"The Place of Popular Music in Contemporary Rhetorical Theory: The Relationship Between Words and Music," presented to the Northwest Communication Association, Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, April 1979.

This paper (1) provided a brief summary of recent efforts by communication sholars to address the rheoric of popular music, (2) discussed the meaning of "popular music," (3) presented a two-dimensional continuum from "music as dominant" to "words as dominant," and (4) discussed (with examples) the nature of meaning derived from the blending of words and music at several points along the continuum. The idea for the spectrum stems from research presented in an interest in "The Film Composer a Rhetor" (1976).

With the populatization of "music videos" and cable channels devoted to playing these videos in the 1980s, cinematic and videographic techniques became part of the mix.