Music Book Reviews

2010-09-07T09:28:00.001-07:00

Musical ImagiNation: U.S.-Colombian Identity and the Latin Music Boom. By María Elena Cepeda.

New York: New York University Press, January 2010. Cloth: ISBN 978-0814716915, $65; paper: ISBN 978-0-8147-1692-2, $22. 272 pages.

Review by Sandra J. Fallon-Ludwig, Brandeis University

Although traditional forms of Latin music, such as salsa and merengue, are the subject of a large portion of musical scholarship, the impact of more commercial Latin music has received little scholarly attention. In Musical ImagiNation, María Elena Cepeda attempts to remedy this neglect in her discussion of contemporary rock en español, the evolution of the vallenato genre and the music of the female popular artist Shakira. Taking a transnational and transcultural approach to this music, Cepeda focuses on gender roles and multi-layered national influences, while also commenting on media perception of Latin artists and their commodification in the U.S. music industry.

Cepeda lays a strong foundation for her study with a chapter dedicated to Colombian history and the violence that led to the Colombian migration to New York and Miami. She also provides a vivid picture of the Miami musical scene, the dominance of the Cuban community, and the Estefans' perceived control of the music industry in Miami. The selective history of Latin music and the commercialization of Latin artists marketed as "newly discovered," despite their often long professional careers in Caribbean, Central or South American countries, are also discussed. In her first two chapters, Cepeda skillfully explores the dismantling and resemantization of popular culture as it relates to Latin and Latin-American music and artists.

After laying this foundation, Cepeda discusses three different artists and genres with a focus on the transnational and transcultural aspects of their music. She begins with Shakira, whose music reveals her Lebanese-Columbian and Caribbean-Columbian roots, and discusses her role not only as a Latina performer, but as a U.S. migrant, a female "cross-over" artist, and a popular music artist. Much of the discussion pertains to gender roles and to the sexual persona constructed by the U.S. music industry and perpetuated in the U.S. media. In her discussion of Andrea Echeverri of the rock group Aterciopelados, Cepeda provides an alternative vision of gender dynamics in the rock genre. Framed as the anti-Shakira, Echeverri was marketed in the second wave of Latin music in the United States – a wave specifically advertised as more “authentic.” Cepeda discusses individual song lyrics, the politics inherent in Echeverri's music, and how the female rocker defies the gendered representation presented to U.S. mainstream audiences. Shakira and Echeverri are presented as polar representations of the female artist, which seems inevitable given their respective genres, audiences, and industry marketing. Cepeda then returns to issues of race and national identity with her discussion of the vallenato genre and its transformation from a "low" music originating in the town of Valledupar on Colombia's Northern Atlantic to a commodified musical genre. Cepeda argues that musicians like Carlos Vives act as a cultural mediator, interpreting this music for elite (read light-skinned, upper-class audiences), and that the modern vallenato nullifies the Afro-Colombian and Afro-Caribbean contributions to the genre and to popular culture.

The weakest section of Musical ImagiNation is chapter 6, in which Cepeda discusses gender dynamics in music videos. Here, she returns to the subject of Shakira and analyzes two music videos: "La Tortura" and "Hips Don't Lie." Cepeda notes elements like belly-dance as evidence of Shakira's female-centered, Pan-Caribbean transnational identity. She then asserts that the visual imagery in each video challenges the traditional modes of gender and sexual representation usually found in the medium. However, this conclusion contradicts her earlier characterization of Shakira as an artist commodified and sexualized by the U.S. music industry and media. In chapter 2, Cepeda illustrated the ways in which Shakira succumbed to the traditional stereotypes of the Latina artist. This confusion may have been avoided if Cepeda had discussed these videos in conjunction with her previous discussion of Shakira, as she did with Andrea Echeverri in chapter 4.

Overall, Cepeda offers a valuable look at the perception of Latin and Latin-American music and the struggle to categorize and discuss this music in the current musicological scholarship. Issues of nationalism, gender, and commodification are at the forefront of her work, in which she attempts to overcome long-standing stereotypes related to Latin music and female performers in particular. Musical ImagiNation is a much-needed foray into commercial Latin music and opens the door for further discourse in this underrepresented area.

2010-09-07T09:22:00.001-07:00

Dreams of Difference, Songs of the Same: The Musical Moment in Film. By Amy Herzog.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, January 2010. Paper: ISBN 978-0-8166-6088-9, $25. 296 pages.

Review by Albin Lohr-Jones, Independent Scholar

Given the growing volume of writings on Gilles Deleuze and film – now ubiquitous at Deleuze studies conferences and in interdisciplinary essay collections dedicated to his work – one might wonder whether or not his role as an innovator of film criticism is beginning to eclipse his legacy as a philosopher. At the heart of this emergent field, however, lies an inescapable contradiction. Reflecting on the impact of his Cinema I: The Movement-Image (1983), Deleuze acknowledged that his turn toward thinking about film was largely accidental, and then only as a means of addressing specific philosophical problems to which examination of linguistic signs prohibited access. In the nearly 27 years since the publication of this book, the distinction between “philosophical concept” – on which Deleuze’s writings constantly ruminate – and critical methodology has become increasing blurred. The philosophical is, in Deleuze’s view, incompatible with the creative (artistic) act. Yet, notwithstanding this purely accidental origin of what has emerged as a Deleuzian mode film analysis, the discipline has and continues to witness a precipitous growth.

Amy Herzog’s Dreams of Difference, Songs of the Same: The Musical Moment in Film may be one of the more daring of the newest additions to this growing literature. Taking as its focus cinematic examples which utilize film-musical devices – a diverse range of “camp” and other genre hybrids deploying what Herzog labels the “musical moment” – her book is markedly ambitious. Rather than restricting the Deleuzian framework from which she examines these films to the Bergsonian/Peircean concept-base outlined in the Cinema books, Herzog adopts a different strategy. Taking as its central concern the varying modalities of repetition which operate coextensively within the “musical moment” (“repetition” here understood in its range of qualifications defined in Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition ), Herzog effectively reorients (and recontextualizes) key concepts from the Cinema books and from Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s collaborative opus A Thousand Plateaus. In itself, synthesizing these texts and attempting to construe consistency between the concepts they invoke can be a problematic undertaking. Yet Herzog’s sound command of Deleuzian thought, coupled with a keen awareness of the difficulties inherent in trying to synthesize (or conflate) Deleuze’s various writings, sets the stage for the clear and well-delimited studies comprising the body of her book.

Herzog is quite accurate in the introduction to her book in advising her readers that this is not a “genre study” in the proper sense. The focus of her investigations, rather, is of a more philosophical nature: to interrogate and explore what she identifies as “a fluid and malleable expressive form” constituting the “musical moment.” Neither purely musical (in the proper sense) nor wholly-integral to the visual narrative of a film, the musical moment names a site of dislocation, of radical disparity between a filmic-work’s temporal flow (linear development) and the disruptive excesses of diegetic musical material. Thus the musical moment embodies an irresolvable tension: one born of complex and often partial negotiations of both conservative and radical ideologies. In her words, these “moments are marked by a tendency to restructure spatiotemporal coordinates, to reconfigure the boundaries and operations of the human body, and to forge new relations between organic and inorganic elements within the frame.” Herzog’s analyses, consequently, seek to elucidate various ways in which these parameters (and the hierarchical thought that informs our normative, “classical” expectations of them) are frustrated in these singular and temporally un-assimilable instances marking the disruption of narrative progress.

At just over 200 pages (plus its introduction and conclusion), perhaps the only ways in which this book’s ambitions are thwarted are in its brevity and in its choice of examples. One gets the sense that her line of development, the trajectory of her argument, is occasionally abbreviated; and that a longer treatment (even if only a few additional pages in each chapter) would afford her the opportunity to elaborate more upon her observations. An ideal reader of this book (someone at least casually familiar with Deleuze’s writings) will no doubt fill in the missing pieces, supplementing Herzog’s observations with knowledge of the conceptual background from which her reasoning emerges. Despite the eloquence of her introductory notes on Deleuze’s philosophy – one of the best that this reviewer has read – the uninitiated reader may be at a slight disadvantage. Her examples are, for the most part, extremely effective in their diversity and their relevance: Godard’s and Preminger’s Carmen films (Chapter 2); Jacques Demy (Chapter 3); and Esther Williams, Busby Berkeley and Tsai Ming-liang (Chapter 4). The first chapter – on the proto-music video formats of the 1940’s “Soundies” and 1960’s “Scopitones”– however, seems slightly out of place. By focusing on the technologies themselves rather than on individual works, Herzog’s objective here suggests a different type of study. And though her application of the Deleuzian notion of “fabulation,” fits nicely with her analysis, and – as is the case throughout the book – her research is first-rate; the musical moments discussed here are less concrete than those in the following chapters.

In summary, Dreams of Difference, Songs of the Same represents advances on two fronts. First (and most immediately), in its simplicity and unadorned style, and through a varied choice of examples, Herzog makes a convincing argument in favor looking anew at how the key mechanisms of the film-musical style operate. But her book makes an important contribution in a more significant and purely theoretical direction. In advancing the notion of the musical moment – as clear and as useful in its conceptual import as the Deleuzian perspectives from which it derives its saliency – Herzog demonstrates the viability of philosophizing about cinematic signs in a way consistent with and complimentary to Deleuze’s philosophical pursuits. And, if one looks closely enough at the musical moment, as Herzog shows, one finds not merely a cinematic device, but rich – if ultimately inchoate – formation whose varying modulations provide a means of scrutinizing the technical, social and ideological resonances which configure them.

2010-09-07T09:15:00.001-07:00

Dangerous Curves: Latina Bodies in the Media. By Isabel Molina-Guzmán.

New York: New York University Press, February 2010. Paper: ISBN 978-0814757369. $22. 256 pages.

Review by Natchee Blu Barnd, California College of the Arts

It seems fitting that I began writing this review on the release date of Jennifer Lopez’s latest and widely berated film The Back-Up Plan. Just as her nickname “J-Lo” suggests a shorthand familiarity, her high-profile celebrity life most readily “embodies” the contradictions of dominant discourses about Latinas in the media. While we have become accustomed to public discussions about Lopez’s career, love life, and body parts, her construction also symbolizes the broader colonized production of Latina subjectivities.

Dangerous Curves balances Molina-Guzmán’s confessed status as a fan and consumer of popular culture (she briefly shares her family’s keen interest in Jennifer Lopez’s appearances) with her critical eye toward the racial, gender, and nation-building projects that shape and limit representational possibilities for Latinas in US media and the larger cultural sphere. She tackles a broad spectrum of the “mediascape,” tracking dominant discourses of Latinas (re)produced through “newspapers, television news broadcasts, ethnic and racial minority newspapers, tabloids, magazines, film, television programs” as well as considering audience reception and disruption of such discourse through “blogs, Web sites, online discussion boards, and letters to editor.” Molina-Guzmán organizes this array of sources around five case studies, each centered on one or more important Latina media figures.

The first chapter revisits the enormous attention given to the repatriation of one-time Cuban refugee Elián González, focusing on the representational transformation of Cuban Americans from privileged “white ethnics” to marginalized “brown immigrants” through the figures of González’s late mother Elisabet Brottons and his media darling-turned-target cousin, Marisleysis. Chapter two examines Jennifer Lopez’s widely-observed maneuver from dangerous urban blackness toward safe middle-class whiteness most noticeably signaled by her successive marriage/love partner choices, and actively shaped by raced and gendered tabloid narratives. Next, Molina-Guzmán reads complex transnational discourses between the US and Mexico around Latinidad and “authenticity” generated by Salma Hayek’s berated/celebrated portrayal of Frida Kahlo. The fourth chapter takes aim at the “sublimation” of ethnoracial identity in ABC’s popular series Ugly Betty, turning critical attention to the construction of its main character, played by America Ferrera. The final study situates two fictional films – Maid in Manhattan (2002) and Spanglish (2004) – that narrate domestic workers as romantic comedy love interests, against the real world context of the gendered and racialized global circulation of immigrant labor.

The strength of Dangerous Curves lies in its attention to multiple forms of media which (re)produce dominant colonizing discourses about Latinas and Latinidad. In addition, Molina-Guzmán provides an excellent reading of popular culture productions such as Ugly Betty and Frida (2002) which can too easily be read as completely progressive and outside the scope of racialized and gendered discourse. These cases studies in particular also attend to heteronormativity through a highly productive queer reading of constructions of Latinidad. The author’s efforts to incorporate audience engagement with these media texts presents an important reminder that viewers do not simply consume media, but maintain complex and contradictory relationships that both reinforce hegemonic projects and subvert them, yet always reflect the fluidity and instability of meaning-making practices.

For teachers, Dangerous Curves provides a solid discursive analysis that can be immediately put to use for course lectures and class discussions on popular culture and the politics of representation. More advanced undergraduate students and those interested in Latina representation will be excited to have a resource that treats recent media productions and still-popular media figures, especially compared to the now “distant” media and figures featured in Rosa Linda Fregoso’s Bronze Screen (1993) or Clara Rodriguez’s Heroes, Lovers, and Others (2008). Within the larger scholarship of media and Latina/os, Dangerous Curves will effectively supplement works like Arlene Davila’s Latino Spin (2008) and Latinos, Inc. (2001), Leo Chavez’s The Latino Threat (2008), and Otto Santa Ana’s Brown Tide Rising (2002).

There were a couple points of limitation that should be noted. For me, the first chapter feels somewhat out of place in relation to the other four case studies examined, all of which focus on Latina superstars in popular media. Although the Elián González story occurred within reasonable temporal proximity to the popular media case studies, its “pure” news media standing makes it less recycled and therefore seem more distant and isolated. There are numerous moments in this chapter, and others, where news media representations are too quickly passed over without providing the reader a thorough look at the actual discourse being deployed in the articles and television news coverage. In the rush to structure her critiques/examination, Molina-Guzmán tends to quickly paraphrase what ought to be thoroughly demonstrated. Too often, I found myself wanting for a more sustained examination of the concrete examples in the production of these discursive regimes, something slightly more akin to Santa Ana’s analysis of the Los Angeles Times. To be fair, the treatment fared better in chapters 3-5, where the focus remained on single popular culture “sites.” To this point, I found the final two chapters to be the strongest and the most engaging.

I also found the audience reception angle somewhat overemphasized as a methodology, or else underutilized in practice. The biggest concern here is that Molina-Guzmán’s excellent analysis is too open to criticism by those not easily convinced of the validity of her arguments. While I fully support the work and trust her findings, the data for audience reception seemed sparse, sometimes incorporating only a handful of statements from blog or discussion-board writers. While the small number of writers does not and cannot dismiss their agency in generating “symbolic ruptures” in the dominant discourse, it does leave the force of their often powerful critiques feeling less substantial.

2010-07-29T12:38:00.001-07:00

Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture. By Alice Echols.

New York: W. W. Norton & Company, March 2010. Cloth: ISBN 978-0-393-06675-3, $26.95; paper: ISBN 978-0393338911, $16.95. 368 pages.

