into how artworks work
and how meaningful experience is constituted.
In many of our experiences of art (and not only of art), there are capti-
vating singularities that are salient for us aesthetically and that may deserve
to be salient in criticism, as in the Endings essays. To be sure, art criticism
does often focus on such singularities: almost any serious critical assessment
will cite notable lines in a literary work, or notable motifs in a musical
work, or notable specifics of composition in a picture. But the main goal
of art criticism is normally to construct an interpretation of a whole work,
to which the component values are strictly subordinated. After all, one
must see what the work makes of its elements; only then can one rightly
see what is a crux or high point in it. And aesthetic theory tends to be well
aligned with art criticism in this regard: the meaning of the experience of
the part is ruled by the meaning of the experience of the whole, the whole-
quality best exemplifying the essential character of aesthetic experience in
that artistic mode or in general.3 For hook criticism, in contrast, the expe-
rience of the whole is deeply stamped by the experience of the part. The
specific genius of the part gets its due. In paying that tribute, enthusiastic
perceptions of the part are fully licensed to generate meaning.
“Hooks” is an apt word to use for aesthetic reflection on captivating
singularities—so I wager—but it may seem to be tainted by some unsavory
associations. For at least a century, the term has combined a sense of being
almost hopelessly caught with a certain awareness of what the captor is up
to, like the prostitute “hooker” or the salesperson with the “sales hook”;
the term seems especially well suited for commercial pop music because
often that cleverly designed, captivating thing repeats through a pop song
and is enjoyed in frequently repeated listening experiences (as of songs
played on the radio or on records or running through one’s head), so that
the listener feels snagged.
In music, one usually hears of hooks in two sorts of calculation: on the
side of production, hooks are the well-made compact devices (the catchy
riffs, rhythms, and refrains) that predictably attach listeners to the prod-
uct; on the side of consumption as guided by mass-market reviews, hooks
3
I illustrate this point with reference to Hegel’s, Dewey’s, and Langer’s aesthetic theories
in “Hooks,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 67 (2009), pp. 311–319.
1 INTRODUCTION 3
are the delivered goods that will assuredly satisfy listeners.4 Prefigured and
manipulative, hooks might seem antithetical to fresh expression in authen-
tic art, or—thinking of Adorno’s concerns in his attack on the “culture
industry”—to sincere openness or serious thought by artist or audience.5
Drawing from theatrical experience, the filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein
took stock of the “attractions” (i.e., hooks) at the disposal of the artist:
“The attraction (in our diagnosis of the theater) is every aggressive
moment in it, i.e., every element of it that brings to light in the spectator
those senses or that psychology that influence his experience—every ele-
ment that can be verified and mathematically calculated to produce certain
emotional shocks in a proper order within the totality.” Attractions are
things like “the ‘chatter’ of [the actor] Ostuzhev no more than the pink
tights of the prima-donna, a roll on the kettledrums as much as Romeo’s
soliloquy, the cricket on the hearth no less than the cannon fired over the
heads of the audience.”6
Did Eisenstein really mean to put art on the level of cookery? If so,
should we resist this way of thinking?
There is an important issue here, but I think it won’t be helpful to be a
purist totally opposed to prefiguration and manipulation in art and aes-
thetic experience. Artists who could not prefigure and manage their
“attractions” at all would be helplessly open-minded improvisers, clueless
creators. Audiences who had no definite expectations to be fulfilled at all
would have, if they were lucky, a succession of amazing experiences but
not a coherent career of experiencing the powers of an art form.
In any case, the core of the hook concept that I propose is not that
attachment or satisfaction is deliberately designed, whether for a commer-
cial or any other sort of purpose. Many hooks have been designed, cer-
tainly, but the core of the concept is that attachment and satisfaction
momentously happen with certain components of aesthetic experience for
4
For a general introduction to the ingredients of musical hooks, see Gary Burns, “A
Typology of Hooks in Popular Music,” Popular Music 6 (1987), pp. 1–20.
5
See Theodor W. Adorno, “On Popular Music” (with George Simpson) [1941], in Essays
on Music, ed. Richard Leppert (University of California Press, 2002), pp. 437–469, and
“The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in Adorno and Max Horkheimer,
Dialectic of Enlightenment [1944], trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1972),
pp. 120–167. Theodore Gracyk provides a useful critique of Adorno’s view of popular music
in Rhythm and Noise. An Aesthetics of Rock (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), Chap. 6.
6
Sergei Eisenstein, “Montage of Attractions,” in The Film Sense, trans. Jay Leyda (New
York: Harcourt, Brace, 1947), pp. 230–231.
4 S. G. SMITH
certain subjects. A beat or refrain that was intended to hook you may fail
to do so; on the other hand, you may find an accidental effect
captivating.
You may find any element of an experience captivating continuingly and
deepeningly. I say this in the teeth of a prejudice in aesthetic theory against
the cheap immediate titillations of pop songs that will surely lose appeal
over time, or even arouse disgust.7 Well, it is true that there are some pop
hooks I once liked that I can no longer stand to listen to. But the more
telling phenomenon is how many I have come to love, and love
thoughtfully.
Despite the drawbacks of commercialized hook discourse, I propose to
make popular music our primary field of reference for exploring the pos-
sibilities of hook criticism and the aesthetics of hooks. It lends itself
supremely well to this kind of study as the experience of popular song is so
widely and enthusiastically shared and affords most people their most pal-
pable sense of an enactment of ideal living. At the same time, it furnishes
an infinity of prompts for hook discernment, as experience shows that a
listener can be captivated by any sort of acoustic or semantic event.
What might hook discernment involve? For me, on one occasion, my
grab-back at what grabbed me came out this way, under the rubric of
“Harmony as Event”:
To harmonize a melody is to give it a more specified resonance and a more struc-

turally interesting and serious path to move along—a decorum. But harmony
can also be an utterly contingent and individual event of companioning voices,
a rendezvous (be it tryst or fight), and a preeminent hook—as when John
Lennon joins Paul McCartney in an eventful harmony vocal on the third and
especially the fourth verse of The Beatles’ “Hey Jude” (1968).
The ostensible theme of “Hey Jude” is Jude’s desire to start a relationship
with a girl.“You have found her, now go and get her.” The message about rela-
tionships is clear in the text. But the song’s really meaningful substance lies in
its being sung, where there’s a junction of the singer with Jude, hovering by Jude
in solicitude, lending him strength by speaking of strength, companioning him.
That’s the deep harmony that counts.
7
“Our satisfaction in most popular art does not typically deepen and extend itself on suc-
cessive encounters but rather comes quickly, all at once, often fading away precipitously after
a certain point, when it does not actually turn into repugnance”—Jerrold Levinson, “Pleasure
and the Value of Works of Art,” in The Pleasures of Aesthetics (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1996) 11–24, p. 13.
1 INTRODUCTION 5
And the harmony is enacted in the singing by John and Paul, whom we
know. Their voices together make the sound of a benchmark friendship. John has
come in with various touches earlier in the track but at the ripest moment,
fourth time around, slips into harness and sings the whole verse. He wraps
around Paul’s notes with close intervals, giving the lines a gentle spring.
Toward the end of the verse John and Paul’s partnership starts to fly apart
backstage, as it were, in obscure ejaculations, possibly even expletives, around
the 3:00 mark. But that drama is soon superseded by four minutes of people’s
chorus, the great na na na na.
And now for a bonus that comes with a deep harmony reading of “Hey
Jude.” There’s a mysterious line in the song that Paul would have changed but
the poetically more open-minded John made him keep: “The movement you need
is on your shoulder.” A harmony, or a friendship, is an enabling hook-up and a
fulcrum in power transmission, a harmos, in Greek a shoulder. Paul’s encour-
agement of Jude (originally “Jules,” John’s son Julian) is a shoulder; Paul’s
implicit address of John is a shoulder; John’s hanging in with Paul (while he’s
leaving Paul, in a sense, for Yoko Ono) is a shoulder.8 The song is a shoulder for
all; indeed, no harmony keeps its resonance just to itself.
What have I done? It remains to be seen whether I’ve begun to shed

light on larger topics or have shared pleasure or insight with anyone else,
but immediately I’ve discovered a satisfying interpretation of a song I love
by creating an intellectual figure congruent with an emotional and even
kinesthetic experience of one of the song’s moments—an experience that
had emerged for me as a high point in hearing the song. The images and
metaphors I used seemed essential for following the extending and thick-
ening of the hook’s impact on me. I don’t know how my interpretation
might interact with other interpretations. Undoubtedly, I have more to
learn about the powers of the song and its devices, and also about my own
capacities for being gotten to and my intentions for using those capacities.
But I’ve made a start. I hope I’ve made a good enough start to hook you.
Writing an appreciation centered on one small part of one song proves
that the opportunities for hook analysis must be infinite, but now the
higher-order questions arise of what inclusive patterns or structures hooks
8
On the lore of what went into the song, see William J. Dowlding, Beatlesongs (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1989), pp. 203–206. Compare how Paul comes in on harmony vocals in “The
Ballad of John and Yoko” (1969) after John and Yoko were married. For an interesting cross-
genre comparison, listen to how George Jones and Tammy Wynette harmonize with beautiful
restraint on their hit “Golden Ring” in a performance two years after their divorce (https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9KniULwvjE).
6 S. G. SMITH
and hooks criticism will exhibit, and how hook experiences fit into what
aesthetes and philosophers call aesthetic experience. Are hooks just the
“attractions” from which art works are made, relatively intense doses of
standard kinds of aesthetic gratification, or are they, more like people we
know, unique monads in their aesthetic universe? Are the analytical and
metaphorical gambits of hook criticism constrained by objective character-
istics of the hook or are they freely generated posits that come to the hook
a-wooing? I will have to work through a range of hook encounters and
gambits of hook criticism to show what would go into answering such
questions.
The present inquiry is designed to bring some helpful conceptual order
to hook experience and to show how an illuminating aesthetics can be
generated by putting hooks in the foreground. We’ll find that an orienta-
tion to hooks leads our attention not only to good focus points in pop
music but also to analogous focus points in other art forms, so that con-
nections are woven between pop music aesthetics and the larger conversa-
tion about all art forms and vivid experiences.
I plan to check in frequently with my own earlier-written “grab-backs,”
continuing to set them apart in italics, to show how grabbing actually hap-
pens in both directions—how my sensitivities are engaged and how I’m
able to articulate my enlivenment and try to share it in the jeux d’esprit of
hooky hook reviews. I ask all my readers to join this game.
CHAPTER 2
Some Relevant Aesthetic Principles
Even if we don’t find all our hooks in the same places, hooks are interest-
ing and important to us—the “us” for whom this is true. That’s the hook
phenomenon. What general expectations for aesthetic experience best fit
with our shared love of hooks and our interest in elucidating them? I shall
put forward three general principles that I think revealingly amplify the
meaning of hook experience and get confirmed by it:
1. Special liveliness—aesthetic experience increases the ideally desir-

able, “high” and cherishable quality of life; I live more vibrantly, and
am impressed and grateful that I do so, when I am grabbed in great
aesthetic moments.
2. Usable models—aesthetic experience is well-formed so that it pro-
vides usable models of highly desirable living; the telling moves in
great love songs, for example, enable me to express and comport
myself in definite repeatable ways, and anticipate definite responses,
in the aesthetic experience of ideal loving (which could be helpful in
real loving).
3. Ringing realizations—aesthetic experience delivers perceptions that
are resonantly convincing, fatefully defining one’s position in that
staging of higher life.

