Voice Leading and Harmony as Expressive Devices in the Early Music of the Beatles: 'She Loves You' WALTER EVERETI A recent issue of Popular Music contains a review of Tim Riley's armchair listening guide to the Beatles, Tell Me Why, that concludes with the following statement: "No amount of academic analysing could capture the sheer geniality, innocence and barely bottled-up exuberance of ["She Loves You"]: Riley tries it, but you sense that even he feels it is unnecessary." 1 Now, many things in this life are unnecessary. Perhaps it is sufficient to say, as did Duke Ellington, that "if it sounds good, it is good." (For some intuitively-minded conservatory students, it is certainly sufficient.) Ellington's ob- servation is profound, but it is one that begs every musical thinker to attempt to explain why what sounds good is good. Because our reviewer seems to hold the academic and the exuberant to be antithetical, perhaps he should be reminded of Philip Tagg's words of a decade ago: The serious study of popular music . . . is a question of (a) getting together two equally important parts of experience, the intellectual and emotional, inside our own heads, and (b) being able as music teachers to face pupils whose musi- cal outlook has been crippled by those who present 'serious music' as if it could never be 'fun' and 'fun music' as though it could never have any serious impli- cations.2 The aim of this essay is to expose the musical means of expression of geniality and exuberance in the Beatles' simple early song, "She Loves You," using the "serious" tools of academic analysis that pertain to issues of voice leading and harmony. Other Beatles songs, primarily those produced through 1965 (thus representing the earlier half of their recorded catalog, quantified by their output of singles and albums from 1962 through 1970), will be cited in relation to "She Loves You." The Beatles' ardent early works cohere by virtue of a greater degree of structural tension than is heard in most of their later work. Support for this argument can be found in the sparing, calculated use for dramatic effect of registral contrasts and rhythmic emphasis, in the clever announcement of harmonic and voice-leading events from the 1 Stephen Barnard, "Tell Me Why: A Beatles Commentary, by Tim Riley," Popular Music 9, no. 2 (April 1990): 251- 252. 2 Philip Tagg, "Analysing Popular Music Theory, Method and Practice," Popular Music 2 (1982): 39.