Review by Joseph E. Morgan, Brandeis University

After dominating American popular culture for the lion’s share of the 1970s, Disco suddenly lost its chic. This once liberating music and culture was abruptly derided in the American mainstream for its shallow consumption and crass embrace of lavish glitz. More recently, the pendulum has swung back as scholars of popular culture have erected a romanticized view of the glitterball culture. In her new book, Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture, Alice Echols stops the pendulum. With a nuanced interpretation of disco that recognizes the movement’s ability to accommodate the diversity of the American experience, gay, straight, black, or female, Echols has written a sophisticated and thrilling investigation of this oft-simplified music and culture.

One of the best aspects of Echols’s approach is the way she integrates the musical and social aspects of disco culture. In her first chapter “I Hear a Symphony: Black Masculinity and the Disco Turn” which takes us from James Brown to Barry White, and tracks the emergence of Disco from the insistent and whomping beat of Detroit’s Motown through the sumptuous Philadelphia sound, Echols locates a new form of Black masculinity as well as the prototype for disco’s 4/4 thump in a single track—Isaac Hayes’s “Theme from Shaft.” This example is telling of Echols’s style; the strength of this text is not its comprehensive coverage of everything disco, but instead its interpretive focus and ability to unpack the multiple meanings built within individual cultural moments.

Chapters Two, “More, More, More: One and Oneness in Gay Disco” and Four “The Homo Superiors: Disco and the Rise of Gay Macho” focus on the role that the music, clubs, dance floors, and culture played in the outing and evolution of gay culture. From the club managers who left the air conditioning off to encourage men to remove their shirts on the dance floor, to the D.J.s who accommodated their playlists to the “week’s drug of choice,” Echols identifies the interactions that facilitated the liberation of the movement. Particularly interesting is Echols’s description of the fashion that characterized the new gay macho. A coded “uniform of the plaid shirt and bomber jacket,” the look emerged both as a pragmatic necessity, “to identify ourselves to other gay people in a populace that wasn’t gay” and in reaction to the traditional image of the homosexual (126).

However, her view of gay disco is neither simple nor uncritical. For example, unlike most modern writers that emphasize the inclusive aspects of Disco culture, Echols also points to the racial segregation in New York’s fashionable Tenth Floor club where “the vibe was if you’re white you’re right, if you’re black stay back.” Her nuanced approach to the culture is refreshing, neither romanticizing nor vilifying. She closes her discussion with an all-too brief account of the arrival of “Saint’s Disease” (later known as AIDS) in the popular Saint’s nightclub in New York City, ending with a strong introduction to the effects of the epidemic, and the common interpretation of the disease as (at least) a moral imperative against gay culture.

Echols’s chapter on women in disco “Ladies’ Night: Women and Disco,” sandwiched between her chapters on homosexuality in disco, argues that by foregrounding female desire, disco was essentially progressive for the women’s movement, this despite the irony that “for many women the biggest problem with discos was not sexual harassment but gay men’s sexual indifference” (78). For example, she points to at least two critics who describe the typical form of a disco song’s instrumental break as a musical imitation of the female orgasm. She locates this characteristic in the instrumental break from what is perhaps the first disco track, Eddie Kendricks’s “Girl You Need a Change of Mind.” Echols’s narrative then shifts to the emergence of the black diva in disco, and traces the roots of disco’s black feminism (as she had with disco’s black masculinity) from the R&B artists from the early seventies. Thus the public personalities and musical identities of artists like Donna Summer and Labelle are shown to be influenced by the work of Sylvia Robinson and Jean Knight.

The sixth chapter, “One Nation under a Thump?: Disco and its Discontents” describes the fall of disco. The blanching and suburban commodification are cited as the primary death blows, but the contribution of reactionary “discophobes” and the broader conservative movement are also given their due responsibility. However, her coverage of the “Disco Sucks” movement and its orchestration by rock d.j.s is also given nuance. Indeed, Echols breaks new ground in disco literature when she acknowledges that “the rhetoric of discophobia suggests that anti-disco rockers were also critical of what they saw as disco’s perceived innocuousness and conventionality” (213). This viewpoint resists the common trope in modern scholarship that writes off the entire anti-disco movement as stereotypically based on homophobia and racism. The chapter ends as Echols attempts to come to terms with the influence of disco, citing the disco-rock hybrid that comprised so much eighties dance music. One example of this influence is found in the androgyny of Madonna, Prince, Grace Jones, and Annie Lennox, who built upon the “implicit queerness of seventies’ disco” for their looks (229).

In all, the book is a wonderful read. Echols’s account is that of an informant, and although she is quite aware of her own bias, it is when she is describing the progressivism of the Disco movement that her narrative sparkles. The perfect combination of fan and scholar, Echols’s account of the era and the book is very well researched (with over 50 pages of notes) and will go a long way towards fairly documenting the history and impact of Disco on American popular culture.

SW/TX PCA/ACA Conference Paper by Samira Nadkarni, University of Aberdeen, Scotland

2010-07-29T12:03:00.001-07:00

“Is that a footnote, or are you just happy to see me?”: Examining Meta-narrative in Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog

“All that matters: taking matters into your own hands,” sings Dr. Horrible in the 2008 web series Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. The show, a social satire in three acts, seems to rely on certain established narratives to constitute itself, working through the audience's participation within an established framework, a media-savvy community that is able to understand throwaway comments and asides and the layering they are intended to provide. Yet the series and its associated musical commentary subverts and destabilizes these dominant ideologies, re-appropriating them to a new purpose, and thus this paper aims to discuss the presence and subversion of these meta-narratives. However the events of the actual “making-of” commentary itself, included only in the DVD edition, will be ignored in favour of focusing on the framework established by the scripted performance and its potential effects upon a media-fandom community.

The social satire contained within the series is simultaneously both, remarkably multi-faceted and yet almost simplistic in its depiction. Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog is based upon the premise of a world filled with heroes and villains, focusing on Dr. Horrible and his nemesis Captain Hammer and their mutual love interest, Penny. In doing so, the show borrows from a number of stereotypes within the established universe of superhero comics; for example Dr. Horrible comments at the start of the series that he has hired a vocal coach because:

Dr. Horrible: A lot of guys ignore the laugh, and that's about standards. I mean, if you're going to get into the Evil League of Evil you have to have a memorable laugh. What, do you think Bad Horse didn't work on his whinny? His terrible death whinny.

Further examples include the self-proclaimed hero, Captain Hammer's invulnerability, his ability to continually best his nemesis, Dr. Horrible in battle, and as per established guidelines, that the hero ends up with the girl - in this case, do-gooder Penny. The audience's understanding of the series's underlying satire is predicated upon their knowledge of these stereotypes and the manipulation they undergo within the confines of the series. The viewer is compelled to place the events within a narrative that presumes the triumph of good over evil, i.e. within a dominant meta-narrative that is informed not only by the genre of the superhero universe, but also by a moral narrative propounded within society. Arguably, the series destabilizes these by revealing Captain Hammer to be the “corporate tool” of Dr. Horrible's early claims, whereas Dr. Horrible himself, while claiming to have “a PhD in horribleness,” is shown far more sympathetically. The audience realizes, as we are meant to, that Dr. Horrible (or Billy, his alter-ego) is in fact the (anti)hero of the piece. As in previous works such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, Serenity and Dollhouse, co-writer and director Joss Whedon challenges these tropes and demonstrates that they are not as rigid as one might think; good and evil are simply matters of interpretation.

The term “meta-narrative” is used here with specific reference to Jean-Francois Lyotard’s assumption that there is in fact a representation of universal truth, one commonly but not exclusively associated with a positive ethico-political end, which, once communicated between a sender and an addressee would then be intellectually binding for all rational minds. This notion of meta-narratives was commonly associated with modernism, and it is possible to argue that in part by adopting the superhero genre, the golden age of which was considered to be in the 1930s and 40s, and placing it within a field that is almost aggressively post-modern, the show implies a continuing presence of meta-narratives, the old order challenged by Dr. Horrible. As he states, he is “destroying the status quo, because the status is not quo. The world is a mess and I just need to rule it.”

It is interesting to note that Lyotard believed that meta-narratives no longer had a legitimate place in the post-modern world, laying credence instead with micro-narratives, an argument he formulated based on Wittgenstein's theory of “language games.” This theory then argues that while there are no broad over-arching narratives, there are a number of smaller narratives or micro-narratives that society uses to regulate itself through linguistic conduct. Thus, in order to establish what one might term a certain ruling system, a unified narrative which consolidates people into a community, there is the requirement that there be a sense of shared understanding, that certain words be taken for certain things. Identity in this community is grounded around the “throwaways” in language, the agreed-upon clichés and commonplaces that are taken for granted. And it is that which is taken for commonplace, for unsaid, that allows for the formation of links between individuals and the formation of a community. What one encounters in this manner is the unsaid, a truth represented in pure form that will inevitably provoke a response. There remains no doubt about them; rationality and a shared sense of understanding ensure a reaction.[1]

However, it seems possible to argue that with the onset of a global culture and the amalgamation of a global community, there is once more the possibility of narratives that can no longer fall merely within the space of a micro-narrative. Rather, these narratives are assumed to be fact, enforced by a shared knowledge or shared history; a fact that when coupled with the globalizing influence of the media allows for the possibility of unified narratives or meta-narratives. Thus, within the global phenomenon that is television and the internet there is the propagation of an over-arching set of narratives, what one might term a media culture that compels certain common narratives among its viewers who use the same to validate themselves as part of an ongoing society, a community alive and responsive to these selves.

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog then functions not merely within the space of a well-established narrative - the superhero genre - but also within a space where the viewer's own global culture is incorporated. The series is framed such that the audience is provided a certain amount of information through the recordings Dr. Horrible creates for his video blog, drawing the viewer into the events occurring and placing him or her among Dr. Horrible’s online followers, a list that includes not only other viewers within the audience of this film, but also fictional members such as Captain Hammer and the story-bound LAPD. In this manner, the lines between reality and fiction appear to blur. Moreover, this effect is propounded by the associated musical commentary which, while meant to provide what one might term “real” information such as the history of the show, the artistic process involved, anecdotes involving the cast and crew, or a deeper insight into the characters portrayed, instead displays a continued fictional confine, a scripted performance. This applies largely to the characterization of the actors involved, with this performance often blurring the lines between their character in the series and the supposed reality of themselves that they perform:

Nathan Fillion: Look there Felicia goes/ Another deal you couldn't close, yeah. ... I'm better/ Better than Neil/ At - where do I start?/ Romantic appeal./ We both went for Penny/ And who copped a feel?/ The true man of steel./ I'm better than Neil.[2]

It could be argued that the viewer is not only drawn into the patently fictional confine of the show, but that the commentary – elucidating real-time events such as the strike held by the Writer’s Guild of America (2007-08), Maurissa Tancharoen’s writing of Penny’s lines, and the cast and crews’ supposed fascination with the game of Ninja Ropes – also places the film within a reality external to itself. The viewer is led into a space within which the ideological discourse by which they navigate cannot be said to be informed merely by the narrative presented to them; the cultural discourse and basic social patterns that surround them will also play a role in the means of interpretation.

The show's attempts to establish itself within certain fields of narrative then seems to prioritize an analysis of the various communities depicted within its frame, as well as the series's own effects upon a media-fandom community both within and outside of this narrative. Arguably, by placing the series within the confines of the superhero genre, the viewer's attention is drawn not merely to the established social mores and the conventions of law and order, but also to the transgressions of, and ambivalence towards, these mores and conventions, the latter usually depicted by the villain in question. However, the show raises certain pivotal questions with regard to these transgressions, inquiring into the communities depicted and the transgressed social norms in question. It seems clear that both heroes and villains (represented by Captain Hammer and Dr. Horrible respectively) can be seen to be members of differing communities, each with its own social norms, hierarchy, and strictures. And while Captain Hammer adheres to the basic social patterns applied by “normal people” or society at large, Dr. Horrible in turn is merely adhering to the behavioral blueprint for his own community of evil-doers. This theory seems borne out by Dr. Horrible's attempts to advance to a higher status of villainy by entering the Evil League of Evil, and being unable to do so until passing an evaluation by Bad Horse, “the thoroughbred of sin,” in which he is ordered to perform “A heinous crime, a show of force/ (A murder would be nice, of course.)” Thus, while convention within this genre would dictate that the villain in question represent a force of anarchy, Dr. Horrible's efforts are still merely an attempt to conform.

Notably, unlike traditional formulations within the superhero comic genre, the villain in this case is not constituted within a Freudian parable as the id, nor is the hero representative of either the ego [as per the character of Batman] or the superego [as per the portrayal of Superman]. Rather, if one attempts to place the main characters within this formulation, it would appear that Captain Hammer, the supposed hero of the piece would represent the id, Dr. Horrible, the self-proclaimed villain would depict the ego, and finally, Penny, the moralistic do-gooder would take the place of the superego. Thus, we see Dr. Horrible agonize over his entry into the Evil League of Evil, an entry predicated upon the immoral act of murder:

Moist: Kill someone?

Dr. Horrible: Would you do it? To get into the Evil League of Evil?

Moist: Look at me, man. I’m Moist. At my most bad-ass I make people feel like they want to take a shower. I’m not E.L.E material.

Dr. Horrible: Killing’s not elegant or creative. It’s not my style.

Moist: You’ve got more than enough evil hours to get into the Henchman’s Union.

Dr. Horrible: Pshaw. I’m not a henchman. I’m Dr. Horrible. I have a P.H.D. in horribleness.

Moist: Is that the new catch phrase?

Dr. Horrible: I deserve to get in. You know I do. But killing? Really?

Moist: Hourglass says she knows a kid in Iowa that grows up to become president. That’d be big.

Dr. Horrible: I’m not gonna kill a little kid.

Moist: Smother an old lady.

Dr. Horrible: Do I even know you?

Meanwhile, Captain Hammer baits Dr. Horrible at the laundromat, informing him of his intent to sleep with the woman of his dreams purely because Dr. Horrible cares for her:

Captain Hammer: You got a little crush, don’t you Doc? Well that’s gonna make this hard to hear. See, later I’m gonna take little Penny back to my place, show her the Command Center, Hammer Cycle, maybe even the Ham-Jet. You think she likes me now? I’m gonna give Penny the night of her life. Just because you want her, and I get what you want. See, Penny’s giving it up. She’s givin’ it up hard, ‘cause she’s with Captain Hammer. And these (indicating his fists) are not the hammer. [Pause] The hammer is my penis.

Moreover, the characters of Dr. Horrible, a.k.a. Billy and Captain Hammer, seem to be closely associated with each other, so much so that the characterization of each appears curiously dependent upon the other. The viewer is first presented with this connection in the first act during “A Man's Gotta Do,” a song begun by Billy and yet, immediately after the first verse appropriated by Captain Hammer with the same refrain. This original co-dependency is then underlined by the fact that Captain Hammer decides to woo Penny beyond his usual seduction routines due to Dr. Horrible's crush on her, keeping her far longer than his other conquests simply because, as he says, he gets what Dr. Horrible wants. And most notably, at the climax of the series, at the very moment that Captain Hammer cannot help but feel, cannot help but be placed in a situation where he experiences real feeling for the first time, Billy claims that he no longer can.