Switzerland AG 2023
8 S. G. SMITH
Special Liveliness
Whether or not by the artist’s design, a hook, like Lindsey Buckingham’s
guitar lick at 2:38 in “You Make Loving Fun” (Fleetwood Mac, 1977), is
a high point in my experience of a work; the work, in turn, is probably a
high point in my listening or viewing or reading life; and my good experi-
ences of artworks and art-like situations all share in a high value. What is
this “height,” presumably different from the height of moral excellence or
moral authority? There may not be one answer. I plan to invoke fuller
personal enlivenment as the best general conception of aesthetically high
life. But perhaps, as many think, the high value of aesthetic experience
generally lies just in the highly desirable distinctive pleasure it gives—an
enduring pleasure that seems to rise above more ephemeral or conflicted
pleasures—while hooks and favorite works rise up high because they
sharply focus for us some of the ingredients of aesthetic pleasure.
The trouble with citing pleasure as a principle of aesthetic value is that
it stops our conversation too soon, shedding no light. You say you enjoyed
the play? Or that it was delightful? That’s good, but clearly if anything is
worth probing and contemplating in our experience of the play, it lies on
the other side of that fact of pleasure, in the why and how of it. At least we
take a step in that direction by differentiating “high” pleasures from ordi-
nary ones; we challenge ourselves to make sense of that discrimination and
that aspiration.
Anyone worried about cultural elitism might want to reject the whole
idea of “high” pleasure. Mightn’t we value aesthetic pleasure simply as a
distinct extra kind of pleasure, recognizing that we would be poorer with-
out it, just as we would be poorer without many other desirable compo-
nents of our lives? Perhaps we enshrine artworks or celebrate “natural
beauty” simply for the sake of protecting and promoting certain pleasures
that we otherwise might miss out on. No aspiration need be involved
other than wanting to have the most good things in one’s life. And so the
aesthetic enjoyer need not pretend to any personal or cultural superiority.
The sense of a distinct “exhilarating” quality in aesthetic pleasure could
be interpreted as a highness.1 To be exhilarated is be cheered (hilaris); to
be cheered is to be encouraged, boosted in making one’s best way. But
making one’s best way needn’t involve going “higher” in any sense other
than the mounding up of the most good things. Perhaps we should be
1
Susanne Langer, Feeling and Form (New York: Scribners, 1953), p. 395.
2 SOME RELEVANT AESTHETIC PRINCIPLES 9
careful not to overrate great pleasures: after all, from certain serious per-
spectives the good things of aesthetic experience are relatively “low”
because they make no practical difference in life.
There is a lot wrong with pleasure as the category in which to look for
aesthetic value. Part of the problem is that pleasure only gets to be high by
being more—or, for the sake of a more, simply being different.2 True, we
also tend to value so-called rare pleasures highly, but so what if a pleasure
is rare? Is it just that it is less likely to grow stale? Or is the point that one
should seize the rare opportunity to add that pleasure to one’s portfolio,
filling that lacuna? But so what if one has a filled-out portfolio?
We tend to ascribe higher value to so-called distinct pleasures, meaning
by “distinct” something more than “relatively more” or “different,” as in:
“It’s a distinct pleasure to welcome tonight’s speaker.” In that case, our
appreciation noticeably swings from the generic pleasure aspect to the
pleasure-causing individual. The accompanying pleasure confirms but
does not constitute the value of what occasions it.3 The significance lies
beyond the fact of pleasure.
It’s a mark of the highness of aesthetic experience that normally we’re
more interested in the distinct identities and actions of the objects of aes-
thetic pleasure than in the pleasure as such. The typical framework of aes-
thetic value is not a quest for a kind of pleasure, like my own daily quest
for various forms of good food and drink, but the particular relationship
we find we can have with a Beatles chorus or a Shakespearean speech. It is
more like having a friend, or an awe-inspiring leader, than having a great
2
In Jeremy Bentham’s hedonism, aesthetic pleasure could earn a high ranking only by
offering us a greater intensity or endurance or accessibility of pleasure—An Introduction to
the Principles of Morals and Legislation [1789], Chap. 4. John Stuart Mill tried to improve
on Bentham’s crudely quantitative utilitarianism with a recognition of the qualitative superi-
ority of some kinds of pleasure over others. To stay true to his empiricism, Mill had to rest
the qualitative superiority of X to Y on the (posited) empirical fact that the most fully expe-
rienced subjects, those best capable of comparison, prefer X to Y. But he also invoked the
important normative premise that a higher, more valuable experience is associated with a
fuller exercise of human capabilities. Mill, Utilitarianism, in Utilitarianism and Other
Writings, ed. Mary Warnock (New York: New American Library, 1974), pp. 258–260. Mill’s
approach is continued by the more recent aesthetic hedonists who require cognitive discern-
ment for aesthetic pleasure—see James Shelley, “The Concept of the Aesthetic,” in Edward
N. Zalta, ed., The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2022 Edition), https://plato.
stanford.edu/archives/spr2022/entries/aesthetic-concept/.
3
Admittedly, the “pleasure-causing individual” could be an interesting form of pleasure
rather than an entity—say, the arc of sexual climax.
10 S. G. SMITH
cup of coffee. I was already pointing in this direction when I used the
phrase “specially impressive.” As social beings we’re oriented to valuing
particular relationships to which we are committed, and the qualifier “spe-
cial” marks the high importance of our relationship partner and our delib-
erate act of entering this relationship and our loyalty to it.
For human beings, the foremost paradigm of “special” value—that
which is intrinsically, eminently worthy of being chosen, given attention,
and defended—is the individual person, indeed any person one encoun-
ters. The reason is clear: apart from unfortunate momentary crises of self-
preservation, nothing else can match the importance for us of mutual
personal affirmation as we grapple with the infinitely interesting difficul-
ties in trying interdependently to be successes as persons. We’re obliged to
pay special attention to our fellow persons because we’re embroiled in a
historically concrete sharing of existence with them, each of us fated to live
better or worse lives according to the quality of our relationships. While
having the Beatles or Shakespeare in one’s life is not fully equivalent to
having a person in one’s life, the aesthetic relationship deserves to be
thought of as at least quasi-personal because of its analogous specialness.4
There, too, unique stimuli determine not just the pleasantness or exciting-
ness of life but its personal quality.
Yet another main problem with pleasure as the general category for
aesthetic value is that it is too passive. Pleasure happens to you, and within
you; it isn’t participatory, unless there is a sense of participation in pursu-
ing a continuing pleasure or in being at peace with something.5 Dancing
is a particularly clear counterexample to the supposed rule of pleasure. You
may think of dancing as a pleasure (if you do take pleasure in it), but more
naturally you think of it as enlivening fun. The emphasis is on what you
get to do and participate in, going out into shared life, rather than on what
you feel, taking something for your private reality. I venture to generalize
4
For Jerrold Levinson’s conception of “persona,” roughly corresponding to my concep-
tion of “quasi-person,” see his “Musical Expressiveness,” in The Pleasures of Aesthetics
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996) 90–125, p. 107.
5
Sharpening the hedonic aspect of the oft-made point that aesthetic experience involves
active engagement with its object, Mohan Matthen conceives aesthetic pleasure as a kind of
“facilitation pleasure” in contrast with the passive “restoration-or-relief pleasure” more usu-
ally assumed in discussions of pleasure. It is the difference between actively savoring some-
thing you’re eating and simply being relieved of hunger. “The Pleasure of Art,” Australasian
Philosophical Review 1 (2017), pp. 6–28. Facilitation pleasure is indeed a stronger way of
pleasure chiming in with enlivenment, but it is not the same thing as enlivenment.
the dancing model: the hallmark of robust aesthetic experience is that your
faculties are actively engaged and that your central aesthetic satisfaction is
produced by that engagement.6 The Beatles chorus is fun, involving vir-
tual movement if not overt dancing or singing. The Shakespearean speech
is fun, involving actively following (in theater) or virtually enacting (in
reading) its fine cognitive and communicative moves. The Jackson Pollock
picture is fun, leading your form-seeking eye on a merry chase.
A rock hook that speaks directly to the question is Sly Stewart singing
“I want to take you higher” (in the song of that name by Sly and the
Family Stone, 1969). The song’s music seems to consist almost entirely of
jolts. The lyrics tend to stress the theme of active bodily involvement.
Beat is there to make you move

Sound is there to help you groove
While aesthetic hedonism requires us to say that “I Want to Take You