It seems clear that the terms “hero” and “villain” within the series are not without a certain irony, and that in this particular case, the terms have then ceased their association with the traditional meanings. Rather, the destabilization of these signifiers within the field of the show appears to create what one might term a “pure signifier,” one that is freed from its previous associations at this point to be bound through the field of shared understanding to a new meaning within the media-fandom community that observes these fictional events. Thus, within this community of viewers, these terms and associations have taken on new meanings in the context of the series, i.e. a micro-narrative that is applicable within the context of a shared understanding.

Whedon's use of the superhero genre employs a further irony. Traditionally, superhero comics, especially those in the 1930s and 40s, were largely associated with the propaganda inherent in a war-torn and immediately post-war world. To accommodate their propagandistic function, communication was made as simple as possible with comics relying on rudimentary phrasing and formulaic plots. Whedon's representation of this genre, however, lacks this simplicity, with communication within and between various communities in the show being problematized, albeit for satiric or comic effect. For example in the case of Dr. Horrible (a.k.a. Billy) and Penny, the problem seems to arise either from his romantic interest in her:

Dr. Horrible: Love your hair.

Penny: What?

Dr. Horrible: No – I... love the... air.

or from his need to protect his identity as an evil villain; the need for subterfuge arising from his need to keep this side of himself hidden away from the moralistic do-gooder of his dreams:

Dr. Horrible: I wanna do great things, you know? I wanna be an achiever. Like Bad Horse…

Penny: The thoroughbred of sin?

Dr. Horrible: I meant Gandhi.

Subsequently, the viewer is given to note that this lack of communication is not restricted purely to the disparate communities of supposed good (or “normal”) and evil, as Captain Hammer also finds himself unable to effectively communicate with Penny due to excessive use of his signature metaphor:

Captain Hammer: Who wants to know what the Mayor is doing behind closed doors? He's signing over a certain building to a Caring Hands Group as a new homeless shelter.

Penny: Oh my God!

Captain Hammer: Yep. Apparently the only signature he needed was my fist. But with a pen in it. That I was signing with.

He also appears to fumble during his speech to the assembled crowd gathered to witness the opening of the shelter, pausing inappropriately during the opening to his speech:

Captain Hammer: I hate the homeless... ness problem that plagues our city.

The viewer is not exempt from this attempt at failed communication either. As previously stated, the viewer is drawn into the confines of the fictional space itself, made to assume the place of the audience. Thus, the viewer is included in the failure to communicate demonstrated both, by Dr. Horrible in his stuttering video blog entries, as well as the newscasters who announce:

Newscaster (female): It's a good day to be homeless.

Newscaster (male): [laughs] That it is.

This problematization of communication, while intended for satiric effect, then also simultaneously performs the function of interrupting any attempts to posit the series and its associations with the superhero genre as mere propaganda. The narrative undermines itself, its interruptions or effects revealing the ludicrous nature of modern communication, both within the series and in the viewer's own reality that relies so heavily on standardized phrasing and pithy metaphors.

Furthermore, it is possible to view Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog itself, along with Commentary! The Musical, as informing a meta-narrative of media by contrasting the relatively controlled media environment of television with the readily accessible broadcast media of the internet and its potential as a site for independent cinema.[3] The viewer's own knowledge of Joss Whedon's work with television, and his well-documented concerns regarding the creative constraints and lack of artistic control afforded to him lend credence to this theory.[4] There can be no doubt that the internet is currently one of the largest up and coming arenas for media with various web-series gaining rapid popularity such as The Guild (2007), We Need Girlfriends (2006), The Legend of Neil (2008), Dorm Life (2008) and many more. And as Carolyn Marvin presciently notes in her book When Old Technologies were New (1988):

For if it is the case, as it is fashionable to assert, that media give shape to the imaginative boundaries of modern communities, then the introduction of new media is a special historical occasion when patterns anchored in older media that have provided stable currency of social exchange are re-examined, challenged and defended.[5]

Thus, while television’s current meta-discourse is specific to modes of production, associated commercialism and viewership, it is possible that the growing popularity of the internet as a viable site for independent cinema would then place it in a position to challenge some of these discourses. For example, Dr. Horrible’s video blog can be seen to depict not only a means by which to propound individual cinema at costs far below those conventionally associated with works for television, but also a production that is free to view and available to a global audience. This would also mirror the production of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog which was marketed via Hulu.com, and was originally available free to viewers in its online format.[6] In this manner, it seems that while the web-series might have been written and produced in an effort to respond to the issues being raised by the strike held by the Writer’s Guild of America (2007-08), which affected television production, it also worked to disrupt the dominant meta-discourse of television. This entry into web-based production and distribution is an incursion that destabilizes television’s current monopoly.

All: As the fall turns into winter/ There appears a bunch of splinter / Groups who wonder what this inter -/ net is like.

While the tide is turning tepid/ And while the town is feeling trepi -/ datious time for us to step up/ to the mic.

We’ve got all these dynamite plots to use/ It’s time to light the fuse or lose/ The Strike.

Television’s ideological discourse is inextricably interwoven with commercial and promotional rationale, and it is clear that in order to succeed, where success is measured in terms of viewing figures and sales, one is forced to play to particular assumptions. As the chorus so clearly notes in the opening track “Commentary!”:

All: Everyone loves these “making-ofs”/ The story behind the scenes./ The way that we got that one cool shot./ And what it all means.

We’ll talk about the writing./ We’ll probably say “It’s great!”/ And the acting – so exciting./ Except for Nate.

…

Cast: Bring back the cast, we’ll have a blast/ Discussing the days of yore./ Moments like these sell DVDs.

Writers: We need to sell more./ We’ve only sold four.

It seems that the musical commentary’s clear mocking of these assumptions appears to adhere to the promotional logic so associated with current media culture, while simultaneously avoiding placing itself completely within this field. The performance both inhabits this commercial space, its intention clearly to appeal to the audience, while its satiric element seeks to disrupt. It mocks from this privileged yet dissenting position, playing both to and against the dominant meta-narrative of promotional culture so entrenched in film and television, forcing the audience to constantly re-assess.

As a result, the commentary acts as a footnote to the show itself, but not as convention would dictate. Instead, it inhabits the edge, the margins, and speaks with impunity from this position, its mockery all the more powerful for the fact that it speaks in response to an unasked question. The commentary presumes that “everyone loves these ‘making ofs’” and that “moments like these sell DVDs,” but what the audience is in fact confronted with is not the true making of, or even a proper discussion of the writing process. Instead, one encounters what one might almost term “throw away” tracks such as “10 Dollar Solo,” “Zack’s Rap,” “Ninja Ropes,” and “Steve’s Song.” Moreover, songs such as “All About Me,” “Nobody’s Asian in the Movies” and “Heart, Broken” all seem to undermine meta-narratives propounded by or within the media, dealing with issues as diverse as the urge for fame, potential racial discrimination, and the constant need for clarification of the artistic process.

Having discussed the commercial and promotional rationale so entrenched in current media culture, it then seems prudent to call particular attention to “Heart, Broken,” the eleventh track on Commentary! The Musical. Written primarily as a solo for Joss Whedon, it explores his despair at constantly being called upon to explain the narrative in question, the commentary expressing a castigation of the commodification of art and the artistic process. The song is arguably a classic example of a satiric attack on present day meta-narratives of fame and mass-production:

Joss Whedon: …[My heart’s] broken by the endless loads/ Of making-ofs and mobisodes/ The tie-ins, prequels, games and codes/ The audience buys/ The narrative dies/ Stretched and torn./ Hey, spoiler warning:

We’re gonna pick, pick/ Pick, pick, pick it apart./ Open it up to find the/ Tick, tick, tick of a heart./ A heart, broken.

Jed: Joss, why do you rail against the biz?/ You know that’s just the way it is/ You’re making everybody mis-

Zack: These out-of-date philosophies/ are for the dinner table, please./ We have to sell some DVDs.

Jed, Maurissa, Zack: Without these things you spit upon/ You’d find your fame and fanbase gone.

Maurissa: You’d be ignored at Comic-Con.

Joss: I sang some things I didn’t mean./ Okay, let’s talk about this scene./ I think it’s great how Ryan Green – / Oh no, this is no good./ I thought J-Mo would back my play/ Now Zack and they all say –

All: We’re gonna pick, pick/ Pick, pick, pick you apart./ Open you up and stop the/ tick, tick, tick of a heart./ A heart…

It seems that at this point, Whedon is not merely addressing the production houses and television syndicates that would place emphasis on the need for mass production, although these are no doubt represented within the song by the voices of Maurissa Tancharoen, Jed, and Zack Whedon. Potentially, Whedon is addressing the viewer, the audience at large. “Heart, Broken” is all but a call to arms against this commodification, albeit one firmly entrenched in irony.

Finally, the series seems to suggest, the choice lies with the viewer. Whedon’s subversive argument echoes Dr. Horrible’s own words - all that matters is taking matters into your own hands. It is possible to view Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog as Whedon's challenge to the authoritarian narratives that popular culture has set in place, the global phenomenon presenting us not only with the presence of these potential meta-narratives, but also the ability to evaluate and perhaps reject them. As Mila Bongco notes:

The world is very different from that of thirty years ago: the bases of power have shifted, and so have ways of understanding them. Old certainties have gone, though new and perhaps equally repressive authoritarianisms have emerged. These, in their turn, must be challenged.[7]

Notes:

1. All song lyrics referenced from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog (2008) have been obtained from the official website: Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog (Soundtrack from the Motion Picture)http://www.drhorrible.com/linernotes.html [accessed on 28 December, 2009].

2. All song lyrics referenced from Commentary! The Musical, an additional feature of Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog (2008), have been obtained from the official website: Commentary! The Musicalhttp://www.drhorrible.com/commentary.html [accessed on 28 December, 2009].

Bibliography:

Primary Sources:

Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog, Dir. Joss Whedon (Hulu.com, 2008).

Secondary Sources:

Books:

Bongco, Mila, Reading Comics: Language, Culture, and the Concept of the Superhero in Comic Books(New York: Garland Publishing Inc, 2000).

Lyotard, Jean-Francois, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984; reprinted and translated from Les Editions de Minuit, 1979).

Marvin, Carolyn, When Old Technologies Were New (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

Essays:

Anna-Louse Milne, 'The Power of Dissimulation: “When You Are Only Three White Men...”, in Yale French Studies, No 106, The Power of Rhetoric, the Rhetoric of Power: Jean Paulhan's Fiction, Criticism and Editorial Activity (2004), pp. 109 – 124.

Online Content:

Commentary! The Musical http://www.drhorrible.com/commentary.html [accessed on 28 December, 2009].

Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog (Soundtrack from the Motion Picture)http://www.drhorrible.com/linernotes.html [accessed on 28 December, 2009].

Kushner, David, 'Joss Whedon Goes Where No TV Man Has Gone Before', in RollingStone.comhttp://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/25951789/joss_whedon_goes_where_no_tv_man_has_gone_before[accessed on 12 January, 2010].

PEOPLE Magazine, ‘Exclusive: Neil Patrick Harris tells PEOPLE he’s Gay’,http://www.people.com/people/article/0,26334,1554852,00.html [accessed on 30 December, 2009].

Whedon, Joss, in http://www.whedon.info/Joss-Whedon-s-Reaction-About-Angel.html [accessed 12 January, 2010].

[1] Anna-Louse Milne, 'The Power of Dissimulation: “When You Are Only Three White Men...”, in Yale French Studies, No 106, The Power of Rhetoric, the Rhetoric of Power: Jean Paulhan's Fiction, Criticism and Editorial Activity (2004), p. 120. Although Milne's argument is based on Jean Paulhan's fiction and criticism, the context of Milne's theory of the formulation of a community seems more than related to Wittgenstein's theory of “language games.”

[2] 'Better than Neil', Commentary! The Musical, in Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog, Dir. Joss Whedon (Hulu.com, 2008). Nathan Fillion's lyrics here refer in the same manner to both Felicia Day as well as her character Penny, overlapping the two into a single entity. Furthermore, the viewer would also be aware that Neil Patrick Harris, having openly declared his homosexuality in People Magazine (Nov 3, 2006) would be unlikely to be interested in any pursuit of Felicia Day, unlike his fictional counterpart Dr. Horrible.http://www.people.com/people/article/0,26334,1554852,00.html [accessed on 30 December, 2009].

[3] David Kushner, 'Joss Whedon Goes Where No TV Man Has Gone Before', in RollingStone.comhttp://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/25951789/joss_whedon_goes_where_no_tv_man_has_gone_before[accessed on 12 January, 2010].

[4] While Joss Whedon's blog is no longer available online, certain websites have copies of his entries. I've chosen to access these instead in order to provide evidence for the statement I've chosen to make.http://www.whedon.info/Joss-Whedon-s-Reaction-About-Angel.html [accessed 12 January, 2010].

[5] Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 4.

[6] Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog was initially ad-supported and available to viewers free of charge via Hulu.com. However, the series is no longer available for free view outside of the United States of America and must be purchased in individual acts via iTunes or as a DVD.

[7] Mila Bongco, Reading Comics: Language, Culture, and the Concept of the Superhero in Comic Books(New York: Garland Publishing Inc, 2000), p. 94.

2010-02-28T15:42:00.000-08:00

Cuttin’ Up: How Early Jazz Got America’s Ear.

By Court Carney.

Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, November 2009. Cloth: ISBN 978-0700616756, $34.95. 219 pages.

Review by Reba Wissner, Brandeis University

While much ink has been spent on the role of jazz in America, its broad cultural and societal influences within cities other than New York, Chicago, and New Orleans has not received such extensive treatment. Court Carney’s new book, Cuttin’ Up: How Early Jazz Got America’s Ear, has ventured beyond existing work in the field of jazz studies. Carney’s study synthesizes and reconciles the basic information about the origins and cultural implications of jazz in a clear and convenient manner. The book spans the 1890s to 1930s, combining both musical and historical analysis in order for the reader to gain a greater understanding of the larger cultural and social issues that contributed to the birth of the genre. The primary objective of the study is to “establish an emphasis on the shifts in American culture as well as the process of diffusion” (7), and it does so by discussing the broader cultural aspects of the dissemination and acceptance of jazz in the United States during the latter part of the nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth. He does so by diving the book into three parts and further dissecting it into six chapters. The essential details in each chapter are supplemented by focusing on a particular jazz musician within that geographic area during that time. Part 1: Creation, consists of Chapters 1 and 2; Part 2: Dispersion, consists of Chapters 3, 4, and 5; and Part 3: Acceptance, consists of Chapter 6 and the Conclusion. The book also contains an index of all the songs written during the time span that the book covers. Part 1 discusses the origins of jazz from ragtime and the blues and its earliest versions within New Orleans. Part 2 is dedicated to the way in which jazz was disseminated in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. Changes in society led to corresponding changes in taste, and these changes are an important key to establishing a greater understanding of the dissemination and acceptance of this new musical genre. Part 3 examines jazz as the new American music, concluding with the contributions of Benny Goodman.

The greatest strength of this study is that it is based on a much more thorough discussion of the cultural implications of jazz in various cities than has previously appeared in print. Carney’s writing style is clear, succinct, and accessible and avoids the use of jargon, making the book easy to read for both the expert musician and the layman without seeming simplified. My one main criticism of the book is that at times, Carney seems to do what he says in the introduction he does not plan to do: to “retell the totality of the early jazz narrative” (4). In some instances, especially in the early chapters, it seems as if he is attempting to reinvent the wheel and writing a jazz history textbook rather than composing a cultural history.

This book is a fascinating study of jazz in its earliest forms and how the music, contemporary culture, and society were intertwined. The information presented in Carney’s book asks new questions and reinforces the need for a more holistic approach to the study of early jazz than has so far been the case. Such a vast amount of information is provided in this book that it is impossible to do it justice in such a brief review. For any scholar undertaking research in jazz and early American music, this book is an invaluable source of information. Carney’s study brings a new perspective to musicological and cultural studies and deserves a central place on the map of jazz studies and studies of early American music.

2009-11-29T15:51:00.000-08:00

Composing the Citizen: Music as Public Utility in Third Republic France.

By Jann Pasler.

Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, July 2009. Cloth: ISBN 978-0-520-25740-5, $60.00. 817 pages.

Review by Reba Wissner, Brandeis University

There is no better summary of Jann Pasler’s Composing the Citizen than the one she herself writes: “In Composing the Citizen, I investigate how French citizens thought music could contribute to the formulation and health of their democracy, and why they embraced musical progress as emblematic of national progress. I explore the musical education they envisaged, from thinking a child’s first intellectual efforts should involve singing to devoting a significant place to music in the Universal Exhibitions. I examine the shifting beliefs and conditions that led to and then mitigated the pervasiveness of republican ideology in French culture” (31). Pasler examines the roots, implications, and consequences of music as public utility in Third Republic France (1870-1940), “a time when politicians intent on creating a lasting democracy in France saw music as integral to the public good—a way to imagine the future voice diverse aspirations, and discover shared values,” examining social practices across cultures through the lens of music’s usefulness (xii).

The author’s main argument is that “music, musical instruments, performing situations, and images of these—often associated with race, ethnicity, class, gender, and culture—helped people become aware of their positions in the debates about identity and nation” (645). She argues throughout that music helped to form a commonality and establishment of a national identity within French society, through its “public utility,” since “generally speaking, in France, the useful in music is what links sound to society, music to the community” (83). The study is motivated by the author’s personal interest as a woman of French descent who spent a great deal of time working in the French archives, a biographical aspect which I feel is useful in order to understand the incorporation of the fruits of her copious research.

Pasler’s book is an in-depth explanation of utilité publique and the government’s role in it, identifying that “the idea that the social utility of goods and services should take priority over their personal utility, provides a key to understanding French notions of government up to the present” (70). The study includes plentiful discussion of French history, politics, law, and philosophy, to place the concept of utilité publique within proper context, while outlining music and the establishment of community, as well as the types of music important in the revolutionary tradition and the challenges presented to composers to write such music. There is a heavy emphasis on French conceptions of both moral and musical progress, as well as the author’s notion of composing the citizen. Music as resistance is also an important component of the book, including an appropriation of music’s utility for non-republican purposes. The role of Wagner’s music for this purpose is examined in detail, but the book also concentrates on the role of composers such as Delibes, Saint-Saens, Massenet, Satie- composers that we don’t typically equate with music and political activism. The role of opera, its prohibitions and characteristics, are discussed at length, as well as the use of older—or as she deems them, “ancient”—forms of music in modern compositions is also discussed at length. In total, the book serves as a gateway to the author’s next books, providing an introduction to their subjects and as a result examines on a broad basis “how, through their music, the French, particularly at the end of the century, engaged with identity from the perspective of race, class, and gender” (645) and focusing on what music has done and what the Third Republic has shown us. Pasler concludes the book by connecting her research of this period to its applications in modern France and our globally interconnected, finance-driven world.

Pasler’s study is divided into four parts consisting of twelve chapters plus an introduction and coda, and three appendices. Part I: Forming Public Spirit and Useful Citizens, Part II: Shaping Judgment and National Taste, Part III: Instituting Republican Culture, and Part IV: Shifting Notions of Utility: Between the Nation and the Self, together create a chronological study of the use of music in France during this seventy-year span. Quotes of varying size are interwoven throughout the work and in between the pictures and musical examples. Both the abundant illustrations and musical examples featured throughout the book are helpful to the reader, though it is not necessary for the reader to be able to read music for the author’s point to be clearly understood. Each of the appendices contain the important political and musical events in the Early Third Republic, as well as the music’s varying appearances in publications of the day.

The book is dense and sometimes seems quite convoluted in terms of information. The reader may feel bogged down, because it seems as if the author included every single primary source and piece of evidence, which has both its plusses and minuses. Pasler uses specific pieces of music to illustrate points and as case studies throughout the book and talks a lot throughout the book about public policy in France. The chapters are long, often encompassing many different topics, making them sometimes difficult to follow the author’s train of thought. The book includes little analysis of the implications of the conception of music among the presentation of an ample amount of facts. The writing is clear but definitely not concise.

While the book falls into the area of music, readers interested in history, public policy, and philosophy will find much to grab onto. There is no other book like it that has been published in the field of musicology, and Pasler’s study gives the reader a glimpse into the musical life in a single part of Europe that has largely been ignored for the time period that the book covers. As an interdisciplinary work, Jann Pasler’s Composing the Citizen is a model for contemporary scholarship.

2009-10-30T12:33:00.000-07:00

Music in German Immigrant Theater: New York City, 1840-1940.

By John Koegel.

Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, June 2009. Cloth with CD: ISBN 9781580462150, $80.00. 620 pages.

Review by Reba Wissner, Brandeis University

Of all of the academic treatment in the area of cultural and immigration studies, one area that has largely been ignored is musical theater during the height of immigration to the United States. Although recently this has been remedied somewhat in the form of conferences and articles on related topics regarding various immigrant groups, there is still a large gap in this area of study. John Koegel’s book, Music in German Immigrant Theater: New York City, 1840-1940, chronicles the performances of German-language theater in New York City’s Klein Deutschland (Little Germany) at the height of German immigration, when New York City was a hub for the newly-immigrated gentry from Germany.

The book forms an inventory of the musical plays, farces, operas, and operettas performed in New York’s Kleine Deutschland, as well as the different theaters in which they were performed. It allows us to examine this output in the context of the larger history of the American musical theater. The scope of this study is broad, as much as it focuses on specific case studies. Koegel did a fantastic job with this study, considering the abundance of primary public source material and lack of private documents of the actors, musicians, composers, authors, and impresarios of the German American stage. Much of the discussion focuses on the background of the various musical plays, often with a synopsis, and paired with primary source reviews of the performances. The book abounds with statistical data, both performance-wise and monetary. A variety of photographs and reproduced programs and advertisements allow the reader to contextualize these performances into the time and environment in which they occurred.

Koegel’s study is divided into eleven chapters with thirteen appendices representing the core of the author’s thorough research. The book is further divided into three parts. Part I presents a chronological history of the German American theater from its inception in 1840 to 1918, examining the various performance spaces, impresarios, repertory, and audiences. Part II closely examines the careers of some of the principal performers on the German immigrant stage, as well as the portrayal of German Americans in literary, theatrical, and popular musical culture and how these portrayals affected the German American immigrant stage. Part III is almost solely dedicated to Adolf Philipp, his career and his contributions to German American musical theater. The book’s conclusion discusses the German American Musical Stage of the 1920s and 1930s, post-Adolf Philipp, and its subsequent decline. Koegel’s copious translations allow the non-German speaker to understand the titles and texts. A CD accompanies the book and is filled with much of the music described in the book.

The author’s main goal is to depict the German American theater in the United States as a method of acculturation for immigrants. More than 80 American cities and towns had German stages, and many of these were of a professional or semi-professional nature. While his study focuses on New York, he peripherally discusses equivalent examples from German American theater in other cities such as Chicago, St. Louis, and Milwaukee, which is helpful for putting the performances in New York City into a larger cultural context. The book shows the versatility of each of the theater companies, each having the ability to stage operas, operettas, farces, and musical plays, all within the same season. Copious reconstruction of extant archival sources and documents allow the reader to see the bigger picture. Additionally, the book contains biographical profiles of the various theater owners relevant to the study, but the main biography that the book contains is that of Adolf Philipp.

Some of the songs are described using musical terminology, but for those who have had no musical training, this method is not detrimental to understanding the author’s point since it is these pieces that are found on the book’s accompanying CD. Koegel includes musical examples beginning in Chapter 8 (Part III), when he delves specifically into the works related to Adolf Philipp. These examples printed in piano and vocal transcription would be handy for the musicologist or music theorist intending on performing an in-depth analytical examination of the songs, but are not necessary for the non-music reader to understand the author’s point. They are also all included on the CD.

My main critique of the book is that it is almost exclusively about Adolf Philipp and his German American theatrical career, so much so that nearly half the book focuses on this subject. It is almost as if Parts I and II combined and Part III could have formed two separate books since there is virtually no overlap between the former two parts and the latter part. Additionally, the author spends most of his time on the historical and contextual elements of the plays rather than on the actual music; the music then almost seems a minimal component of the book and disproportionate to the discussion in the rest of the book, besides contrary to the title. The only music discussed is that of Philipp, and it is only found in Part III of the book. John Koegel’s book fills the gap in studies of music, theater, and immigration. This book will be of interest to readers interested in music and theater history and cultural studies. Scholars exploring the significance of turn-of-the-century immigration from Europe to the United States, its implications, and its resulting cultural creations will find much of interest in this study. Koegel’s study is as comprehensive a treatment as you’ll find on this little-studied subject and is a starting point for more involved and focused work on the subject. Hopefully it will form a gateway to similar studies of the contributions to musical theater of other immigrant groups.

2009-10-30T12:04:00.000-07:00

Sounds of the Modern Nation: Music, Culture, and Ideas in Post-Revolutionary Mexico.

By Alejandro L. Madrid.

Philadelphia: Temple University Press, November 2008. Cloth:

ISBN 978-1592136940, $54.50. 224 pages.

Review by Russell Cobb, University of Alberta

The work of twentieth-century Mexican painters looms large beyond the borders of Mexico. Indeed, many of the images we associate with Mexican identity were created by iconic artists such as Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. When it comes to modernist Mexican music, however, there is a rich and varied tradition that gets little attention outside its country of origin. In Mexico, meanwhile, this music has been overdetermined by the rhetoric of Mexican nationalism, according to Alejandro L. Madrid. In this book, Madrid examines the intersection of twentieth-century Mexican classical music and politics, a fertile terrain left largely unexplored by scholars. Madrid's ability to draw on theorists from anthropology, literary studies, and history lends the book breadth and depth, despite a rather jargon-laced, wordy style that bogs down the reader.What makes this terrain interesting, Madrid argues, is that Mexico produced at least three extraordinarily complex composers whose fates depended on their relationship to the emergence of a post-Revolutionary state in the 1920s. The Mexican Revolution began with the overthrow of the Europeanizing dictator Porfirio Díaz in 1911, but took so many twists and turns during the following violent decade that even scholars of the field have trouble keeping the names, dates, and factions straight. Unfortunately, Madrid does not help clarify matters, and readers are left to piece together the Mexican Revolution through outside reading. A brief overview of the Revolution would certainly have helped since, as Madrid says, the development of Mexican high culture depended upon the connections artists had to the emergence of a nationalist state that created the paradox of an "institutional revolutionary party," which would go on to dominate Mexican political life for over 50 years.
Madrid focuses on three composers, all of whom produced most of their work after the armed phase of the Revolution ended and the nationalist state consolidated its hegemony. These three composers represent different approaches to politics, aesthetics, and Mexican identity. The first, Julián Carrillo, was, perhaps, the most pro-European of the bunch. Carrillo identified his work with what he called "the glorious German music tradition." This was a tradition that was at the fore of the atonal music revolution in the early 20th century. Carrillo, with his Sonido 13, brought the atonal revolution to Mexico, while avoiding a simple mimicry of European innovations. Using Nestor Garcia Canclini's idea of hybrid cultures, Madrid argues that Carrillo was more than an imitator of Europe but that, in a chaotic society struggling with modernity and dominated by a Hispanic-Indigenous nationalism, there was no space for Carrillo. Indeed, Madrid provides a consistent critique of Mexican nationalist rhetoric in the arts. The writer-politician-educator José Vasconcelos is at the heart of this critique. Vasconcelos believed strongly in the idea of the Mexican race as a "cosmic race" and that artistic expression should reflect Mexico's "authentic" indigenous cultures. For Madrid, this quest for authenticity is an essentializing move, one that has the power to include and exclude works of art along purely ideological lines.

The one Mexican composer non-specialists may recognize is Carlos Chávez, the second of Madrid's subjects. Chávez towers over other musicians, Madrid suggests, because he was closely connected to powerful people, including Vasconcelos. Chavez attempted to synthesize Mexican folkloric music with European art music, and achieved international recognition for his works, including Energía and Exágonos. Chavez's career, in many ways, parallels that of Diego Rivera. Early on, they circulated in cosmopolitan avant-garde circles, then moved on to experiment with indigenous themes. Madrid argues that both Rivera and Chávez were canonized in official Mexican cultural history as nationalists, but their work contains "multiple identities." It is a compelling argument, but it remains unclear who is responsible for the one-dimensional legacy of these artists.

Finally, there the figure of Manuel M. Ponce, known as the "paladin of musical nationalism." Ponce is best known for compositions written for the Spanish guitarist Andrés Segovia. Ponce's connections to Europe (he also spent time studying the latest in musical modernism in France) "cross-fertilized" his interest in Mexican folklore, creating a distinct hybrid sound. Ponce believed that reorganizing and reprocessing Mexican folks songs would "dignify" and "elevate" them as art music. It is an interesting story, and one that fits within the larger context of Mexican nationalism, which, at this time, was creating an idealized Indian mythology to represent that Revolutionary state. In this chapter, Madrid makes a curious digression into a discussion of Hispanic modernismo, claiming that it shares with European modernism a "crisis of language." This is quite a stretch and one that ends up confusing, rather than contextualizing, Ponce's contributions to the Mexican cultural scene.

The most serious flaw of the book, however, is stylistic in nature. Rather than launching into a discussion of music history, Madrid constantly describes the nature of his research. It is an annoying trope that is often found in dissertations; the author tells his readers that he will perform such and such an analysis rather than simply doing it. Furthermore, the book is weighted down by unnecessary trendy jargon that will likely sound dated in ten years. The effect of so much description is such that the entire book reads like an introduction. This reviewer was reminded of the old writing workshop adage: show, don't tell. For a story as interesting and vital as Madrid's, this is especially important, since the polemics and controversies of twentieth-century Mexican art music are not well known outside of Mexico. A tighter narrative with accessible prose would have done much to rectify this problem.

2009-10-13T14:32:00.000-07:00

Texas Blues: The Rise of a Contemporary Sound.

By Alan Govenar.

College Station: Texas A&M University Press, December 2008. Cloth: ISBN 978-1-58544-605-6, $40. 624 pages.