Higher” aims to give us pleasure, it’s more natural to say that it aims to
enliven us. The piece conjures vitality—a special vitality—rather than
pleasure.
An emphasis on vitality is a hallmark of barbarian style, and there are
those who hear barbarism in music like “I Want to Take You Higher.”7 My
counter-thesis is that great rock tracks are vivid exemplars of what aes-
thetic form always is primarily for: to channel, shape, and heighten per-
sonal life.8 To insist on meaningful and humane formation of life is quite
6
Engagement of our faculties is the principle of aesthetic “satisfaction” according to Hugo
Meynell in The Nature of Aesthetic Value (Albany: SUNY Press, 1968). For a comprehensive
argument for an “engagement” paradigm of aesthetic experience see Arnold Berleant, Art
and Engagement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991).
7
In The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), Allan Bloom
argues that rock music influences the young to embrace and settle for passion raw rather than
reasonably shaped (67–81).
8
Liveliness was a prominent consideration in earlier aesthetics, especially in Baumgarten
who founded the discipline, but it never became theoretically dominant, perhaps due to a
failure to distinguish the event of enlivenment from the quality or cognitive utility of vivid-
ness in representation. See Paul Guyer, “18th Century German Aesthetics,” in Edward
N. Zalta, ed., Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2020 ed.), https://plato.stanford.
edu/archives/fall2020/entries/aesthetics-18th-german/ and Mary E. Hazard, “The
Anatomy of ‘Liveliness’ as a Concept in Renaissance Aesthetics,” Journal of Aesthetics and
Art Criticism 33 (Summer 1975), pp. 407–418.
12 S. G. SMITH
in order, but we should not forget that aesthetic objects are invitations to
a revving up.
The category of vitality might seem to return us to the problem we
found with pleasure that the “high” reduces to the more. Is “I Want to
Take You Higher” a great performance solely because it stirs us up more
than many other things we listen to? The key question again is: How does
the performance stir us up in a specially impressive way?
Sly and the Family Stone don’t just display their wares; they push for-
ward into your “personal space,” bidding to be included in the move-
ments by which you self-definingly enact your own existence. Their song
grabs you and dances with you. While it is high in the sense of being
eminent, standing above many other experiences as we appreciatively
review our listening possibilities, it is also preeminent in placing itself
before, in front of, other listening possibilities. The forwardness of the
music is not to be lumped together with the unfortunate barbarism when
someone next door plays the record too loud at an inconvenient time.
Given that you are reaching for that strong stimulus, that you are ready to
dance with this quasi-friend, it rewards you with its zest and cunning
structure and confirms your partiality toward it—maybe especially con-
firming your partiality with the boom-shakalakalaka.
Thus, a good short formulation for a notable event of aesthetic experi-
ence is: It grabs you, and you grab it back. You have entered or renewed a
relationship. Your aesthetic quasi-partner brings certain valuable qualities
of life to the relationship by virtue of its own energy and structure, and
you do the same, naturally filling out the aesthetic experience with your
celebratory criticism. The special liveliness that is attributable to the object
is matched by the special liveliness of your joining in with it. Both of you
are jumping out of the humdrum; it is like that separating lift when you
spot a good friend at a boring reception.9 This phenomenon is particularly
clear when someone is singing to you, or approaching you artistically in a
singing-like way, but it also happens when you come upon a petroglyph or
catch sight of a grand mountain peak.
Of course, one may fail or decline to respond to an aesthetic appeal, or
to such appeals generally; one may prefer to live in a different way, repress-
ing aesthetic possibility, or one may simply lack the requisite sensitivity.
Then there is a shortfall of human vitality. But we presume that healthy
9
A popular criterion of aesthetic encounter is “a feeling of freedom from concerns about
matters outside that object … The experience detaches itself, and even insulates itself, from
the intrusion of alien elements”—Monroe Beardsley, Aesthetics, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1981), pp. lxii, 528.
human subjects are (on their good days) normally reaching for the liveliest
life they can attain, and that our liveliest life must be well populated with
aesthetic experiences. I approach you on this basis. If you haven’t yet
heard the Fleetwood Mac hook I’m pointing to, or haven’t been struck by
it, I suppose that you are up for listening to it now, or soon, since our
agenda is to live most fully. A lesser-vitality life of ignoring the hook is still
a possibility but a sad one.
Does the principle of special liveliness correctly distinguish the high
appeal of aesthetic experience from the authoritatively high claim of moral
experience? Moral experience can be thought of as a vitality of respect and
discipline. Whoever lacks empathy or the prickings of conscience lacks a
higher form of vitality. But we would not normally say that the point of
moral value is livelier life, or that the point of the religious ideal of “life
abundant” is to experience liveliness; whereas the point of special liveliness
in the aesthetic sense we have developed is that we delight in an experi-
enced gain of liveliness and that we deliberately choose to maintain a con-
nection with the occasion of this gain for the sake of the liveliness.
Is the standard of special liveliness open in the right way, to the right
extent, for purposes of aesthetic reflection? It’s better to push the borders
back than to exclude significant data. One kind of borderline case is con-
ceptual art. If Marcel Duchamp exhibits an ordinary urinal as a work of art
called Fountain, can we be stimulated by that presentation and partner
with Duchamp’s accomplishment in thoughtful appreciation of its indi-
vidual qualities? Yes! Fountain qualifies, albeit in a challenging way. At the
other end of the range, another hard case is your favorite Blue Bell ice
cream. Should it count as aesthetic experience if you’re reveling in the
familiar quality of a scoop of this treat? Perhaps it shouldn’t count, if
you’re sunk in the experience of having an empty place of preexisting
desire filled with the substance that matches that desire, optimizing that
interval of your private life; perhaps it should, if you’re relating to the ice
cream with responsive discernment, embracing its particular qualities as
though they were being interestingly proposed to you or as though they
were expressive of a significant persona, entering into a shared life. And
what about a mountain or a sunset? Yes, if it reaches you in that way.10
10
If it is objected that an aesthetic experience must grasp an intentional expression, I reply
that the non-art sites of aesthetic significance are experienced as quasi-intentional—the
mountain as though expressing itself or as though assembled by someone for my view, the
sunset as though beaming or beamed to me. (I’m thinking of Roger Scruton’s argument that
photography can’t be art because it can’t be considered intentional representation in
“Photography and Representation,” Critical Inquiry 7 [1981], pp. 577–603.)
14 S. G. SMITH
Taking the principle of special liveliness seriously in aesthetics gives us

excellent reason to attend to hooks, for hook experiences are pinnacles of
special liveliness.
Usable Models
I submit that hooks are usable models for the specially lively comportment
of the aesthetically stimulated subject. Understanding the form of a hook
as a model acknowledges the guided activity aspect of aesthetic experience,
and the possibility of well-anticipated repetition. Those choice sounds,
harmonies, phrases, licks, changes, stops and starts in music—now that we
know them, we follow them.
But I’ll start this discussion with the more familiar sense of “model”
that belongs to intellectual modeling for purposes of theory. An example
is near at hand: inspired by popular music, I have already begun to model
aesthetic experience as dance. I’m doing this programmatically to meet a
fundamental intellectual need and not as an ad hoc metaphor.
It’s a commonplace that in any field of experience we rely on models to
make sense of what we’re dealing with. We need stable images to identify
things and maps to help us find them and recognize their relationships
with each other and with ourselves; further, we need stable procedures,
forms of action by which we can effectively deal with things, like the pro-
cedure of reaching for an object or walking on a route. For discovering
and reveling in special liveliness, we need models of being lively. Dance is
a usable general model for this—meaning by “dance” not a particular
physical activity but the essential structure of forming one’s own liveliness
in responsive partnership with someone or something else’s forming of
liveliness.11
Models are what newborn babies so obviously lack, and what they so
rapidly acquire to become functional persons.
Various proposals have been made for a fundamental model for aes-
thetic experience, aiming to equip us to recognize that kind of special
11
Susanne Langer’s conception of dance is fitted for the particular art of dance, but some
of her main points about the dance are suggestive for the more general notion I’m adopting:
notably that dance is composed of gesture-ideas abstracted from natural gesticulation, and
that dancers seem to be animated by powers beyond them (Feeling and Form, pp. 174–175).
I’m not claiming or assuming that dance is historically the original art or anthropologically
the fundamental art, as Gerardus van der Leeuw argues in Sacred and Profane Beauty, trans.
David E. Green (Nashville: Abingdon, 1963), though plausibly it is these things.
occasion and make the most of it in its diverse forms. We have taken note
of the pleasure model. Long popular among intellectuals was the more
prestigious classical model of sensuously perceiving perfection in things or
in the ordering of things—an approach that risks aesthetic stultification by
enshrining certain forms of supposed perfection (though it can also excit-
ingly open the question of what things are variously trying for). With the
Enlightenment’s pivot from ideal being to ideal subjectivity, people who
aspired to reasonable perception came to rely on the model of taste, that
is, a sensitive and discriminating relish of what is experienced; on this
model, to think aesthetically is to formulate “judgments of taste,” which
has the virtue of admitting the importance of subjective enthusiasm but
again risks sterile standardization.12 (Quoth Hume: “The same Homer,
who pleased at Athens and Rome two thousand years ago, is still admired
at Paris and at London.”)13 A taste model is perforce a pleasure model;
good taste assures good pleasure. Wishing to break through the limita-
tions of formal perfectionism and the complacency of good taste, Leo
Tolstoy argued for a model of emotional infection of the audience by the
artist and R. G. Collingwood argued for a model of successful emotional
expression—Tolstoy emphasizing the effective sharing, Collingwood the
artist’s fresh arrival at an awareness that can be shared.14 And John Dewey
tried to support all these aesthetic considerations with a model of consum-
matory experience or fulfillment, including fulfillment well shared.15
These models, and no doubt others, are all warranted and helpful. They
will vie with each other to rule the aesthetics roost, but they don’t logically
exclude each other. It’s a fact that we’re able to use multiple models in
seriously interpreting anything and are often well served in doing so.
(Think of how we use different types of map for sizing up a territory and
different types of relating for optimal interpersonal relations.) But I’d like
to specially commend some virtues of yet another proposal.
Veering back toward formalism, Susanne Langer’s version of the idea of
“significant form” offers a model that is especially supportive of art
12
Classics of this phase of Western aesthetics include David Hume’s essay “On the Standard
of Taste” and Immanuel Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment.
13
Hume, “On the Standard of Taste,” in Essential Works of David Hume, ed. Ralph Cohen
(New York: Bantam, 1965) 448–466, p. 453.
14
Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art?, trans. Almyer Maude (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1960);
R. G. Collingwood, Principles of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938).
15
John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Minton, Balch & Co., 1934).
16 S. G. SMITH
criticism, an activity in which we have a large cultural investment.16 In