Review by Jonathan Hill, National University of Singapore

Anyone picking up Alan Govenar’s magisterial new book expecting a straightforward history of the blues in Texas is in for a surprise. Its modest title underplays the scope and importance of the book. This is no simple musical history, but a multifaceted retelling of the blues’ place in Texan life through interviews with the people who have made it what it is today. Some are famous – with obvious inclusions such as Albert Collins, Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, and Stevie Ray Vaughan – but most are relatively obscure. Over a hundred individuals are featured in the book, mostly telling their own stories in their own words, unencumbered by editorial comments. As such, the book builds upon the style Govenar developed in his Meeting the Blues (Taylor, 1988), and African American Frontiers: Slave Narratives and Oral Histories (ABC-CLIO, 2000), but on a grander scale. His earlier blues-related interviews reappear here, alongside a wealth of new material, lavishly illustrated in color throughout. The result is an enormous volume, weighty in every sense, but never intimidating. The photographs, many of which are by Govenar himself, are nothing short of magnificent. They include a great deal of archive material which is often as fascinating as the interviews themselves.

The book’s introduction goes over the much-trodden ground of the early history of the blues in a fresh way, paying due and welcome attention to the preconceptions of early researchers which influenced the material they collected. But this is preliminary scene-setting, since the bulk of the book focuses on the 1960s and later. Unfortunately, Govenar says little about his methodology, which is a missed opportunity. What are the strengths and weaknesses of presenting the words of the interviewees alone, with little overt editing, commentary, or other authorial voice? On what basis were these subjects and not others included? Some discussion of such methodological questions would have been extremely valuable to help locate this book in relation to the wider anthropological literature.

Much of the book’s uniqueness comes from the fact that not all of the people featured in it are primarily musicians. The first interviewee in the book is Osceola Mays, the subject of Govenar’s earlier book for children Osceola: Memories of a Sharecropper’s Daughter (Jump At The Sun, 2000) and a traditional songster and storyteller rather than a professional musician. Another subject, Mariellen Shepphard, seems not to be a musician at all: her interview consists solely of a description of a raucous T-Bone Walker concert. And Big Bo Thomas gives a fascinating account of his career as a club operator and record promoter in Dallas in the 1950s and 60s. Many interviewees testify to the toughness of a life devoted to music largely out of the limelight, but others spin their tales from quite different yarn – as in Lightnin’ Hopkins’s magnificent interview, mostly devoted to outrageous musings on love and women. Much of the interest in reading such things lies in guessing where veracity gives way to hyperbole or deliberate image creation.

The inclusion of such a variety of people helps to ground the music in its context more fully, and in more variety, than an exclusive focus on performers could. It reminds us that music is not merely something that musicians do: it is something that people listen to, or dance to, something which plays a central role in a community. It also reminds us that the blues means different things to different people. If, as Clifford Geertz famously argued, every participant at a Balinese cockfight interprets the event differently, so too does everyone at a juke joint dance, or a street singer’s performance, or a studio recording. This book, with its variety of voices and their sometimes quite contradictory stories, illustrates this powerfully.

Somewhat disconcertingly, the material is not always consistently presented. Most of the interviews begin on a new page with a new heading, but those in the “Zydeco” section are all run together in a single block, making it hard to tell where one voice stops and the next begins. Many interviews are preceded by introductions giving information about the interviewee, but others have none, presenting the interviewee’s words entirely unmediated. And for some artists there is no interview at all, the book instead changing to a more conventional third-person narrative to describe their role. The effect is somewhat puzzling, perhaps testament to an identity crisis at the heart of Texas Blues. What does the book want to be? Is it a collection of oral histories, presented merely to allow the subjects to tell their stories directly to the reader? In that case, it is hard to see why there are entries for musicians for whom there is no interview material. Alternatively, is it an exhaustive cultural history of Texan blues, told partly in the first person and partly in the third? In that case, the non-interview material does not go far enough. T-Bone Walker and Freddie King, for example, deserve more than just a page or two in such a history. The book would have been more clearly focused had the third-person narratives been restricted to the introductory material, with the bulk of the book devoted only to the interviews.

Nevertheless, the overall focus is clear enough: it is not on Texan blues as a style of music (it is questionable whether such a style even exists), but on the role that the blues has played, and continues to play, in Texan communities. This book conveys that role brilliantly, and with more conviction and integrity than any conventional history could. Through it, we learn not simply facts (and perhaps a few fictions) about what actually happened. We learn what it meant to people. Govenar conveys the importance of this movingly in the prologue, describing his search for information about Blind Lemon Jefferson, the first great Texan blues singer. When he finally tracks down an old woman who knew Jefferson, she smilingly comments that he has been dead for fifty years, before closing the door in Govenar’s face. And Jefferson drifts through the book like a literary ghost, the subject of anecdotes told by many interviewees, more myth than man. The message is subtle but powerful: whatever facts one might glean about Jefferson’s actual career are less important than the continued effect his story, and even his mere name, have upon people today. Sometimes, what people believe is more important than what actually happened. Some blues scholars, such as Marybeth Hamilton in In Search of the Blues (Cape, 2007) have begun to draw attention to this fact and its role in the creation of blues as myth. By devoting the bulk of Texas Blues to the voices of those involved in the blues at all levels, Govenar does the same thing, though in a very different way. It is this, as well as the sheer quantity and variety of material, that makes this such a valuable book, and one which will undoubtedly be required reading (and a mine of primary sources) for students of the blues for many years to come.

2009-08-11T13:05:00.000-07:00

Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court: Music and the Circulation of Power

By Suzanne G. Cusick. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, July 2009. Cloth with CD: ISBN 9780226132129, $60. 488 pages.

Review by Reba Wissner, Brandeis University

Francesca Caccini was one of the most prolific female composers and performers of the seventeenth century, and recently, musicologists and interdisciplinarians have generated an extensive body of literature on the role of women in early modern Europe, mainly in Italy. Suzanne G. Cusick’s study of the composer eloquently situates itself within that realm. This, Cusick’s first book, has been long awaited. A scholar known for her enlightening and engaging articles on subjects such as feminist perspectives on early music and the use of music as torture in terrorist containment camps, it is high time for a book by this talented scholar. Additionally, hers is the first extended and in-depth study of one of the most influential female Italian musicians of the Baroque. Cusick deliberately avoids the technical language that pervades most musicological scholarship while still conveying her ideas and analysis of Caccini, her role as a female in a predominantly male world, and her compositions. The author’s copious research brings to light a new side of Caccini that has been neglected far too long; she is portrayed not just as the daughter of famed composer Giulio Caccini, but as a composer, performer, and teacher in her own right, no longer studied in the shadow of her father. Cusick’s study illuminates the life of Francesca Caccini, placing her life within the context of family dynamics, societal norms, and economic implications.

The reader will immediately respect the clarity of Cusick’s prose, as well as her meticulous attention to detail. The book contains a CD to accompany and complement the study. There is plentiful incorporation of musical examples to demonstrate specific musico-textual instances in the music that are of the utmost value to those who can read music, but do not make understanding the book difficult for those who cannot. The book discusses and places into context the role of the professional musician, and Cusick frames her study with contemporaneous events in Florence during Caccini’s compositional activity. The book is organized into twelve chapters with three appendices including Francesca Caccini’s known performances and compositions. Cusick’s meticulousness has been extended into her careful transcriptions of Caccini’s extant letters, also found in an appendix.

Cusick’s desire to examine music “as a set of actions rather than as a set of works” (xxii) forms the basis of her study, and she succeeds brilliantly. The author confesses that the personal nature of this endeavor was spurred through observing and experiencing the effects of misogyny both in the classroom and in academia as a whole, but she confines this narrative only to the introduction, thus allowing the book to be focused on her research. Chapter 1 chronicles the birth and early life of Francesca, noting the special influence that her father and his music had on her and hers. Chapter 2 discusses Francesca under the employ of Christina de Lorraine, depicting Francesca as a commodity. Chapter 3 gives an in-depth look at the court of Christina de Lorraine and the environment in which Francesca worked. Chapter 4 discusses Francesca’s early service to the Medici Court as both composer and performer of court spectacle. Chapter 5 discusses Francesca’s home and the work ethic to which she subscribed. Chapters 6-8 introduce her first masterpiece of music, her first book of madrigals (Primo libro delle musiche, 1618), its contents, and the circumstances by which the pieces were composed. Cusick also analyzes the secular songs, some of which incorporate Marian tunes, in the first half of the book, in terms of their dialogic relationship to one another and the anxiety of voice that they express. She also outlines the second half of the first book of madrigals, but here instead of a collection of secular songs, we now have songs that while not sacred, are rooted in the sacred and sometimes liturgical tradition, such as psalms. Unlike those songs contained in the first half of the book, those in second half are not gendered. While Cusick proposes that the songs in the first book of madrigals are gendered, I question whether or not Caccini herself intended for such a reading of her music. Chapters 9-10 examine the circumstances surrounding the composition and performance of Francesca’s opera, La liberazione di Ruggiero, the only entertainment Francesca wrote to survive nearly whole. Cusick situates La liberazione di Ruggiero in relation to Maria Magdalena d’Austria’s regency and its relation to her political agenda. Chapter 11 discusses Francesca’s life post-Liberazione and the culmination of her public career after becoming widowed. Chapter 12 discusses life in Christina’s court after Francesca, as well as Christina’s interest in the Monastero di Santa Croce. Francesca’s life during the 1630s is also examined in this context, as well as her life after her patron’s death.

The major criticism of this text is the incorporation of sometimes seemingly trivial or supplementary information, for example the first part of Chapter 12. Additionally, Cusick’s book does not contain any particular argument, but rather is more of a contextual biography than a thought-provoking study. While Cusick’s explanation of the history of Christina and the Medici Court is both interesting and necessary, and she deals conscientiously with the dearth of archival materials available to her, there are some instances, mainly in Chapter 3, where I feel such copious detail seems at times both unnecessary and irrelevant and as a result detracts from the book’s purpose.

Suzanne Cusick’s groundbreaking study represents an important addition to recent musicological scholarship on the lives of female composers, particularly those of the seventeenth century; a field that only recently has been burgeoning. This book will be of interest to readers interested in music history, cultural studies, and the role of women in early modern Italy. By examining the historical and cultural elements, the author brings new, exciting, invigorating, and much-needed in-depth analysis, and provides a more accurate portrayal of the composer and her works than has been seen before.

2009-07-16T14:47:00.000-07:00

Foundation: B-Boys, B-Girls, and Hip-Hop Culture in New York

By Joseph G. Schloss. New York: Oxford University Press, March 2009. Cloth: ISBN 978-0195334050, $74; paper: ISBN 978-0195334067, $19.95. 192 pages.

Review by Tara Jabbaar-Gyambrah, State University of New York, Buffalo

Joseph G. Schloss’s Foundation: B-Boys, B-Girls, and Hip-Hop Culture in New York brings new, invigorating, exciting, and much-needed in-depth analysis of hip-hop culture’s ethnic origins specific to b-boying. By examining the historical and cultural elements of b-boying and b-girling in New York City between 2003 and 2008, Schloss highlights the significance of the transmission of cultural ideas from one place to another by mapping the experiences of dancers in the field . While hip-hop has been labeled a “problem” by mainstream popular culture, Schloss posits that one of its cultural forms, b-boying, embodies a plethora of cultural traditions such as Afro-diasporic competitive dance, battle tactics, acrobatic power moves, and martial arts that live in the Afro-Caribbean, African American, and Latino communities today. He posits that “hip-hop’s strength lies precisely in the diversity of its concepts and practices” (7). In other words, Schloss suggests that hip-hop cannot be understood in terms of “good” versus “bad,” but each of its components should be viewed as representing an artistic flair that should be examined more specifically through ethnographic methods. One of the reasons he cites that b-boying has been often overlooked in scholarship is because it operates “within the framework of literary analysis and culture studies” (8). It is not theory alone that assists in the full understanding of b-boying and b-girling culture, but it is the voices of the dancers themselves that should be a part of scholarship. Moreover, Schloss suggests that if scholars immerse themselves within the communities in which b-boying has emerged and continually transforms over time, they will be more engaged and create research that represents the reality of the culture itself. In the end, literary and culture studies alone cannot holistically represent the voices of the people; however, when it is combined with ethnographic methodology, the voices of the people shine through and create a remarkable presence.

The book’s title, Foundation: B-Boys, B-Girls, and Hip-Hop Culture in New York, focuses on its core by illuminating the definition of foundation as “a term used by b-boys and b-girls to refer to an almost mystical set of notions about b-boying that is passed from teacher to student” (12). With a total of 8 chapters Schloss eloquently situates b-boying as its own unique cultural form within hip-hop by analyzing the philosophies, practices, and experiences of b-boys and b-girls. In chapter 2, “The Original Essence of the Dance: History, Community, and Classic B-Boy Records,” the author examines the relationship between music and dance. The premise is that a relationship between music and choreography exists that allows b-boys and b-girls to transfer historical associations of the music to their dance movements (38). One of the remarkably interesting ideas that materialize in this chapter is that b-boys and b-girls make almost spiritual connections to classic songs such as “Apache” and “Give It Up or Turnit Loose” as a principle that brings to light the bond shared between “modern proponents and the historical essence of the dance, giving strength, energy, and legitimacy to modern devotees” (39). Essentially, b-boying and b-girling becomes a venue by which culture and history meet, sort of like a spaceship traveling in time.

The next chapter, “Getting Your Foundation: Pedagogy,” builds on this idea by solidifying the foundation of b-boying as the combination of the artist’s mentorship, mental approaches, philosophies, attitude, rhythm, style, and character, as well as b-boys’ and b-girls’ ability to recognize another’s dance lineage from his/her style (51). Although it may be assumed that b-boys and b-girls are from a specific geographic area, they are not; b-boying is a collaborative culture that reaches across states and cities. In the words of Schloss, “a b-boy or b-girl is representing a relationship between dance and musical form (a ‘boy’ or ‘girl’ who dances on the ‘break’ or to the ‘beat’ of a record), a reaction to the psychological stress of poverty (one who ‘breaks,’ emotionally), symbolism of the dance over commercialism (b-boy versus breakancers) a commitment to dance over other aspects of hip-hop (as in the Source Manifesto), and a sense of geographical and class pride (‘Bronx-boy’ versus, presumably, ‘Manhattan-boy’)” (64). Despite the fact that there are contradictions in the way that b-boying is defined, for example, “breakdancing” is not seen as “authentic” b-boying culture, as it is connected to commercialism. Furthermore, what is even more intriguing is the idea of b-boying as an expression of gender identity. One of the female artists, Seoulsonyk, describes what she does as b-boying; but male dancers will never call what they do “b-girling.” Schloss suggests that at times, this contradiction can force b-girls to be at odds with their identity. This brings up the idea of masculinity not just in b-boying but hip-hop in general as a representation of male standards. In his film Hip-Hop Beyond Beats and Rhymes, Byron Hurt posits that hip-hop is a reflection of American society’s view on gender roles, wherein men’s roles are pushed to the forefront more often. Even though the author tackles the idea of masculinity and femininity somewhat in this chapter, I believe that there is room for a more focused study on gender roles within “b-girling” culture.

Chapter 4, “We Have to Be Exaggerated: Aesthetics,” integrates the aesthetic principles of b-boying as an art form that provides insight into the communities’ abstract understanding of, and approach to, those conditions. What I loved most about this is that it builds on the idea of locality and/or space, which is called by b-boys and b-girls “cipher” – a circle that encapsulates the dancers while they perform. Not only is this space a sacred entrance into the world of b-boying, but in many instances, it is a place where b-boys and b-girls are given their code names.By and large, Schloss’s book Foundation is a wonderful masterpiece that outlines the historical and cultural experiences of b-boys and b-girls in New York. I highly recommend this book as required reading for scholars in the field of popular culture (i.e., hip-hop) and for students in the classroom.

2009-07-16T14:44:00.001-07:00

Inventing Entertainment: The Player Piano and the Origins of an American Musical Industry

By Brian Dolan. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, January 2009. Cloth: ISBN 978-0742564619, $39.95. 264 pages.

Review by Justin Patch, University of Texas, Austin

Player pianos are nothing if not antique. The ghostly specter of ebony and ivory keys pressing themselves without a human hand is a spectacle, a novelty, a show that occurs in someone else’s parents’ or grandparents’ living room. And the music of these mechanized marvels: old-fashioned “classics” from Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven to the ragtime of Scott Joplin and virtuosic stride piano of James P. Johnson. Everything about these mechanical beasts screams, or rather delicately performs, “dated,” from the sounds they produce to the paper rolls that convey musical information into their mechanical organs. In the age of MIDI, iTunes, and digital streaming, the player piano just seems little more than semi-hip anachronism. I recently came by not one but two used player pianos for sale in the Austin area in two days, both for over $2000, not exactly cheap kitsch. So one then feels compelled to ask, why pay for such a piece as a player piano? Why invest in an outdated mechanism that plays old-school music with little to no hope of ever updating its repertoire?

The answers to those questions are the driving force of Brian Dolan’s Inventing Entertainment: The Player Piano and the Origins of an American Musical Industry. The book is an absolutely delightful read that chronicles the author’s travels in the West-coast world of player piano connoisseurs, collectors, aficionados, fans, museums of mechanical instruments, and sepia-toned memories as much as it illuminates the history of the invention. From the outset Dolan is clear about his fascination and love for this turn-of-the-century invention in both its original and modern forms. He writes with all of the fascination of a man in a museum filled with previously unseen masterpieces by his favorite artist. The book does an incredible job of performing the player piano: humanizing the mechanical and showing the human hands that toiled to make the instrument what is was, a short-lived but highly influential phenomenon of the early twentieth century. Given the rapid rise and demise of the player piano – its dominance existed for a few decades – one might think of it as the first creation and casualty of the fickle and fast-moving music industry.

Much of the book gracefully oscillates between an ethnography of modern player piano culture, which roves through the houses of collectors, museums, and the National Association of Music Merchants convention, and a history of the growth, development, and demise of the industry. The descriptions and narratives are spotted with colorful figures, visionaries, and the myriad musicians, such as legendary stride pianists James P. Johnson and Eubie Blake, virtuoso Rachmaninoff, and composers Stravinsky and Gershwin, who were part of player piano culture as well as shaping greater international musical development. In particular, Dolan illuminates the life of a relatively unknown hero, a man named J. Lawrence Cook, whose deft fingers and artistic input provided much of the ragtime, stride, blues, and jazz piano rolls made throughout the history of the player piano. A man with a sadly tragic upbringing, Cook was a talented pianist who saw the player piano as the wave of the future. His career moved from cutting and independently selling home-made piano rolls, to recording rolls, including one top-20 hit, to supervising sessions with piano giants “Fats” Waller and James P. Johnson, among others. Cook is responsible for bringing high-quality, artistically-rendered performances of African-American music to the ear of countless Americans who would not have heard it otherwise. Dolan begins the book with the touching story of Cook’s granddaughter “hearing” her grandfather for the first time since his death—she had no idea that he recorded piano rolls—and includes a sensitive biographical chapter about Cook’s upbringing and his contributions to the player piano.

When not telling the history of the industry or the stories of those who made the industry, Dolan turns his attention to some of the meta-questions lingering over the player piano. One of the most interesting concerns the legacy of the invention, not as machinery, but its social impact on U.S. society. The player piano changed the very ideas of performance and reproduction in ways that have resonances today. In a nation emerging from the nineteenth century with a burgeoning middle class, the player piano was marketed as home entertainment that did not require extensive training (as was commonly expected of middle-class women at the time). One could simply pump a foot pedal and be regaled by the classics which were unattainable by most. Yet this was still considered “performing,” as the gramophone had yet to take hold and the amplified radio was still decades away. One who operated the player piano was still considered to be performing and playing the classics to such an extent that instructions, as well as pertinent historical information, was printed on the rolls for the performer. Player pianos also served to teach young performers, such as Duke Ellington, to play music that they might not have encountered otherwise. In these ways, the social impact of this now kitschy technology does deserve to be taken as seriously, and humorously, as Dolan does.

While this book may seem from the outset to be a niche book, it is much more than just a quirky book about a side-line slice of Americana. For one, it is an excellent model of a combination of research, ethnography, biography, and theory. It artfully jumps genres, is a consistently smooth read, and presents thoughtful theoretical queries about the history of technology and socio-auditory culture without getting bogged down. For another, it opens the doors to queries about the auditory culture of the early twentieth century and the first age of mass production of music. Finally, it brings to the surface questions about the first attempts to musically humanize a machine and to mechanize humans, as the standardization of the player piano may be responsible for our aesthetics of perfection and reproducibility in music. As we enter the new millennium with the promise and fear of artificial intelligence over the horizon, and music constantly a click away, it is worth contemplating the magic of the player piano and the reproduction of human-ness.

2009-04-29T11:04:00.000-07:00

Old Roots, New Routes: The Cultural Politics of Alt.Country Music

Edited by Pamela Fox and Barbara Ching. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, December 2008. Cloth: ISBN 978-0472070534, $70.00; paper: ISBN 9780472050536, $26.95. 296 pages.

Review by Justin Patch, University of Texas, Austin

Musical genres are famously difficult to definitively define apart from, or even with, their expressed parameters and limits within the marketplace and para-market spaces – television, radio, print and internet. Statements by musicians and fans are often contradictory, simultaneously playing on the local and the global, popular appeal and artistic indifference, ecstasy and depression, isolation and network. Most often, the experience of both the musicians and fans of any genre lies somewhere in between the poles and boundaries that are used to define what is inside and outside of any genre. The fences that are meant to secure the borders are frequently porous and easily traversed through cracks, tunnels, and well-placed leaps. The art of existing in a genre may actually lie in the use of the bypasses—are they well-worn or newly conceived and constructed? Are they arduously dug, or nonchalantly strolled through? Have they been manufactured according to a plan or are they spontaneous and magical? The game of defining the genre more often than not lies in experience: you’ll know it when you hear (or see, or buy) it.

Enter alt.country, a genre born of opposition – to the growing dominance of stadium rock and AOR-infused Nashville and pop-country radio, to their discursive forgetting of “roots” and loss of “authenticity” in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Alt.country and its performers have captivated millions from the small clubs in cities like Austin to Chicago and Seattle to Minneapolis, to college and internet radio, and music festivals around the world. Drawn together by a cosmopolitan love for old-time music of the Carter Family, hard-country icons Johnny Cash and Hank Williams, and an emotional investment in the spit-in-your-face aggressive attitude and sound of punk-rock, the musical parameters of alt.country are virtually non-existent as a unifying force. A truly post-modern genre, perhaps the only thing that holds alt.country artists together is that they are talked about and bought together, by fans, musicians and writers. The constant “outside” quality of the genre in some ways prevents them from being marketed together.

Grappling with the urge to say something substantial about a genre that is meaningful to so many but very, very slippery, Pamela Fox and Barbara Ching’s Old Roots, New Routes takes on alt.country in one of its primary concerns: cultural politics. How are the politics of authenticity generative and operational in this genre? How do these myths and realities clash upon examination? How do these discourses blend and clash with their counterparts in country and bluegrass? How do they impact performance practice and audience reception? While Fox and Ching’s introduction provides a historical and theoretical overview of the conflict between authenticity and selling out, the entries in the book deal with individual or small groups of artists who are seminal as proponents or progenitors of the genre. Case studies are given of Neko Case, Justin Trevino, Gram Parsons, Jay Farrar (of Uncle Tupelo and Sun Volt), Gillian Welch and Freakwater and three alt.country acts from Austin in the 1990s. There is also a masterful analysis of two “alt.country” films – Songcatcher and O Brother, Where Art Thou? by Barbara Ching.

This format, which provides in-depth analyses of artists within the genre, both demonstrates the complexity and contradiction inherent in the definition and opens up further lines of inquiry into specific questions about the construction of emerging forms of music, marketing and sound as well as the role of literature and film in both defining a genre and acting as heuristic tools. No doubt, this was the only way to comprehend such a pastiche of sounds and stories—through grasping at parts, rather than the elusive whole. The theoretical backbone of most of these essays is surprisingly coherent, swirling around Raymond Williams and Pierre Bourdieu. Although they are far from the only theorists represented, it seems as though their interests in the City/Country dichotomy with its attendant theories on traditional culture, structures of feeling, and taste loom large over all of the essays, as does the urge to represent not oppositional, but co-occurring transformations, desires and developments. In this sense, one can take away a great amount about applying specific aspects of a body of theory to case studies by attending to the nuances used in each of the case studies.

Of note are essays by Diane Pecknold, Jon Smith, Aaron Fox, and Barbara Ching, as well as Fox and Ching’s “Introduction: The Importance of Being Ironic—Towards a Theory and Critique of Alt.Country Music.” Tying a book this diverse together is never easy or logical, but the Introduction does an excellent job of laying the theoretical ground on which all of the essays tread, pre-exposing the ready contradictions and simultaneities of the genre, taste, audience, and market to which the ensuing essays will put a microscope. The summaries and applications of theories of taste and tradition, and the antagonisms and meddling of capital in alt.country, serve as both illuminations of the texts as well as an effective summary of several lines of interrogation into alt.country as a genre and practice.

Following up on these theories, Pecknold’s historicist “Selling Out or Buying In?” traces the development of alt.country as a genre along the lines of its grassroots and institutional developments (particularly the Gavin chart and the Americana Association), arguing that both public taste and market institutions that function as arbiters and sellers of commodities grew up together. She cites earlier (pre-Uncle Tupelo) experimenters in the fusion of country and punk and the discourses around the effect of the utilization of technology, and the grassroots and mainstream institutions that impacted the development of alt.country as a genre and a community.

Smith’s “Growing Up and Out of Alt.Country” stands out as both a close reading of Neko Case, one of the darlings of the genre, as well as an artful reading of so-called “Generation X” literature into an understanding of the development of a career, a style, and a genre. He artfully argues that the legacy of the angst of Generation X was the lineage of alt.country. That generation was searching for new ground in the authenticities lost to the hippie-turned-yuppie upwardly-mobile baby boomers. He then traces Case’s development from punk through mimetic alt.country to her current work as a liberatory trajectory that moves away from feigning authenticity and revels in artistic spirit, musical creation, and being safe within its own artistic self, without channeling the ghosts of artists past in token musical gesture.

Fox’s “Beyond Austin’s City Limits,” an exegesis and reflection on the current career of South Texas journeyman Justin Trivino, asks questions about the nature of “alternative” in alt.country, especially in light of Austin’s position in that scene, and of the sound of country. Fox expands on the materiality of class conflicts that surround country as well as those that the actors within them carve out for themselves. He argues that artists like Trivino are both kept outside as well as keep themselves outside by their decisions—alliances to communities outside of the mainstream and the sound of their recordings.

Finally, Ching’s “Meeting in the Marketplace” offers insight into the role that film has in the makings of a genre and its communities as well as film as a heuristic tool for music. In both O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) and Songcatcher (2000), she analyses the protagonists’ relationship to the market, as both pursue their own ends via hillbilly music. In the finales of both movies, she finds a comfortable location for new, rootsy music in the market. The market offers the characters a way out of their older, less successful lives, and points to a way forward with music as the engine.

What is most compelling about this book is the way it diverges from previous models of analysis on alternate or resistant culture. Rather than homogenizing the culturally hegemonic and setting the resistant against it, many of the essays portray both as gears that turn simultaneously, both exerting their own forces. Although there is still room to look seriously at the impact of 1990s Nashville with its attendant artists and businesses as actors, not as a monolith, there is ample reflection in Old Roots, New Routes to say that it does point towards ways to successfully analyze a music that is constantly emerging.

2009-04-29T10:58:00.000-07:00

Performing Class in British Popular Music

By Nathan Wiseman-Trowse. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, November 2008. Cloth: ISBN 978-0-230-21949-6, $75.00. 216 pages.

Review by Christopher Malone, Northeastern State University

Perhaps the hardest lesson that a materialist approach to culture has to teach us concerns our habits of consumption. What we like or dislike, our sense of things being true, good, and authentic: these intuitive responses to the world (and the marketplace) seem most intimately our own. But these responses are shaped by socio-economic and discursive forces as much as the objects of culture that elicit these responses. If marketing executives trust the power of culture to shape these habits and perceptions in consumers, it is difficult all the same to think about the naturalness of our affections as being caught up in such discursive processes.

In his book Performing Class in British Popular Music, Nathan Wiseman-Trowse examines these processes as they shape the way audiences register the authenticity of a work of pop music. He argues that part of what makes us respond to a song or artist as genuine or “real” has to do with representations of class, not only in the lyrical content of the song but in the entire “rock discourse” that surrounds it. One recent barometer for measuring this concerns the chart battle in the mid-1990s between Oasis and Blur. “The simple story of two competing young British bands trying to outmanoeuvre each other” (1) turned into a kind of “class war” in the British media. Much was made in the press of how Blur came from the suburban Essex town of Colchester, while Oasis originated in working-class Manchester. Competition between the bands was styled in terms that have a long history in British popular music: working-class authenticity and middle-class artistry.

Wiseman-Trowse’s approach to class here does not involve analysis of actual class positions in a socio-economic sense. Rather class identity is construed as a “relatively mobile form of subjectivity that can be invoked through cultural texts such as popular music” (5). What this means is that audiences, regardless of their socio-economic background, may participate in class identities as they become “sutured” into the outlooks and attitudes conveyed in popular music. How this occurs depends not only on the content of specific songs, or the biographies of artists themselves, but also in the way songs and performers are taken up in “rock discourse.” The effects of marketing and promotion, media portrayals, music videos, fan culture, as well as the history of popular music itself and its “accumulation of textual values across time and space”(5), all comprise a discourse that shapes representations of class and allows audiences to identify with and register the authenticity of popular music.

Drawing from the work of Judith Butler and her performative theory of gender, Wiseman-Trowse goes beyond a model of class understood in deterministic relationship with economic circumstances. Just as Butler critiques certain feminist discourse for assigning a priori roles, actions, and attitudes to the category of womanhood, this study points to the limits of the formulation that “working-class kids produce working class music.” Instead, popular music provides a range of “performative class positions that are proffered through the textual moment” (70).

To speak of the performative nature of rock authenticity means to consider the network of values which give meaning to actions or texts, not just in public discourse but also in the “private” subjectivity of the artist herself. Wiseman-Trowse illustrates this with the example of Richey James (Edwards), guitarist with Manic Street Preachers, and his encounter with a journalist who questioned his band’s authenticity in the press. Edwards took out a razorblade and etched “4 REAL” into his arm. This act of carving authenticity into his arm connects James with “a performative vocabulary that speaks of his authenticity as he performs it” (59). That is, in the words of one critic Wiseman-Trowse cites, “the act is private but has public consequences; the sign is authentic but archly so, calling attention to itself as an artificial statement as it declares its reality” (59).