intelligent experience generally, what we recognize and engage is form;
what gives some forms aesthetic significance is their “vital import,” that is,
the sense they convey of something compelling in a way of being alive;
what gives a major “art form” its distinctive aesthetic mission is a basic
form of experiencing in which artful semblances can be fashioned, such as
“virtual memory” for literature and “the image of time” for music; and
what gives a particular work or style its aesthetic value is that it establishes
a fecund matrix for impressive virtual formations of life. Each art form
evolves richly by deploying an unlimited number of specific forms that can
exist within the main form, as for example various combinations of tones
and rhythmic structures articulate music’s “image of time.”
There is a broad Langerian mandate to pay attention to the specific
forms by which vital import is conveyed to us, and to trace relations
between aesthetically potent forms. This promotes objective discernment.
But I don’t think I can fully understand what the artwork is doing for me
without understanding what I am doing in engaging the artwork. This is
not one of Langer’s main concerns, but she points in the right direction
by saying that the aesthetic subject must be intuitively “responsive.”17 We
must overcome the passivity of the pleasure and taste models.
A great merit of Kant’s version of taste theory is that he does feature
our active participation in constituting aesthetic experience. Beautiful and
sublime objects activate our reasoning faculty, so that in the case of beauty
we’re drawn into recognizing the fulfillment of a mysterious purposiveness
and with the sublime we’re drawn to measure ourselves, first despairingly
and then triumphantly, against what seemed to exceed our powers of
rational framing.18 In either sort of case, the liveliness that counts the most
is our own. Kant’s emphasis on reason seems aesthetically narrow, but if he
is right that human life is ruled by reason (and he cannot simply be wrong,
since the concepts of reason and rule are linked), then we will indeed have
to reckon with the involvement of our reason in fully assessing any signifi-
cant experience.
16
Derived from Clive Bell, Art (London: Chatto & Windus, 1928). See Langer, Feeling
and Form.
17
Langer, p. 396.
18
Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, AA 5:221–244 (beauty), AA 5:244–280
(sublimity).
In any case it is first by moving that we enter into partnership with the
aesthetic stimulus. The most pertinent critical question on this level is not
“What does it make you think?” or “How does it make you feel?” but
“How does it prompt and allow you to move?” The moving is what the
aesthetically motivated thinking and feeling are about. The emotional
experience of “being moved,” a hallmark of worthwhile art, always has a
basis in real movement: following Creon’s story to the end of Antigone,
for example, I’m obliged to perform the action of letting go of his dead
son and wife, on that basis feeling the sadness of losing them forever and
thinking about the tragic error in ruling other people overbearingly.
Dancing is movement that has been formed partly by an imperative of
intentional coherence (usually based on somatic–kinetic coherence) and
partly by a relational imperative of coordination (often and preeminently
coordination with another person, but almost always coordination with
quasi-personal music). It is intrinsically fulfilling because it has captured
and sustained a special liveliness. As its paradigmatic form is social, it is
intrinsically oriented to the sharing of liveliness; shareability is part of its
specialness. (This is why it always seems appropriate to look for and solicit
agreement in aesthetic response, despite the preposterousness of asserting
an actual universality of taste.) Dancing in its happy formations thus seems
to be the most appropriate subjective correlate to the significant forms
presented by aesthetic stimuli.
It may be objected that while the dancing model fits well with temporal
art forms, and even has some plausibility for sculpture that we move
around and architecture that we move through, surely it cannot apply to
pictorial art. I reply that we do dance with pictures, in this way: leaving
aside the narrative movement that may be implied by a represented scene,
almost any picture is taken in from left to right, from up to down, from
foreground to background and back; so apprehended, its nodes and spac-
ings have a rhythm; its composition is not merely a more or less striking
brute visual given (though it is that) but someone’s intentional assem-
blage, someone’s successful campaign of deployment, that one intuitively
rehearses. That is true also of any interesting figure within the picture.
One takes hold of what the picture thrusts forward and lets go of what the
picture dismisses. If one’s relationship with the picture lasts longer than a
momentary glance, it is enacted and deepened by this sort of dancing.
In dancing there is always a formed way of going forward, a usable
model of movement that emerges even if it was not previously known.
Otherwise dancing would not be enjoyable in a dancing way. We can say
18 S. G. SMITH
more generally that all enjoyable liveliness is like this. It is true that you
can feel energetic and not care whether you act out by running through
the woods or throwing acorns at trees or yodeling. But even these wild
actions are very definitely formed, and indeed each has a set of meaningful
associations. It’s not a huge step from the ordinary lively comportment
that relies on models of running and throwing and so forth to the special
liveliness of using the model provided by an artwork—say, the general
model of the joyous refrain and the specific, slightly quirky model of the
Ode to Joy’s melody in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
An important general point about models is that we rely on them. A
distinctive point about aesthetic models is that we rely on them enthusias-
tically. If the action model of walking is a trusty form for locomotion, like
a good hiking shoe, the aesthetic model of waltzing is beautiful like a
dancing shoe. We feel it to be a blessing that we have these graspable, fol-
lowable formations of perception and movement thanks to which we par-
ticipate in enacting special liveliness. For that reason we should not
overlook the strangeness of the famous Kantian claims that aesthetic
objects are “purposeless” and that we relate to them “disinterestedly,”
even if we can see the point that aesthetic experience lifts us free in a way
from ordinary practical experience.
Hooks are models that auspiciously constrain our dancing, like the
well-placed stepping stones “I—I—I—I—I’m” on ascending chords in
“(I’m Not Your) Stepping Stone” (Paul Revere & the Raiders, 1966) or
the light-stepping little four-measure refrain of Pharrell Williams’ “Happy”
(2013), adopted as a vehicle by dancers all over the world and used for
large group celebrations on video.19
Ringing Realizations
With anything one loves there is a sense of fate and of loyalty. It has
become a fact and an axiom of one’s life that one belongs together with
the beloved. The die is cast. Beyond acquaintance with the beloved,
beyond even recognition of the qualities of the beloved as desirable and
well suited to oneself, there is a further cognitive event of realization that
19
Including my state, Mississippi, @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtfCDoc1lDE.
See the everyone-can-dance invitation of Williams’ original video @ https://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=ZbZSe6N_BXs.
one is in a certain situation with significant implications, the elements of

the situation fitting together in a certain way unchangeably.
I’ve noted that babies must acquire models of being to be cognitively
functional. To acquire the most important models securely with the
needed practical self-positioning and conviction, babies will have to “get”
these models as inevitable and consequential; they will have to realize that
a cat is a living animal (you can’t expect it not to bite if you squeeze it that
way) and a meowing animal is a cat (you can’t expect it to come when you
call). They have to achieve a particular synthesis of various animal percep-
tions and images together with their own practical powers and options.
These are, as we say, lessons to be learned.
We build up our vocabulary of concepts and our practical savoir faire by
learning lessons of experience. Despite the continual revision of these les-
sons (for our realizations are works in progress), most of our achieved
understandings are so securely in place, so quietly geared into our every-
day operations, that we think of them simply as our knowledge and not as
personal achievements or as momentously orienting pole stars in our life.
Now when we come to a notable new “realization,” it lands on the vast
platform of earlier realizations we have on file.
Realizations are often not pleasant (as when I realize my car needs new
tires), but they are always enlivening insofar as they change the equation
for your life. In the happiest cases, one realizes that one is in a favorable
situation and able to benefit from it.
(There are cases that are too happy: one is simply awash in good feeling,
“ecstatically” out of touch with external reality, or one has fallen into
Stendhalian “crystallization,” fantastically assigning all the perfections you
can think of to the one with whom you’re enamored—a pseudo-realization
likely to be punctured soon enough by experience.)20
Suppose that after many years of ordering chocolate ice cream, you try
strawberry ice cream one day and realize that you like it better. You have
a new pole star in your life! From now on you will choose strawberry, rel-
ishing the perkier flavor. You rejoice in the thought of the future availabil-
ity of the strawberry option. You and strawberry are a couple … but now
I’m joking. To have another person as a new pole star in your life is far
more momentous and demanding than having a new favorite flavor of
ice cream.
20
Stendhal, Love I.2.
20 S. G. SMITH
Aesthetic realization is somewhat like an ice cream love in involving

enjoyment and partiality and somewhat like a personal love in demanding
serious discernment and caring about implications, but it is different from
either. It needs its own model.
The case of the new favorite flavor shows that enjoyment can involve
realization, even on ice cream level. One discovers an energizing or stabi-
lizing relationship with another being, a harmonious stimulation in a cer-
tain situation, that can be treated henceforth as a standing possibility;
thanks to the characteristics and prospects of the other being or of the
situation, and perhaps thanks also to one’s own desirable characteristics
(one’s “taste” at least), one feels firmly supported. It is a favorable “chem-
istry,” an energetic-yet-stable configuration.
Although the case of the new personal love probably involves its own
sort of good “chemistry,” we have to model it dramatically in consider-
ation of the active free choosing that occurs on both sides of the relation
and the fateful consequences of that choosing. One’s relation with straw-
berry ice cream is never “fraught” (except metaphorically if one is worried
about the sugar), but one’s relation with another person is always some-
what fraught because of the inherent tension in the maneuvering between
freedoms asking for commitments. Personal love is profoundly constrain-
ing in its demand for caring and loyalty. Even if I have realized today that
I love strawberry ice cream, I can easily give it up tomorrow, and so
today’s ice cream realization is light-hearted; whereas if I realize today
that I love a person, I am stopped in my tracks, forced to reconsider my
whole life in depth. The most important success conditions for my life
have been and will continue to be redefined in this highest-priority per-
sonal relationship.
To think of aesthetic realization as a jolly access to pleasure, as with the
new favorite ice cream, is to miss how interesting and important aesthetic
discoveries are. In the special case where we would want to say that enjoy-
ing ice cream is an aesthetic experience, the hallmarks of the aesthetic will
be that one finds interesting qualities in the ice cream that engage one’s
intelligent attention and that one can make serious, discussable judgments
concerning the place of the ice cream in a structured aesthetic universe. A
distinctively aesthetic realization involves not merely having good “chem-
istry” with something but also finding passage into a great hall of interest-
ing conversation armed with new evidence and ideas.
Suppose you love the sound of “Brown Sugar” (The Rolling Stones,
1969). Perhaps it has never occurred to you that the musicians and
engineers have poured years of effort into obtaining that sound, cultivat-
ing it as a quasi-personal voice that heightens sharable life-energy with an
affecting ragged beauty. Perhaps you enjoy it as most people enjoy choco-
late ice cream, strictly for a pleasant private state of being, and your realiza-
tion about it reaches no further. More likely, you do appreciate how bands
distinguish themselves by achieving a sound, and your love of the Stones’
sound carries you outward into shared enjoyment of it and a larger con-
versation about how it differs from other sounds and how it’s constituted
by the specific relations among voices, instruments, and recording proce-
dures—so that your realization of the sound’s greatness is interestingly
expanding.
Aesthetic realization is no less than deep involvement in a complex situ-
ation that has been or is being interestingly resolved. But to think of aes-
thetic realization as the kind of involvement we have in a dramatic personal
relationship would be to miss how non-fraught our aesthetic relations are,
how we are not dramatically constrained by them. Our fresh entry into the
great conversation about aesthetic significance is enlivening in an aesthetic
way partly by virtue of being guiltlessly experimental. Not rarely, a work or
even a single hook offers us free choices of rewarding construal rather than
pinning us down to one intended experience. And yet we’re experiment-
ing with profound embraces and judgments loaded with implications.
There may not be more passion in loving aesthetic objects than in loving
one’s favorite ice cream, but there is more mental seriousness—of a soar-
ing kind.
Because of the essential freedom of aesthetic realization, we have to
give it permission to lean far toward either of the nonaesthetic models we
have flanked it with. It has to be possible to participate in the great con-
versation saying only, “But: strawberry!” For strawberry flavor, or some
other quality similarly regarded (“More cowbell!”), could be one’s
supreme axiom of aesthetic experience. At the same time, it must be pos-
sible to anchor one’s aesthetic appreciations in personal drama—to be
wedded to a work, a style, or an artist, as in feeling strongly that “You Can’t
Always Get What You Want” ought to be played at one’s funeral (which
happens in Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill, 1983); and perhaps, the per-
sonal becoming the political, to feel that one must care for some pure
strain of expression that our society needs more of—more Rolling Stones,
or less.
To realize the nature and power of a hook is the most concretely vivid
sort of aesthetic realization—not the most profound aesthetic realization,
22 S. G. SMITH
on the level of fathoming the spirit of Greek tragedy, but a bright one,
possibly even brilliant, and possibly contributory to greater realizations.
Grabbing back at a hook, I link my involvement with this strong stimulus
to my involvement with the great conversation of aesthetic discernment
and judgment. Thus hooks, apprehended as such, ring not only with their
own euphonious qualities but also with the intellectual and social vibrancy
of the aesthetic conversation.
In the center of realizing, the “heart,” where a person’s intentions are
forged, hook realization is a kind of love, involving the feeling of some
actual resonating between the subject and the object but also a voluntary
turning toward the thrilling thing as beloved, meaning that the felt quality
and regulation of one’s life will be affected—enriched, one expects—by
the presence (as intimate as possible) of that anointed special thing. One
knows one will be marching into the future differently and more worthily
by virtue of one’s thick connection with that thing, having it in one’s heart.
In the absence of the synthetic complexity and deep involvement of
genuine realization, I don’t think a memorable stimulus deserves to be
considered a hook just because it’s memorable. For instance, in the 1978
movie Superman I thought it was really funny that Lex Luthor (Gene
Hackman), when asked, “Why do so many people have to die for [your]
crime of the century?” replied: “Why does the phone always ring when
you’re in the bathtub?” I must have been deeply tickled by Hackman’s
delivery of this line because I think of it fairly often. But it’s not interesting
or important. I don’t see why I would write about it.
* * *
In a realization, one grasps the significance of something in a context. I