Of course there is a contradiction inherent in these signifying processes representing class. The authenticity that rock discourse generates—which artists self-reflectively or unconsciously deploy, and into which audiences are in various ways drawn—actually masks what popular music is: an industrialized form that grants the oppositional character and authenticity of pop performers in the first place. It is a contradiction that Wiseman-Trowse carefully explores throughout the history of British popular music.

The scope of the study is broad, as much as it focuses on specific case studies. Wiseman-Trowse offers an overview of the “folk voice” in British culture, and how it came to articulate not “the voice of the people,” but an oppositional idiom deployed to resist commercialism and middle-class values. The first case study considers the conflation of this folk voice with rock music, and how the organic nature of folk performance was supplanted by a sense of authenticity generated through unmediated acoustic performance that came to embody a romantic ideal in opposition to industrialism.

The second case study examines the British punk movement, complicating the popular media portrayal of this music as belonging to the working-class youth. Wiseman-Trowse explores the evolution of punk, the different ways punk engaged its representations in the media, and how it consistently constructed its own values of authenticity in dialogue with and in opposition to rock discourse. He also considers how the genre affirms working-class solidarity, while at the same maintaining a masculine character, the implications of which comment on the values circulating within rock discourse.

While this work does not pretend to be exhaustive in its approach to British popular music, its theoretical implications are far-reaching. Scholars exploring the significance of American popular music, for instance, particularly issues of audience reception, will find much of interest in this study. Performing Class in British Popular Music is a work that considers the “text” of popular music on multiple interpretive horizons, not only at the levels of lyrical content, artist biography, and performance, but also the ever-shifting discursive contexts surrounding and shaping popular music.

2009-04-29T10:47:00.001-07:00

The Hayloft Gang: The Story of the National Barn Dance

Edited by Chad Berry. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, August 2008. Cloth: ISBN 978-0-252-03353-7, $65.00; paper: 978-0-252-07557-5, $24.95. 232 pages

Review by Sara Boslaugh

When you think “country music,” what American cities come first to mind? Most likely Nashville, followed perhaps by Branson or Bakersfield, with Chicago way down the list if it comes up at all. And yet Chicago was a center of country music in the genre’s formative years and played a crucial role in popularizing the country sound to a broad audience. An important aspect of this influence was the radio program The National Barn Dance (NBD), a variety show including string bands, singers, and comedy sketches, which began broadcasting on WLS from Chicago on April 19, 1924 and remained on the air until 1969.

NBD launched the career of many popular country musicians, including Gene Autry and Patsy Montana. Bill Monroe also made his professional debut as a square dancer on the show, which was recorded live before an audience at Chicago’s Eighth Street Theatre. NBD served as the model for the WSM Barn Dance (now The Grand Ole Opry), which began broadcasting from Nashville the following year. Ironically, while nearly everyone has heard of The Grand Ole Opry, its predecessor has largely faded from public memory.

Reclaiming that lost heritage is the goal of the essays in The Hayloft Gang: The Story of the National Barn Dance, edited by Chad Berry, director of the Appalachian Center at Berea College. Some of the essays stick close to the topic implied by the title and trace the programming, economic history, and other aspects of the program. Others venture farther afield, discussing broader cultural aspects of country music.

Paul Tyler and Wayne W. Daniels remain close to the source as they trace the history of NBD: Tyler covers the program from its origins in 1924 through the 1930’s in “The Rise of Rural Rhythm,” while Daniel’s “Music of the Postwar Era” picks up the story from the 1940’s through the station’s demise in 1969. Both essays are loaded with information and together create a convincing picture of the program and its place in American culture of the period. Lisa Krissoff Boehm discusses the importance of the city of Chicago in the popularization of country music in “Chicago as Forgotten Country Music Mecca,” while Susan Smulyan places NBD in the context of a young but rapidly-growing radio industry in “Early Broadcasting and Radio Audiences.”

Michael T. Bertrand, in “Race and Racial Identity,” argues that NBD was one among a number of contemporary radio programs that promoted the benefits of traditional rural culture against what some saw as threatening aspects of modern life, including urbanization and new styles of music. He also notes that blackface performers appeared on NBD as they did on many radio programs of the period, and that “minstrelsy” touring acts were popular as well. Kristine M. McKusker traces patriarchal attitudes, as exemplified by NBD programming, as well as other aspects of contemporary culture in “Patriarchy and the Great Depression.” In “Cowboys in Chicago,” Don Cusic takes a look at an obvious question, yet one I can’t recall having been addressed previously: how did the image of the cowboy come to be identified with country music, and why did rural southern performers frequently adopt western stage personas? For example, Ruby Blevins of Arkansas became “Patsy Montana” and as such sold over a million copies of her hit song “I Want to Be a Cowboy’s Sweetheart.” Cusic argues that the cowboy was a wholesome, all-American image that replaced that of the less attractive and less marketable hillbilly. Finally, in “The National Folk Festival,” Michael Ann Williams looks at the relationship between the National Folk Festival (begun in 1934) and NBD.

If Chicago and country music seem to go together like chalk and cheese, consider two powerful cultural myths debunked by several authors in this collection. One is the commonly-accepted “creation myth” of country music, which places its origins entirely in the South; the other is the popular image of Chicago as a haven for crooked politicians, gangsters, and jazz. Both are oversimplifications: Paul Tyler convincingly argues that country music is more rural than exclusively southern, and Lisa Krissoff Boehm makes the case that Chicago was a diverse city which included many rural people who migrated there for employment; it’s not surprising that they brought their musical tastes with them. Furthermore, Chicago was the headquarters of Sears and Roebuck, who owned WLS at the time (the call letters stand for “World’s Largest Store”), a company which understood that rural and small-town America constituted an important source of customers for their catalogue sales.

Overall, the essayists did an admirable job, often working with a dearth of available materials: although the show was broadcast for 4 ½ hours weekly, the main source of recordings is the one-hour national broadcasts carried by NBC, and these were not representative of the program as a whole. A greater problem, treated less effectively, is that it’s impossible to determine who was listening to the program, or why: assumptions can be made, extrapolating from statements by station management and the type of programming included, but they must remain speculative. True, listeners did write to the station, revealing their tastes and preferences, but these form what social scientists call a self-selected sample. There’s no way to know if attitudes expressed by people who chose to write letters to the station (or make telephone calls, or send telegraphs) were representative of the broader listenership; modern survey research suggests just the opposite.

Other readers will no doubt take issue with other specific points included in one or more of the essays in The Hayloft Gang, but together they present a variety of viewpoints on NBD and form a valuable addition to the history of radio and of country music.

2009-02-12T19:05:00.000-08:00

Pop Surf Culture: Music, Design, Film and Fashion from the Bohemian Surf Boom

By Brian Chidester and Dominic Priore. Santa Monica: Santa Monica Press, November 2008. Cloth: ISBN 978-1595800350, $39.95. 272 pages.

Review by Kristin Lawler, College of Mount Saint Vincent, New York

The surfer is everywhere. Ubiquitous in print, on television, and up on the big screen, the image of the surfer has found yet another home, on the coffee tables of America. Scores of outsized, large-print, image-drenched books have been published over the last decade or so. Brian Chidester and Dominic Priore’s Pop Surf Culture: Music, Design, Film, and Fashion from the Bohemian Surf Boom, is the latest entry in this extremely profitable genre. The focus of the book is the heyday of surf culture in early 1960s Southern California, and the central place that the innovative rock known as surf music held within surf culture at that time. As a matter of fact, the title is a bit misleading. This book is almost exclusively about surf music, so much so that a reader unfamiliar with the expanse of mid-century surf culture in all its visual, literary, and subcultural permutations, will probably get the idea that surf music and surf culture were largely identical. The history of the subculture is treated strictly as prelude to what the authors see as the key moment – the explosion of garage rock teenage indie surf bands during the first four years of the sixties. The mentions that other incarnations of surf culture do warrant – the surf movies, for instance – are generally limited to pointing out the centrality of surf music within them. Music was central to the surf movie genre, but so were the characters, the storylines, and the fluid image of the surfer gliding across the wave. So as a comprehensive treatment of “pop surf culture,” the book largely fails. However, read as the story of surf music and its intense penetration into early sixties pop culture, its centrality to other aspects of surf culture, its roots, its reverberations – in the mod British invasion bands, in psychedelic hippie music, through 80s new wave, to the Pulp Fiction soundtrack and into the 1990s hipster rediscovery of lounge music, burlesque, and go-go – it’s as comprehensive a treatment as you’ll find. And it leaves no room for doubt that surf music’s relegation to a footnote in the history of rock and roll has been a serious injustice. Surf music deserves a central location on the map of rock history, and thanks to Pop Surf Culture, it may just take its proper place. Most important, the authors turn up the volume on a largely overlooked aspect of surf culture – its link with bohemianism, in both its beat generation and its hippie incarnations. The academic treatment of surf culture is pathetically thin, given the surfer’s prominent and enduring status as an American archetype. Worse, when the pop culture image of the surfer is discussed, it’s generally dismissed as some kind of bland, all-American, wholesome reaction to the truly oppositional incarnations of mid-century youth culture. The authors insist on the “bohemian,” “beatnik,” “psychedelic,” and “trippy” content of surf art and music, implicitly arguing against the standard misinterpretation of pop culture surf. It’s in making this argument that the treatment of the visual aspect of 1950s and 60s surf cultural productions transcends the marginal status it’s given in much of the work as a whole. (The chapter on fashion, for instance, feels like an afterthought.) The connections between beat-hip Southern California artists and the producers of the early surf graphics, magazines, and comics are laid out with such precision that there can no longer be any question of the role played by surf culture in the history of American bohemianism. With similar attention to detail, the authors trace the transition between “beat-surf” rock and roll and the “psychedelic surf pastiche” it later morphed into. In fact, Pop Surf Culture is best when it’s providing incontrovertible evidence for the idea that surf culture is actually the forgotten link between the beat generation and the hippies – beat, it seems, went to the beach, got a tan, grew its hair, and turned hippie. In the end, though, the authors abandon their own narrative of the lasting significance of surf culture. Their conclusion, that after the early seventies, the baby boomers’ “emergent culture of unconsciousness” combined with the “professional sports mentality” to send “the true story arc of pop surf culture…underground from here on out” is facile and simplistic, to say the least. It springs from the book’s most glaring limitation – its reliance on the fiction of an “authentic” surf culture, somehow unspoiled by big commerce. The book begins with the statement, “Let’s get something straight, right off the bat – authenticity has nothing to do with it.” Ah, would that it were so. The very simplest version of co-optation theory is at work here, an assumption that an “authentic” surf culture produced by mid-century youth flowered until commercial forces evacuated it of its meaningful content and pimped its shell out for profit. The problem is, there’s no evidence here, or in any of the twentieth-century history of surf culture for that matter, that supports the authors’ theory of the relationship between “authentic” subcultural production and the degradations of commerce. The simple fact that the authors miss is that surf culture, like rock and roll itself, has been a commercial product since its inception. This confusion about the concept of “pop” leads the authors to rely on quite insufferable pronouncements about the “great” stuff vs. the “drivel” in place of more interesting lines of cultural analysis. And as in most analyses grounded in a discourse of authenticity, the distinctions the authors draw are arbitrary, inconsistent, and irrelevant. For them, obscure bands and fly-by-night labels from beach towns were real. Surf bands from the Midwest were real, too, however, presumably because they, like their coastal counterparts, played the heavy-reverb guitar riffs and rolling, thunderous drumbeats that evoked the power of the wave and that, played live in teen dance venues, set kids dancing the “surfers’ stomp.” But then, the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean – who were far removed from the garage-punk aesthetic and the surf rock sound – are treated reverentially here. The reason seems to be that the authors just really dig them. If devolving into matters of taste were the only danger of the always-arbitrary discourse of authenticity, it might not be so bad. But it also places severe limitations on cultural analysis, as the authors inadvertently demonstrate. These guys are just a little too indie for their own good. Although the image of the surfer is more prominent today than it’s been in decades, and surfing itself is more globally popular than ever before, the authors make of obscurity such a virtue that they fully miss the big story – that surf culture in all its (still) countercultural glory is alive and well and gaining strength. For them, “true” surf still exists – but only in and around one artsy surf shop in San Francisco! We’d overlook an awful lot about what’s actually happening in surf culture, and its continuity with its bohemian roots, if we followed the authors down this lonely road. So it’s better not to. The book is wildly uneven, and suffers from some serious problems of logic and organization. But the depth of the research (not to mention the exhaustive parade of obscure and fabulous record covers) makes it an enormously significant, if very partial, contribution to the history of what is arguably America’s most enduring countercultural form. The key is to check your critical eye at page one. Imagine you’ve met a beat-style hipster in a Venice Beach café, one with an encyclopedic knowledge and a wild, untamed enthusiasm for what he considers to be the coolest and most important thing that’s ever happened, man. He may contradict himself at times, bore you with meaningless details at others, but you won’t be sorry you listened. What Pop Surf Culture lacks at the level of cultural analysis, it makes up for at the level of straightforward cultural history. Take it for what it is, and enjoy.

2009-02-11T14:31:00.000-08:00

Rebels Wit Attitude: Subversive Rock Humorists

By Iain Ellis. New York: Soft Skull Press, December 2008. Paper: ISBN 978-1-59376-206-3, $15.95. 256 pages.

Review by Justin Patch, University of Texas, Austin

In a world of crisis, chaos, globalization and panic, it is too often the outwardly serious and grave elements of culture that capture the spotlight and imagination of academics. More often than not, the humanities are caught trying to legitimate their subjects to wider audiences by adapting catch words like “dangerous,” “weapons” and “resistance.” The topic of humor is often left to footnotes or relegated to one-off articles rather than the study of a full-length monograph, save for a long history of writings on political satire. In the field of music scholarship, this tendency is amplified. The movement to ennoble popular music has left its playful side in corner with a dunce cap while focusing on the teacher’s pets: hidden epistemologies, political economy, gender, globalization, and regional and transnational community formation. But even as music scholarship turns a blind eye and a deaf ear to humor, it continues to rear its comical head, like a Punch and Judy theater at a joust.

Enter Iain Ellis’s Rebels Wit Attitude: Subversive Rock Humorists, complete with a pun on one of the most influential rock albums of all time on the cover. Through a decade-by-decade account of key artists and genres, Ellis charges through six decades of rock and hip-hop, giving accounts of the times and providing selective case studies of artists he finds particularly compelling. Ellis makes his case that subversion and humor have been an essential element of rock music, built into its genres and forms, one of its defining characteristics. He goes on to outline the various over-generalized and leaky types of humor – wit, dumb, primal, idiotic, and subcultural, each with expansive definitions that bleed into and out of each other. He also provides his parameters, with sufficient reflexivity to acknowledge that this is simply a preliminary survey, lacking in comprehensiveness and depth. It is indeed an exploratory work, one which does not claim authority and does leave plenty of space for others to delve deeper. One glaring gap that Ellis graciously opens up to is that he is completely US-centric. He brackets all of the UK’s influential rock in an effort to contain the beast that is rock humor into 256 pages.