realize that I need to change the tires on my car because otherwise I dare
not drive to Virginia next week. A hook realization differs from a mere
surge of enthusiasm for a salient element in a work by placing the appreci-
ated element in an imaginative context that determines its significance.
For example, the tremendous snare strikes in “Jailhouse Rock” (Elvis
Presley, 1957) are a hook for me because I hear them as gestures of defi-
ance in prison, like banging metal cups on the bars—which I can further
hear as saucy squawks of youth imprisoned in their families and schools
everywhere.
We can get some handles on how hooks hold their impactful positions
in aesthetic contexts by grouping them in categories of structural
significance, starting with how they can impressively start a work’s aes-
thetically satisfying proceedings (Chap. 3) and continuing to how they can
pose significant challenges for registering the import of a work (Chap. 4),
decisively resolve the character of a work or a key element in it (Chap. 5),
and engagingly end things (Chap. 6). We’ll consider how hooks can hold
important positions in contexts of personal and social meaningfulness with
reference to the themes of love (Chap. 8) and peoplehood (Chap. 9). And
finally, we’ll look at how hooks spark and support expansive aesthetic
interpretation (Chap. 10).
Throughout, I will tend to reference hooks in twentieth-century rock
music, mostly well-known ones, because (a) I love them, (b) they are
great, and (c) I suppose that for many of us they have been formative for
our imagining of the powers and glories of this art form. That’s not to
deny that the form continues to evolve and there’s more to it than my own
listening has detected.
Usually my reference will be to performance hooks in the best-known
recordings of the songs under discussion. Usually a good composition
hook supports a performance hook, but one does not necessitate the oth-
er.21 Otis Redding’s “What you want” inaugural hook in his composition
“Respect” (1965) doesn’t necessitate the tremendous performance hook
of Aretha Franklin’s phrasing of those words (1967).
At the end of each chapter I’ll undertake a brief reconnaissance of
hooks in other art forms, demonstrating the usefulness of the hook con-
cept across the arts and planting a few markers to stimulate further reflec-
tion on hooks in those art forms and on the larger structure of hook
experience.
Befitting the personal investments and prerogatives of hook experience,
henceforth I’ll very often address the reader as You, hopeful of discovering
and expanding shared aesthetic experience and complementary interpreta-
tions for a We under construction. I hope that you’ll love my examples
(looking everything up) and interpretations—sometimes because you feel
the same, and sometimes because you don’t—and that you’ll tell me what
marvels I have missed.
21
In Stephen Davies’ sense, popular songs are, in comparison with classical works, “thin”
compositions that determine relatively less of the valuable properties particular performances
may have. Musical Works and Performances: A Philosophical Exploration (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 2001), pp. 3–4.
CHAPTER 3
Inauguration Hooks
Starting this chapter is a problem. There are so many ways one can start!
And I can’t solve this by just Declaring The Main Thing, as Chuck Berry’s
guitar does so compellingly in “Johnny B. Goode” (1958), because there
isn’t just one main thing to declare.
What Is It to Start?
I’ll take a step backward from our topic and ask: What’s at stake in starting
an experience? The issue is whether there will be a significant experience at
all, as opposed to continuing the daily grind; or a certain sort of significant
experience—say, an aesthetically enlivening one; or a certain desirable
form of aesthetic experience, such as hearing a great song.
An experience can start badly, so that some regrouping is necessary, or
so badly that it aborts. (You hear a would-be Conway Twitty say “Hello,
Darlin’” [1970] and you slam down the phone.) An experience can start
adequately, putting in place enough to build on, leading to worthwhile
content—like a public speaker with a useful message starting off with a
self-deprecating joke. Or an experience can start brilliantly, like Beethoven’s
Fifth Symphony (ca. 1808), handing us along to happy encounters with
many treasures. Or it can start brilliantly but misleadingly, like that person
you met at a party, raising the question: Should we try again to take advan-
tage of this model, or should we not trust it?

Switzerland AG 2023
26 S. G. SMITH
If you and I are friends, we may say our relationship started when (a)
we discovered our common enthusiasm for an obscure craft beer, or (b)
when I accidentally ran into your shopping cart in the grocery store park-
ing lot. The humorous (b) beginning is a good one to remember, but
there must be something of an (a) nature following it or we wouldn’t be
friends. The (a) type of beginning prefigures and sets a standard for what
we will find rewarding in the friendship. The idea that we can intentionally
get together to share special experiences and compare notes on them,
which was right there the first time you said “Have you tried Ballistic
Blonde?”, is a plan for relationship that will organize encounters for at
least as long as there are kinds of beer to try. It is such a promising premise
that it virtually assures our enjoying each other’s company and valuing
each other’s opinions. And that’s what happens; we were indeed well ori-
ented by that foretaste of friendliness.
A great art start is promising like this and stokes up our optimistic feel-
ing about everything that starts and everything that might follow. Stephen
Sondheim’s opening number “Comedy Tonight” in A Funny Thing
Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962) is so strong that it makes me
weep with overflowing optimism. (The rest of the show doesn’t quite
measure up to the opening, though. That’s the risk.)
Let me start over, backing up even further: How can anything start?
Remember how Zeno proved that Achilles can’t run: for every interval of
space that Achilles has to traverse he would first have to cover half that
distance, and this means he can never cover any distance. Same problem
with time elapsing. Mathematically one can resolve the conundrum by
making Achilles infinitely speedy as his intervals become infinitely small—a
strange thought—but for purposes of existence we get over the conun-
drum by counting on change and definite events. Change is always occur-
ring, and not just as further grinding but as happenings; and whenever
there is a happening, something happens, a whole event with a form of its
own. You might surprise yourself, but once you have commenced to sing
(somehow that happened), lo and behold, a note comes out, showing
once again that even if Zeno’s logic can stop nervous Nellies, it can’t stop
you or your listeners. Starting, launching an intended change, is a tri-
umph. A great art start, well-intended and well-formed, gilds the tri-
umph—we feel exultation in the success that all other successes presuppose.
An art work must start up in such a way as to guide you across the bor-
der between your aesthetically undistinguished ordinary life and the spe-
cial liveliness it has in store for you. To accomplish this, it provides a model
3 INAUGURATION HOOKS 27
of starting with special lift. The acoustic art of music has the advantage
that the lively qualities of coherent tone and rhythm easily propagate and
clearly separate music from nonmusic. Merely by singing a note, or play-
ing a note on your flute, you can cause people who can’t even see you to
prick up their ears and follow your flow. They already know that musical
sound is something like flying, a pure power lifting them free of the rest of
their present experience. And any one person who hears music must
assume that others might be having the same experience, whether in the
open air or through their earbuds; ideally if not perceptibly, a proto-society
of people-called-out is convened and a future conversation is given a point
of departure. A rat-a-tat-tat on a drum, or the raw guitar notes starting the
Beatles’ “Revolution” (fast version, 1968), will pull all listeners to atten-
tion with a jerk, posing the question: What urgency would correspond to
such a forcible summons? A promise is made, still indeterminate but
shapely enough to engage us.
The start of “Revolution” is delightfully brutal. It repeats in an almost-
thoughtless pattern, like an obnoxious but not totally unwelcome friend
you feel you have to go along with. The pushy guitar trains you to squint
fiercely at the topic of revolution and feel what you feel about it loudly.
Whether you will come to a decisive realization about that topic remains
to be seen—there are also ambivalence hooks in the song, including John
Lennon singing “Count me in/out”—but the power of the guitar’s
appeal, the congeniality of its brutality as a premise for a whole song expe-
rience, is a starter realization in itself.
In “A Hard Day’s Night” (1964), the Beatles proceed in the opposite
way, starting with ambiguity in that famous complex chord—an F chord
with a G chord overlaid, or vice versa. (The song turns out to be in the key
of G, and we do experience a harmonic movement from the opening
chord to the G chord that starts the verse, so it must be an F with G
added, that is, an F13.)1 In that first suspenseful moment when we are
oriented by a lovely chord boldly struck but don’t yet know which way
we’re headed, we feel the power and excitement of being able to go in
multiple directions. We’ve been handed the keys to the car, which starts
our imaginations revving. Then the hard-rocking, harmonically well-built
song provides a very choiceworthy drive. (Compare the constrained rev-
ving of our imaginations in the grandiosely designed prologue of
“VROOOM” by King Crimson [1995].)
1
“F13” because if you count upward from the start of the F scale, the notes of the G chord
are the 9th, 11th, and 13th.
28 S. G. SMITH
Characterization
An opening hook can work more like a calm advertisement of coming
attractions, like the unusual drum figure Steve Gadd brings to “50 Ways
to Leave Your Lover” (Paul Simon, 1975)—a military figure that’s oddly
funky, or else a funky figure that’s oddly military. As it turns out, the song
doesn’t resolve itself into one feeling as in “A Hard Day’s Night” but sup-
ports two moods that are oddly coexistent, a despair about love gone bad
and a reckless mood about starting a new affair. The drum figure is an
elegant diagram for emotional layering. You get into this figure as your
vehicle and it takes you with its subtle bumps through the song’s heavily
deliberating verses, keeping you alert so that you won’t fall off when the
perky “Slip out the back, Jack” chorus starts up.
If you’re already familiar with a song and fond of it, the song’s begin-
ning can be well designed to welcome you home. The opening measures
of David Crosby’s “Dolphin’s Smile” (The Byrds, 1968) are too delicate
to make much of a first impression, but for me now they sound like gliding
into a home bay circled by welcoming dolphins. A repeating acoustic gui-
tar figure gently anticipates the distinctive upward-spiking main melody of
“Out at sea/For a year/Floating free/From all fear.” It’s been a delayed
realization, special liveliness creeping backward from the body of the song
to the opening.
In either vocal or instrumental music, a crucial component of starting
is the announcement of the person whose expression the music is. (The
picked-guitar modal2 opening of “Dolphin’s Smile” sounds very much
like David Crosby; the vocal harmonies of the verse sound just like the
Byrds.) Popular song usually delays the entry of the singer so that there
will be a second inauguration, often the most important one. “Revolution”
is typical in this regard, with Lennon’s vocal starting after four measures of
rock guitar outburst—except that Lennon is pulling back on the ferocity,
addressing us conversationally, already signaling his ambivalence (compare
“Fortunate Son” by Creedence Clearwater Revival [1969], where a mild
rock intro for ten measures functions as a countdown for a blast-off in
measure 11 with the hot anger of John Fogerty’s singing).
2
“Modal” means shifted out of the ordinary major or minor scale to another scale-based
harmonic system or “mode.” We’re hearing the neutral second note of the A scale instead of
the major or minor third.
Part of the charm of “A Hard Day’s Night” is that the entry of the
singer is delayed so briefly. Like personable salesmen, the Beatles win you
with their confidence that they can get right to you once they have their
toe in the door—even just the single chord of “A Hard Day’s Night,” or
the half-measure drum figure of “She Loves You” (1963),3 or nothing at
all in “All My Loving” (1963).
While there’s a strong summons in the expressive presence of any per-
son, for purposes of musical enlivenment a person has to bring musical
value to the table. I would hope to have you on board for a brief while if
I started singing to you “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” but I don’t think
there would be a great moment there, a deeper grabbing. Maybe if I was
Aretha Franklin, and we had already started with a compelling groove, and
I came in slightly early with a bold phrasing of “Mary had …”?
At the beginning of “Respect” (1967) Aretha Franklin sings “what you
want” in a particular way that rewires our brains. Her phrasing here is
strikingly unique even though it’s hard to tell how. I think it’s that “what”
and “want” are the tiniest bit ahead of the beat—1/30 of a second or so, as
best I can tell by looking at an audio graphic. It’s like swinging in jazz, but
she isn’t swinging, she’s early for a more serious reason: she’s taking charge of
the proceedings. She’s already at the gateway of the soul or rock experience,
ordering us through it.
What a way of Starting! How could you instantly seal the deal with your
audience better than by opening with Aretha calling “What you want/
Baby I got”?
The first time I went to hear B. B. King—and this was an aged, seated
B. B. King on the vast stage of the city auditorium—he did exactly the same
thing with his first guitar phrase. He instantly owned everything. His per-
sonal style was in control of the blues just as surely as the blues was in control
of him. This too was a forceful, honest “signature” styling, likewise delivered
in short bursts.
A softer approach taken in “White Bird” (It’s a Beautiful Day, 1969)
works just as well. The song has been constructed with a sort of vestibule
in a lovely opening instrumental theme plucked by guitar and violin.
When, at 0:21, it’s time to step out of the vestibule into the song’s main
space (I’m imagining this as stepping into a big old church), the singers
sing the first words, “white bird,” somewhat quietly (like the reverent
tone of a church guide)—quietly, but not unassertively. Whereas Aretha
3
“She Loves You” is doubly early because it starts with its chorus rather than a verse.
30 S. G. SMITH
surged ahead early, the “white” sung by David LaFlamme and Pattie
Santos lands a little bit late, the female harmony vocal slightly trailing the
male lead vocal. Their gentle “white” is exquisite in our recollection; we
appreciate how we have been appropriately ushered into the song’s beauti-
ful complaint about the white bird’s confinement.
Gateways
The idea of a gateway is applicable in a totally general way, because we all
always have to get through the next gate, and also always in a song-specific
way, when we can recognize the steps of a coherent musical unfolding in
every choice of next event. Sometimes there’s a surprisingly big gateway
thematically. The huge reverby guitar notes that start Quicksilver
Messenger Service’s jam on “Who Do You Love” (1969) sound like a
portal of infinity: the cosmos is calling.4 The notes bend like the very cur-
vature of spacetime (or whatever spacetime is in—the Mind?).
Not quite cosmically, the super-heavy-reverb gateway in Grizzly Bear’s
“While You Wait for the Others” (2009) puts the opening guitar chords
in deep disguise: No matter how familiar you become with the song, so
that you see how those upstruck chords fit into the song’s pattern, you
can’t hear the sounds properly as chords. But you can’t hear them as non-
tonal noises, either. They’re almost just room-reverberation noises, like
when a door slams shut on a big space—raising the question, How would
I feel about going in there?—but you can’t be unaware that they’re also
rhythm guitar chords starting up a pop song, which turns the question
into: Do I want to get involved in this song? Having heard it once, you do.
But going in is never easy. Those first booming guitar strikes will not put
on a friendly face. They’re like temple dogs guarding the song’s entrance.
You have to endure them and get past them—which makes the rest of the
experience that much more thrilling.
On the plane of humanity, the first word “people” in Curtis Mayfield’s
song “People Get Ready” (1963, at a Civil Rights moment in the United
4
Compare the opening of “The Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil,” Jefferson Airplane
live at the Monterey Pop Festival (1967). On the meanings of reverb, see Peter Doyle, Echo
and Reverb: Fabricating Space in Popular Music, 1900–1960 (Middletown: Wesleyan
University Press, 2005). Doyle’s general conclusion is that “reverb indicates a kind of preg-
nant off-center space, neither fully occupied nor truly empty” (170).
States) semantically opens a door wide to moral and political solidarity

with everyone:
People get ready

There’s a train a-coming
You don’t need no baggage
You just get on board
You can get the seriously hopeful effect just by reading those words
quietly. The song brings a musical quietness to the words to give the right
ring to the effect.5
Transgression
Inaugural hooks in rock are often palpably transgressive, like Lennon’s
brash guitar in “Revolution” or Fogerty’s singing in “Fortunate Son.”
You’re yanked into your special enlivenment: Let’s go! This is worth being
impatient for! Another imperious approach is to start wrongly—not as a
problem that you’re invited to work on (which will be our concern in the
next chapter) but sheerly as a summons in the mode of irritation, in the
way that a car alarm claims your attention.
I hated it. Then I still hated it. Then I grudgingly accepted it as a price to
pay. Then I learned to recognize it as a great song’s gateway. Long years after
first acquaintance, somehow, at some point, I finally came over, and now I
love the high chinking piano sevenths by Bill Payne at the start of Little Feat’s
“Dixie Chicken” (1973), which I realize are just as essential to the song as the
marriage mirage in its storyline.
What makes those sevenths hard to take is that they’re on the wrong seventh,
not the flatted seventh that’s a full-step down from the tonic but the regular
seventh that’s just a half-step down, too close—when you lead with it, it sounds
like you meant to hit the tonic but missed. A flatted seventh would sound nice
and tart in a perfectly normal way for blues or rock (and it’s the flatted sev-
enth that’s included in the signature wordless lick after each verse in “Dixie
Chicken”). A repeated regular seventh would sound okay as part of a major
seventh chord in a bossa nova song—but then we’d be on a different continent.
5
Beyond the original by Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions, I especially recommend Eva
Cassidy’s version (1996).
32 S. G. SMITH
Why would the “regular” seventh be the wrong-sounding seventh? In most

situations, you’re supposed to hit that close-neighbor seventh if you hit a sev-
enth at all. But it’s also considered that the point of that seventh is to lead into
the tonic; that’s why it’s called “the leading tone.” It’s not supposed to be a
stable place.
The flatted seventh answers the question, What if being a little off the tonic
were a place to be? Shoving off by a whole step, it gets enough distance from the
tonic to stake its own claim. Being a lower place, its character is, naturally,
depressed—minor and blue. We’re so used to this blue seventh in all modes of
popular music that it sounds more right than wrong even in major-key har-
monies and ascending melodies. The bluesy transgression in flatting the sev-
enth hasn’t entirely lost its flavor, but it doesn’t really sound transgressive
any more.
Post-bebop guru Thelonious Monk once said “Wrong is right.” I take him
to mean that in playing music you can try something dangerously new, or you
can simply mess up, but either way, it might come out great if you have enough
guts as a player and listener to carry on living in the new world you’ve made.
“Wrong is right” is a fabulous all-purpose motto but ultimately puzzling
because of a philosophical problem it raises. As Plato would tell you, the same
thing cannot have opposite attributes at the same time and in the same
respect. So if “wrong is right” is ever true of a note, it must mean that the note
goes from being wrong to being right, or that it turns out to be right in one
context while wrong in another. The blues scale is a great standing example of
“wrong is right” in both senses: its flatted third and seventh are right all along
in a different key that’s implicitly superimposed on the main key (like the key
of Eb on the key of C), and its flatted third and seventh come to be heard as
feasible landing spots in a C scale (we get a wrong-to-right thrill insofar as
we’re always coming to hear those notes as okay rather than simply hearing
them as okay).
This seems a reasonable interpretation of “wrong is right,” as far as it goes.
But it weakens the wolfish intensity of Monk’s declaration. It misses how he
and maybe also Bill Payne are being bad boys.
So let me ask this: Is a wrong-is-right event right because it is now right,
that is, because the wrong has been rectified, or is it right because you’ve been
gotten to accept something wrong even as it persists in its wrongness? Is wrong
right as right or as wrong?
In this case I come down on wrong (I mean wrong as right as wrong).
Those opening sevenths in “Dixie Chicken” are persistently wrong to my ear.
They’re not just randomly wrong; their deviance is strategic; they’re
reinventing something analogous to the blue seventh by ragging the normal

expectation of a flatted seventh. This interpretation implies that I have become
a bad boy too by welcoming the wrong sevenths on those terms.
The wrong-is-right piano hook turns out to have been the perfect
launch for the delightfully perverse “walking together in Dixieland” of
this sardonic song.
“Be Alone Tonight” (Raymond Jones, 1988—from Spike Lee’s movie
School Daze) leads off with a different sort of harmonic challenge. The
strong three-chord sequence of its opening hook concludes with what
sounds like a misplaced root note on the third chord—as though an A
chord had misgrown a D root.6 It’s a gorgeous move, but deeply disturb-
ing: it signals that the song’s plea for security in love will be denied. We
would more comfortably guess an E root for the A chord in that position;
the root note we hear being a step lower on D makes us globally blue.
“Dixie Chicken” and “Be Alone Tonight” open with harmonic irri-
tants. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s version of “Woodstock” (1970)
engages us with a rhythmic irritant, the refusal of a simple guitar riff to
settle into a stable four-beat feeling—continually restarting the attempt,
unable to make up its mind, until, nine seconds in, allowing us a some-
what hard-earned satisfaction, it comes out fully right.7 After the first two
pick-up notes the beats go like this (continually restarting on 1):
1 2
1 2 3
1 2
1 2
1 2 3
1 2 3
1
1 2 3 4 …
There are some great misdirections from late-arriving bass notes too.
Going for suspenseful anticipation more than irritation, the “orchestra
tuning up” hook (used by Pearl Jam in “Last Exit” [1994], for example)
involves you in a group’s impressively complex musical preparations for a
6
The thing could misleadingly be called a D11, as though the notes of an A chord had
been added to a D chord. But it’s an A.
7
Joni Mitchell’s original recording of the song on Ladies of the Canyon (1970) also goes
out of its way to induce uncertainty at the beginning, using pauses in the piano part.
34 S. G. SMITH
song’s main launch. This gives you the realization feeling of things falling
into place, significance emerging when the time is ripe. We seem to hear
the tuning up not only of the band but of the cosmos itself in the wonder-
fully chaotic first 28 seconds of Steppenwolf’s “Magic Carpet Ride”
(1969), setting up a drastic contrast of rough electronic noise with a sleek
pop verse-chorus machine. (Compare the first seven seconds of Jimi
Hendrix’s “Foxey Lady” [1967], a rough prologue whose roughness is
excitingly retained in the song.)
Turning the chaotic preparation hook into an ingratiating joke, we hear
a false start and studio clatter starting the slow version of “Revolution” on
the White Album (The Beatles, 1968).8 We might call this a behavioral
hook behind the music—we’re grabbed by what we know the musicians
are doing.
There’s another engaging joke in what we might call the Piggyback
Opening Hook: “All You Need Is Love” (The Beatles, 1967) takes its
opening fanfare from the start of the “Marseillaise.” (It was George
Martin’s idea.) Why not present yourself to your millions of fans as the
new revolutionary vanguard of the human race?
The Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship9

The opening hook might effectively bring you into one song but then, in
later realization, bind you to your whole experience of an artist, a sensibil-
ity, a worldview.
You may have a lifelong attachment to someone whose music you’ve loved
from the very first moment you started listening. I’m attached like that to
Chris Whitley. What did he do, right there at the start, to get me on his side?
I see it clearly now in the first eight measures of the first song on his first
album, “Living with the Law” (1991), before he sings.
What gets me is not so much a sound (though sound is important) as a
composing, the implications of a song structure. First we hear unusual
8
Another notable chaos hook: even if it won’t spontaneously replay in your imagination
like my other examples will, the groaning guitars and thumping drums prologue of
“Misunderstood” by Wilco (1996) turns out to be thematically tremendous because similar
unsonglike material erupts again at key points in the song—a hint at 1:40, a big dose at 3:00,
and then a complete takeover from 4:50 on, like the graded series of shark appearances in
Jaws. “Misunderstood” is about finding holes in your life, your connections to home and
friends having become disconnections. Cosmos fought chaos and chaos won.
9
Rick’s last words (to Louis) in Casablanca (1942).
percussion, brushes dropping in from somewhere to whack the snare, oblique,

disguising beat 1 of measure 1—propulsive enough, as it turns out, but mak-
ing me wonder what it might ripen into later on. And there’s a droney guitar
playing a pentatonic melody, like a hillbilly dulcimer part but electric, hint-
ing it could become heavy, similarly intriguing. But then—here is the Hook—
there are two chord changes, D up to A and A down to G, that tell us something
great about how the song is being composed.
The three lines below are
Melody
Chord
Beat (4 per measure)
First Four Measures
Chart 1
This is an elegant demonstration of certain basic principles of listener

conquest.
1. Make ‘em wait a beat before you start your main gesture (here, in the
melody).
2. Make the time-scheme of the main gesture a markedly distinct yet com-
patible companion with the time-scheme of the groove. Give ‘em a feeling of
layers, of movable tectonic plates.
3. Make ‘em wait (but not too long) for an expected chord change. Here,
the melody goes up to A right on beat 1 of the fourth measure, when it’s time
for a chord change to something like A—but we must wait two more beats of
sweet tension before the A chord arrives, now either chiming in with our
anticipation of it or—your choice!—unsettling our acceptance of the extended
D chord.
Next Four Measures
Chart 2
36 S. G. SMITH
4. Tweak ‘em again with the sweet tension, that is, make ‘em wait past
where the next chord change would have come, in measure 5, until measure 6.
And then—
5. Go to the G chord on beat 1. Because of that one delay of the A chord, the
return to more normal timing is now a pleasant surprise.
This song is a law to itself, yet a law we can follow. (Funny that it’s
about crime.)
Inauguration Hooks in Other Art Forms

It seems reasonable to suppose that every major art form has powers com-
parable to the others. Despite the obvious distinguishing features of each
art domain it would be rash to assert that any important move or effect in
one form has no counterpart in another; on the contrary, we should be
ready to appreciate parallels and analogies and cross-form mixtures, and
we should be looking for them on the plane of hooks. If Beethoven really
did make a “statement” at the beginning of his Fifth Symphony (“Fate is
knocking at the door”) and I’m enlivened by the quasi-propositionality of
his musical opening, that’s a palpable hook in that way, a sort-of-literary-
yet-instrumental musical hook.
In general, we know that experience is always temporally extended and
always has to start, so we know that every art form will share with music the
issue of starting and the opportunity of a great start along with the advan-
tages of gripping sensuous dynamics to play with, possible references to sig-
nificant aspects of real life, and powerful personalities forming the expressions.
Pictures
Pictorial art might seem to have no place for inaugural hooks, given that
pictures (once they are made) exist without starting. But every picture
strikes you first with something about it. In nonaesthetic picture experi-
ence, the first thing will probably be recognizing the subject matter, which
is a hook if one is already interested in the thing, or the sort of thing, that
is pictured. Building on that hook, there might be a higher-powered hook
in the revelation of something significant about the thing you recognize,
perhaps something that still deserves study—like how Bierstadt’s fantasti-
cal Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains (1868) compares with real places
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PLATE CCCX.
S TA C H Y S C O C C I N E A .
Scarlet Clownheal.
CLASS XIV. ORDER I.
DIDYNAMIA GYMNOSPERMIA. Two Chives longer. Seed naked.
GENERIC CHARACTER.
Calyx. Perianthium monophyllum, tubulatum, angulatum,
semiquinquefidum, acuminatum, persistens; dentriculis acuminatis,
subulatis, subinæquale.
Corolla monopetala, ringens; tubus brevissimus; faux oblonga, ad basin
deorsum gibba; labium superius erectum, subovatum, fornicatum, sæpe
emarginatum; labium inferius majus, trifidum lateribus reflexum; lacinula
intermedia maxima, emarginata, replicata.
Stamina. Filamenta quatuor, quorum duo breviora, subulata, ad latera
faucis recurvata. Antheræ simplices.
Pistillum. Germen quadripartitum. Stylus filiformis, situ et longitudine
staminum. Stigma bifidum, acutum.
Pericarpium nullum. Calyx vix mutatus.
Semina quatuor, ovata, angulata.
Empalement. Cup one-leaf, tubular, angular, five shallow clefts, taper,
permanent; toothless taper, awl-shaped, nearly equal.
Blossom one petal, gaping; tube very short; mouth oblong, hunched
downwards towards the base; upper lip upright, rather egg-shaped, arched,
often notched at the end; lower lip large, three-cleft, side ones reflexed; the
middle segment, which is the largest, notched at the end, and folded back.
Chives. Four threads, of which two are shorter, awl-shaped, bent to the
sides of the mouth. Tips simple.
Pointal. Seed-bud with four divisions. Shaft thread-shaped, of the length
and situation of the chives. Summit cloven, sharp-pointed.
Seed-vessel none. The cup scarce changed.
Seeds four, egg-shaped, angular.
SPECIFIC CHARACTER.
Stachys verticillis sexfloris; foliis ovato-oblongis, basi cordatis, crenatis;
floribus coccineis.
Clownheal with six flowered whorls; leaves oblong-egg-shaped, heart-
shaped at the base, scolloped; flowers scarlet.
REFERENCE TO THE PLATE.
1. The Cup, natural size.
2. The Blossom cut open, with the chives in their place.
3. The Seed-buds and Pointal, the summit detached, magnified.
4. The Seed-buds, magnified.
Although this species of Stachys must be considered as an herbaceous plant,
yet the stem, if kept in the green-house, may be preserved; and therefore, as
it is too tender to bear our winters, in the open ground, we must consign it to
that station. It is a native of South America; is easily propagated by cuttings;
flowers in the month of July, or August, and thrives in rich mould. The
figure was taken from a plant in the collection of J. Vere, Esq. Kensington
Gore, where, we believe, it flowered for the first time in Britain.
PLATE CCCXI.
G E R A N I U M P I N N AT U M .
Winged-leaved Geranium.
CLASS XVI. ORDER IV.
MONADELPHIA DECANDRIA. Threads united. Ten Chives.
ESSENTIAL GENERIC CHARACTER.
Monogyna. Stigmata quinque. Fructus rostratus, penta-coccus.
One Pointal. Five Summits. Fruit furnished with long awns, five dry
berries.
SPECIFIC CHARACTER.
Geranium foliis pinnatis; foliolis subrotundo-ovatis, hirsutis; floribus
flavis, staminibus quinque fertilibus; scapo polystachio; radice tuberosa.
Geranium with winged leaves; leaflets rather round-egg-shaped, and
hairy; flowers yellow; five fertile chives; flower-stem branched; root
tuberous.
1. A Flower-cup, natural size, cut open.
2. The Chives and Pointal, natural size.
3. The Chives cut and spread open, magnified.
4. The Pointal and Seed-bud, magnified.
The specific title of this plant, originally, belonged to a species which is,
now, confounded amongst the numerous variety of Geranium lacerum. And,
indeed, the present plant is taken as a synonim, by Willdenow, with G.
astragalifolium, of which we have given a figure in a preceding number. This
was among the first of the tuberous kind of Geraniums known to our
gardens. Mr. F. Masson, according to the Kew Catalogue, first introduced it
to the Kew Gardens in 1788. It has nothing particular in its character to
require a different treatment from the rest of the tuberous species. Our
drawing was made from a plant in the Hammersmith Collection, in March
1801.
PLATE CCCXII.
STYPHELIA VIRIDIS.
Green-flowered Styphelia.
CLASS V. ORDER I.
PENTANDRIA MONOGYNIA. Five Chives. One Pointal.
Calyx imbricatus. Corolla tubulosa. Stamina fauci inserta. Drupa
quinque-locularis. Semina bina.
Cup tiled. Blossom tubular. Chives inserted into the mouth of the
blossom. A pulpy berry with five cells. Seeds by twos.
See Styphelia triflora. Pl. LXXII. Vol. I.
SPECIFIC CHARACTER.
Styphelia foliis utrinque acuminatis, obliquis, acutis, glaberrimis; floribus
axillaribus, solitariis, viridibus.
Styphelia with leaves tapered to both ends, oblique, pointed, very smooth;
flowers grow from the insertion of the leaves, solitary and green.
1. The Cup of a flower, natural size.
2. A Blossom, with the Chives in their place, cut open.
3. The Seed-bud, Shaft, and Summit, the Summit magnified.
Few of the plants from New Holland have excited more admiration than the
Styphelias; the S. tubiflora figured in the New Holland botany of Dr. Smith,
the S. triflora given in the first Vol. of this work, our present plant, together
with the numerous other species already known from dried specimens, lead
us to conjecture that the genus is as copious as any, Banksia not excepted,
from that country. This plant grows to the height of two feet, or more; the
flowers nearly covering the branches. It is rather delicate, requiring but little
water, in the winter months; as it is certain to perish, if kept wet any
considerable time. Is propagated by cuttings, and must be kept in a small pot,
proportional to the size of the plant, in very sandy peat earth. Our figure was
taken from a plant in the Hibbertian collection, in the month of April, 1803.
All the plants, at present in Britain, of this species of Styphelia, are the
offspring of one solitary seed, received by Messrs. Lee and Kennedy from
New Holland, in the year 1791.
PLATE CCCXIII.
JUSTICIA LUCIDA.
Shining-leaved Justicia.
CLASS II. ORDER I.
DIANDRIA MONOGYNIA. Two Chives. One Pointal.
GENERIC CHARACTER.
Calyx. Perianthium monophyllum, minimum, quinquepartitum, acutum,
erectum, angustum.
Corolla monopetala, ringens; tubus gibbus; limbus bilabiatus, labium
superius oblongum, emarginatum, labium inferius ejusdem longitudinis,
reflexum, trifidum.
Stamina. Filamenta duo, subulata, sub labio superiore recondita. Antheræ
erectæ, ad basin bifidæ.
Pistillum. Germen turbinatum. Stylus filiformis, longitudine et situ
staminum. Stigma simplex.
Pericarpium. Capsula oblonga, obtusa, basi angustata, bilocularis,
bivalvis; dissepimento valvulis contrario, ungue elastico dehiscens.
Semina subrotunda.
Empalement. Cup one-leaf, very small, five-divided, pointed, erect,
narrow.
Blossom one petal, gaping; tube hunched; border two-lipped; the upper
lip oblong, notched at the end; the under lip of the same length, reflexed, and
three-cleft.
Chives. Two threads, awl-shaped, hid under the upper lip. Tips upright,
two-cleft at the base.
Pointal. Seed-bud top-shaped. Shaft thread-shaped, the length and
situation of the chives. Summit simple.
Seed-vessel. Capsule oblong, obtuse, narrowed at the base, two-celled,
two valved; the partition opposite to the valves splitting from an elastic claw.
Seeds roundish.
SPECIFIC CHARACTER.
Justicia spicis terminalibus; floribus subcapitatis; foliis elipticis, nervosis,
bullatis, lucidis; corollis bilabiatis, labio superiore lanceolato; caule
fruticoso, glabro.
Justicia with terminal spikes; flowers grow nearly in heads; leaves
elliptic, nerved, blistered, and shining; blossoms two-lipped, the upper lip
lance-shaped; stem shrubby, smooth.
1. A Blossom cut open, with the Chives in their place.
2. The Cup and Pointal.
3. An unripe Seed.
Most of the species of this genus of plants have hitherto been considered of
little value in our collections, as few of them have woody stems, and from
that character have a weedy appearance. This plant however is an exception,
and is well worthy a place in collections where ornament only, not variety, is
studied. It grows to the height of three feet, flowers in the month of August,
is easily increased from cuttings, and may be kept in the hot-house, out of
the bark-bed. The Justicia coccinea and this plant approach in the appearance
of their flowers and habit; but the leaves differ much as well as many other
minuter parts. It is a native of the East Indies, and was introduced about the
year 1794. Our figure was taken from a plant in the Collection of G. Hibbert,
Esq. Clapham Common.
PLATE CCCXIV.
ITEA SPINOSA.
Thorny Itea.
CLASS V. ORDER I.
PENTANDRIA MONOGYNIA. Five Chives. One Pointal.
GENERIC CHARACTER.
Calyx. Perianthium monophyllum, quinquefidum, erectum, acuminatum,
minimum, persistens, laciniis acutis, coloratis.
Corolla. Petala quinque, lanceolata, longa, calyci inserta.
Stamina. Filamenta quinque, subulata, erecta, longitudine corollæ, calyci
inserta. Antheræ subrotundæ, incumbentes.
Pistillum. Germen ovatum. Stylus cylindraceus, persistens, longitudine
staminum. Stigma obtusum.
Pericarpium. Capsula ovata calyce multoties longior, stylo muconato,
unilocularis, bivalvis ex duabus coalita apice dehiscens.
Semina numerosa, minima, oblonga, nitida.
Empalement. Cup one-leaf, five-cleft, upright, tapered, very small,
remaining, segments pointed, coloured.
Blossom. Petals five, lance-shaped, long, inserted into the cup.
Chives. Five threads, awl-shaped, upright, the length of the blossom,
inserted into the cup. Tips roundish, laying on the threads.
Pointal. Seed-bud egg-shaped. Shaft cylindrical, permanent, the length
of the chives. Summit obtuse.
Seed-vessel. Capsule egg-shaped, much longer than the cup, tapering
into the shaft, one-celled, two-valved of two joined, splitting at top.
Seeds numerous, very small, oblong, shining.
SPECIFIC CHARACTER.
Itea foliis cuneiformibus, emarginatis; spinis axillaribus.
Itea with wedge-shaped leaves, notched at the end; spines grow at the
insertion of the leaves.
1. The Empalement, magnified.
2. A Flower complete, magnified.
3. The Chives and Pointal, magnified; part of the cup and the petals
taken away, to shew the insertion of the Chives into the cup.
4. The Pointal, magnified.
This plant is a native of New Holland, and was introduced from thence by
the Right Honourable the Marchioness of Rockingham, at the same time
with the Bauera rubioides of this work; and from a specimen communicated
by her Ladyship in September, 1801, our drawing was taken. It is a hardy
green-house plant, continuing in flower from August till December; makes a
very bushy handsome shrub, especially when planted in a conservatory. Is
easily propagated by cuttings, made in the month of April, and kept on a
gentle heat until they are rooted. It thrives most in sandy peat, with a small
mixture of sandy loam.
PLATE CCCXV.
ORCHIS BICORNIS.
Two-horned Orchis.
CLASS XX. ORDER I.
GYNANDRIA DIANDRIA. Chives on the Pointal. Two Chives.
Nectarium corniforme pone florem.
Honey-cup like a horn behind the flower.
See Orchis ciliaris, Pl. XLII. Vol. I.
SPECIFIC CHARACTER.
Orchis bulbis indivisis; corollis galea bicalcarata; labio quinque-partito.
Orchis with undivided bulbs; helmet of the blossom two spurred, lip five-
parted.
1. A Flower, natural size.
2. The same, magnified, with the front petals cut away to expose the
parts of fructification, one of the chives being liberated from its
cell.
This singular little Orchis was first introduced to us, from the Cape of
Good Hope, by Mr. F. Masson, in 1787, but has been lost to our gardens
since near that time till last year, when we had the pleasure of seeing it again
in the collection of T. Evans, Esq. Stepney; but we much fear, without a
fresh supply of roots, it will again soon stand but as a name in our
catalogues. It is a very tender and delicate plant; and, like nearly the whole
of this natural order, difficult to propagate or preserve in a cultivated state;
wherefore we cannot pretend to recommend any particular method. The bulb
which flowered at Stepney was planted in sandy peat, and appeared in good
health. It flowers in September, loses its leaves soon after flowering, and is
extremely fragrant.
PLATE CCCXVI.
O L E A A P E TA L A .
Petal-less Olive.
CLASS II. ORDER I.
DIANDRIA MONOGYNIA. Two Chives. One Pointal.
GENERIC CHARACTER.
Calyx. Perianthium monophyllum, tubulatum, parvum; ore
quadridentato, erecto, deciduum.
Corolla monopetala, infundibuliformis; tubus cylindraceus, longitudine
calycis; limbus quadripartitus, planus; laciniis subovatis.
Stamina. Filamenta duo, opposita, subulata, brevia. Antheræ erectæ.
Pistillum. Germen subrotundum. Stylus simplex, brevissimus. Stigma
bifidum, crassiusculum; laciniis emarginatis.
Pericarpium. Drupa subovata, glabra, unilocularis.
Semen. Nux ovato-oblonga, rugosa.
Empalement. Cup one-leafed, tabular, small; mouth four-toothed, erect,
deciduous.
Blossom one petal, funnel-shaped; tube cylindrical, the length of the cup;
border four-divided, flat; segments nearly egg-shaped.
Chives. Two threads, opposite, awl shaped, short. Tips upright.
Pointal. Seed-bud roundish. Shaft simple, very short. Summit two-cleft,
thickish; clefts notched at the ends.
Seed-vessel. A pulpy berry, rather egg-shaped, smooth, one-celled.
Seed. A nut oblong-egg-shaped, rough.
SPECIFIC CHARACTER.
Olea foliis elipticis, floribus racemosis, apetalis.
Olive, with eliptically-shaped leaves, flowers in long bunches without
petals.
1. A. Flower expanded, magnified.
2. The same with the Chives exposed, magnified.
3. The Seed-bud, Shaft, and Summit, magnified.
4. A half ripe Berry.
5. The same cut transversely.
Our present figure represents a plant a native of New Holland and New
Zealand, in the Pacific Ocean; but, we have great reason to think, it has been
referred, rather rashly, to the genus under which it is here named; and that it
possesses a distinctive character sufficient on which to have formed a new
one. We have, nevertheless, as usual, taken it up under the title it is in
general known by, as published by Vahl, in his Symbolæ Botanicæ, Part III.
p. 3, and quoted from him into Willdenow’s Sp. Plant. p. 46, and thence into
Professor Martyn’s ed. of Miller’s Dict. article Olea, 5. Whether the fruit of
this plant will ever turn to account, when cultivated, as an article of food,
time must evince; but, certainly, it bears an appearance of much hope. It is a
strong woody growing shrub, forming itself into a handsome round-headed
plant; and, when in full flower, has a very pretty appearance, having all the
necessary qualities of such plants as are fit for planting out in a conservatory.
It is propagated by cuttings; should be planted in sandy peat earth, mixed
with a small portion of loam; producing its flowers about February or
March. Our drawing was made from a plant in the Hammersmith Collection,
to which it was first added in the year 1791; having been raised from seeds
communicated to Messrs. Lee and Kennedy by Colonel Paterson.
PLATE CCCXVII.
G E R A N I U M U N D U L AT U M . Va r. M i n o r.
Waved-flowered Geranium. Lesser Var.
CLASS XVI. ORDER IV.
MONADELPHIA DECANDRIA. Threads united. Ten Chives.
Monogyna. Stigmata quinque. Fructus rostratus, penta-coccus.
One Pointal. Five Summits. Fruit furnished with long awns, five dry
berries.
See Geranium grandiflorum, Pl. XII. Vol. I.
SPECIFIC CHARACTER.
Geranium foliis radicalibus lanceolatis, integerrimis, petiolis longitudine
foliorum; petalis cuneiformibus, equalibus, undulatis; floribus pentandris;
radice tuberosa.
Geranium with the root leaves lance-shaped, quite entire; foot-stalks the
length of the leaves; petals wedge-shaped, equal, waved; flowers with five
fertile chives; root tuberous.
1. The Empalement cut open, natural size.
2. The Chives cut and spread open, magnified.
3. The Seed-bud, Shaft, and Summits.
This very handsome tuberous Geranium, and which we have rather placed as
a variety than a species, might perhaps by some have been considered as
sufficiently distinct to have formed a species; but, indeed, much difficulty
arises in the determining, amongst this variable tribe, where to fix
determinate specific character. Our present figure was taken from the
Hibbertian Collection, where as yet the plant is only to be seen in Britain. It
flowers in June or July; does not perfect its seeds, nor has the appearance of
easily propagating from the root; the usual method with this link of the
Geranium family. It thrives in sandy peat and leaf mould.

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The Special Liveliness of Hooks in

Popular Music and Beyond Steven G.

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7 Interlude: Are There Bad Hooks? 97

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