The objects of Ellis’s inquiry are indeed interesting and seminal to the study of popular music, at least in America. He provides short to medium studies of the likes of Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Big Mama Thornton, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Bob Dylan, The Mothers and the Velvet Underground, Warren Zevon, Marilyn Manson, The Ramones, Madonna, Weird Al Yankovic, Missy Elliot, and the Modern Lovers, to name a few. He also champions the re-assessment of Wanda Jackson and a re-thinking and interpretation of the famous cookie-cutter girl-groups of the 60s like the Shangri-las. Within this mass of material, he brings up the role of humor in both defining and re-defining youth culture, gender norms, sexuality, and the music business.

Rebels Wit Attitude stands as an open portal for delving into humor in a serious and meaningful way. Because of its form as a survey, dealing mostly with surface rather than plumbing the absolute depths of one age or particular artists, and making no attempt to tie music culture into greater popular culture trends, Ellis invites others to latch on to his case studies as a starting point for more involved and focused work.

For all there is to recommend this, there are some frustrating points. There is little theorizing about how his own parameters of what constituted the applicable humor for specific ages. Rarely do case studies interact with scholarship concerning the social milieu of the decade, generation, or genre, save for topical and stylistic associations to the belligerent humor of Lenny Bruce and George Carlin. Overtures are made to other bodies of scholarship, but Ellis does not overtly make connections or theorize these interactions, a stylistic choice, no doubt. He is also slightly too generous with titling music as subversive, labeling subversive anything that has a different, oppositional vision of the existing hegemony. Without any words on relational aspects of resistive or differently imaginative discourses to the cultures that birthed them, it is hard to get a sense of how these musicians and genres fit into the greater mass of popular culture, remained vibrant and relevant, and were able to be a part of the music market system (which all of them were to a greater or lesser extent). He also does not deal with the marketing of rebellion and its impact on the production of subversive humor. Although the overview format is useful, it does leave many questions unanswered, and leaves deep trenches for other brave, and tenured, scholars to plumb.

With all of its gaps and questions, Rebels still stands as an excellent first step into a relevant aspect of rock culture. As an academic book, it can serve as an alternate reader for any popular music class, as it is not music-technical at all, and covers many of the trends, artists, and genres that are common in history of rock classes. For anyone looking for a style guide to writing compelling prose about music, Ellis is definitely someone to look to; his writing, not bogged down by jargon or excessive citation, is clean and succinct.

2009-02-11T14:21:00.000-08:00

Delta Blues: The Life and Times of The Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionized American Music

By Ted Gioia. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, October 2008. Cloth: ISBN 978-0-393-06258-8, $27.95; also available on Amazon.com’s Kindle, $9.95. 448 pages.

Review by Timothy J. O’Brien, University of Houston

Music lovers and researchers have long been fascinated with the mystery and imagery of the blues. The story of Delta bluesman Robert Johnson’s going to the crossroads and selling his soul to the devil in exchange for a superior talent to play the blues is the primary blues myth. Decades after his death, the public fascination with Johnson translated into Grammy awards, sales of over a million copies of the boxed set of his music, movies, and numerous books. Robert Johnson and his legend became the most profitable commodity in blues music. All the attention is focused on a performer who only lived twenty-seven years and recorded less than thirty songs. Despite the enormous posthumous popularity of Johnson, very little is known about his life.An understanding of the Mississippi Delta region and its musicians is necessary to contextualize Johnson’s role in blues history. Although Gioia’s book does not add any details to Johnson’s biography, it excels in sketching a broader picture of the musicians’ lives and the music of the region. Gioia begins by setting out the origins and history of the music. In an early chapter he explains the success and significance of W.C. Handy and blues women Ma Rainey, Mamie Smith, and others. Discussions of the environment of the blues such as plantations and Parchman prison further set the stage for the musicians’ lives. After filling out the cultural context and the formulation of the music, Gioia organizes his study by biographies of both popular and lesser-known blues figures.

Although the book does not have a thesis, the title argues that the subject musicians were responsible for revolutionizing American music. The author allows that the absence of definitive data in many facets of the Delta blues necessarily permits numerous interpretations of the material that is available.

Early on there are warning signs that Gioia will engage in hyperbole. For example, he sets out unsupported assertions that the Delta blues hold “second place to none” and “possess the deepest roots of all” (5). The book does not contrast or compare Delta blues with blues from any other region, so the reader is left to take those declarations on faith. However, for the most part, Gioia refrains from objectifying and romanticizing his topic.

The sources are mostly secondary, but Gioia did conduct some archival research at the Library of Congress. The relative scarcity of original research is supplemented by in-depth interviews with the leading researchers in the field. Gioia’s knowledge of the topic, and his smooth and engaging prose, are also strengths. In addition to digging deep into the existing scholarship, he listens hard to the music, searching for answers and meanings in the lyrics. He steers clear of jargon, complex academic theories, and technical music terms, which makes the volume accessible to a general audience. At times he reverts to a conversational or thinking-out-loud writing style that invites the reader to join him in looking for answers as he sifts through the evidence.

Gioia devotes a whole chapter to examining and reviewing Johnson’s life and the myths that surround it. He runs into the same barricades earlier researchers encountered. With so little known about Johnson, what can a writer add? Gioia settles for reviewing and analyzing the research and theories of Mack McCormick, David Evans, Gayle Dean Wardlow, Elijah Wald, and others. Gioia notes McCormick’s claim that he found Robert Johnson’s supposed killer but was unable to get McCormick to disclose the name. The chapter includes a concise look at Johnson’s influences and examines his songs and their themes. After weighing and discussing the theories and myth surrounding Johnson’s life, Gioia takes the position that the deal at the crossroads “may have never happened” (168). He ultimately comes to the conclusion that researchers are unlikely to ever solve the mysteries of Johnson’s life.

The limitations of the Delta-centric view of the blues show up in the chapter on the blues revival. Gioia notes Samuel Charters’s book The Country Blues “as a signal event in the history of the music” (351). However, he fails to note Charters’s 1959 rediscovery and recording of Sam Lightnin’ Hopkins, a Texas bluesman, and its importance in kicking off the blues revival. Instead, Gioia skips ahead to the rediscovery of the Delta blues men Ishmon Bracey and John Hurt in 1963.

It is commonly recognized that the blues impacted American music, and that the Mississippi masters whom Gioia examines were important blues artists. He never does quite flesh out the title statement that these masters revolutionized American music. He needs to connect the dots. Although he begins to develop this argument in the chapter on Muddy Waters, more evidence and examples would have strengthened his study. For example, merely listing famous musicians like Bob Dylan, Bo Diddley, Bonnie Raitt, and Carlos Santana who credited John Lee Hooker’s music is not enough. Gioia should explain how that Mississippi master influenced their art. That quibble aside, this is a solid contribution to the literature. It synthesizes a century of the blues and expands and updates Robert Palmer’s Deep Blues, the gold standard for Delta blues scholarship.

2008-12-14T16:44:00.000-08:00

Modern Noise, Fluid Genres: Popular Music in Indonesia, 1997-2001. By Jeremy Wallach. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, October 2008. Cloth: ISBN 978-0-299-22900-9, $50.00; paper: ISBN 978-0-299-22904-7, $24.95. 320 pages. CD included.

Review by Matthew J. Forss, Goddard College, Vermont

In Modern Noise, Fluid Genres, Jeremy Wallach provides an ethnographic and historical study of music and its cultural and social significance in Jakarta, Indonesia from 1997-2001. Drawing upon nearly 250 different reference sources, Wallach “aims to examine the processes of production, dissemination, replication, and interpretation of popular musics in Indonesia by tracing how these processes implicate and connect producers, performers, and listeners – all of whom play an active, creative role in the ongoing circulation of musical culture” (4). Essentially, this book’s approach to musical ethnography examines the “lives and concerns of actual people involved in the various stages of those cultural processes” (5). In contrast, previous studies have mainly examined cultural music from a “macro-level” or “transglobal” perspective. Of course, Wallach’s study is not meant to be an authority on global music discourse, but rather a specialized examination of local musical identity and culture, which provides a framework to study the “Indonesian-ness” of the music and its people.
After a short twenty-five-page introduction on the impact of political and social regimes on the music of the 1960’s through 1990’s, Wallach covers several different types of music genres in chapter one. The genres of pop barat (Western pop music), pop Indonesia (Western-influenced pop music), dangdut (Arabic/Indian/Malaysian pop music), musik daerah (regional music), and musik underground (metal/grunge/gothic) are described, as are several sub-genres. Importantly, these musical genres are explored in the modern post-Soeharto era, after years of oppressive sensibilities toward anything loosely defined as “non-Indonesian music.” Wallach does not investigate the more familiar, at least for Western audiences, genre of gamelan or court music.
Chapter two delves deeper into the inner workings of Jakartanese living. Wallach more than adequately describes the sights, sounds, and social developments throughout the city – paying close attention to examples of modernity, gender roles, and Internet cafes. Wallach does a fine job of pointing out the benefit in conducting an ethnographic study of musical culture that considers the continual flow of social experiences into living conditions and musical performance. In other words, musical investigation should be, and here is, carried out in an open system of ever-changing social, political, and religious constructs.
One of the highlights of this book includes a well-researched section in chapter three on cassette retail outlets. Such outlets include cassette stalls, mall stores, “large” music stores, reverse outfits of underground music, and mobile music vendors. This is a rather understudied arena, but nonetheless important area for any study of musical cultures and consumer culture. Wallach explores the retail business of music where a plethora of information on socioeconomics, consumer behavior, musical genres, and “metaculture” (culture about culture) can be obtained. Two pages are also devoted to cassette piracy and its impact on the commercial and underground music industry.
Chapter four covers sound production as part of the studio recording experience. Examples of recording techniques, problems, and organization of the musical recording experience are discussed, with special attention given to instruments, language, technologies, and cosmopolitanism. Chapter five examines the role of music videos as a form of musical expression and national identity. One highlight is Wallach’s study of a music video shoot that ended up with his being in the video for “Cahaya Bulan” (“Moonlight”), by the group Netral. Here, the reader is given a diary of sorts explaining the tiresome and somewhat dangerous act of filming a music video. However, Wallach always incorporates the larger picture of musical culture by noting social views on violence, cultural expression, ethics, sociality, and iconography.
Chapter six draws attention to the music constructed and performed in less structured environments in informal contexts. In essence, Wallach investigates the ethnography of “hanging out” and the social expression of playing music for fun. The primary reason for performing music in this context is that it creates a sense of commonality between individuals and a spirit of camaraderie. In a similar manner, Wallach spends a good deal of chapter seven on live musical expression from the streets of Jakarta to large stadium rock concerts. The performance style of dangdut music encapsulates the content of chapter eight. Dangdut incorporates a “gendang, suling, two electric guitars, electric bass guitar, two electronic keyboards, tambourine, trap drum…in some cases, electrified mandolin…or a brass section” (190). Other styles, such as rock and pop, are covered in chapter nine. This chapter explores other live venues and arenas of musical culture. For example, cafes and student-organized events, and the role of women and performance are also explained. The lesser-known style, at least for Westerners, may be Indonesia’s underground music scene. Chapter ten looks at this music and associated aesthetics of musical performance, including moshing, dancing, lifestyles, and issues associated with inclusionary expression. In summary, Wallach concludes, “[I]t is more appropriate to view Indonesian popular musics from dangdut to underground, as soundtracks for hanging out with others than as facilitators of private, contemplative listening” (251). In other words, “musical encounters are usually social affairs, and they derive their meanings and emotional resonance from intersubjective experiences” (251).

Overall, Wallach provides the reader with an in-depth, ethnographical study of musical cultures of Jakarta. For good or bad, Wallach also incorporates a lot of Indonesian words throughout the book, which may be distracting to some. However, every word is defined to prevent confusion. Appendix A and C provide additional notes on language usage, while Appendix B focuses on other Indonesian music genres. A helpful glossary is included with notes to each chapter. A CD is included and features six popular music tracks representing dangdut, pop alternatif, and underground music styles. Unfortunately, the lyrics to the songs are not included, but could have been beneficial for the reader. That being said, this is a highly recommended text for undergraduate and graduate students in Southeast Asian music, or anyone interested in Indonesian popular music in particular.

2008-11-16T15:04:00.000-08:00

No Depression: Surveying the Past, Present and Future of American Music. Edited by Grant Alden and Peter Blackstock. Austin: University of Texas Press, October 2008. Paper: ISBN 978-0-292-71928-6, $19.95. 144 pages.
Review by Jason Mellard, University of Texas at Austin
from SJC post 2 (10/13/08)

Founded in 1995 by Grant Alden and Peter Blackstock, the magazine No Depression, for all intents and purposes, defined the contemporary musical sub-genre of alt-country. This is not to downplay the role of artists themselves, from the Byrds of Sweetheart of the Rodeo to the Uncle Tupelo album of 1990 from which this magazine chose its name. However, through insightful artist profiles, album and performance reviews, interviews, and essays, a wide range of authors have operated under the No Depression banner to craft a deft collective portrait of that imaginative space where Americana, roots music, country and western, bluegrass, blues, honky-tonk, and the independent singer-songwriter converge. That is, until the competitive pressures of the brave new media world caught up with them in 2008. Rather than head for the metaphorical hills and hollers, though, the makers of No Depression have turned to a novel solution, dividing the labors of their quality magazine between a website (www.nodepression.com) and a large-format “bookazine” to be published twice a year by the University of Texas Press. This builds on Alden and Blackstock’s prior collaboration with UT Press, The Best of No Depression: Writing on American Music of 2005, only this new text features all original material, an attempt to expand on No Depression’s concerns in a lengthier format. The initial bookazine was published in October 2008.For the most part, the first foray into the new format works. The editors chose a single theme, that of youth and the next generation of artists, to cement the collected pieces, and the result will look familiar to those who followed the magazine. The work primarily proceeds through fourteen artist profiles written by thirteen different authors. These range from pieces on singer-songwriters (Carrie Rodriguez, Samantha Crain, Basia Bulat) to blues (Homemade Jamz Blues Band, Gary Clark, Jr.) to pop (Hanson), and with a disproportionate focus, perhaps, on the new wave of bluegrass artists (Sarah Jarosz, Sierra Hull, Infamous Stringdusters, Crooked Still).
At times, the profile format can seem repetitive, as each article follows the formula of introducing readers to the new ingénue or the next big thing, each with his or her own particular journalistic hook to make the profile stand out from the crowd: worrying over senior prom in small-town Tennessee despite global renown (Sierra Hull), emerging as a stand-alone artist out of the shadow of a nurturing mentor (Carrie Rodriguez), or singing bluegrass songs in Mandarin at the 2008 Olympics (Abigail Washburn). The repetition, though, serves a purpose and slowly reveals that standing out in the crowd might not be the goal here. Rather, the profiles, taken together, underscore a series of dialectics that have long undergirded the No Depression project. Page after page, the artist profiles begin to merge into a portrait that grows, stroke by journalistic stroke, into a conversation over the collective and the individual, tradition and novelty, rootedness and movement, authenticity and performativity, national identity and global culture. From its origins, the magazine did not blindly follow nor rigidly police the borders of American roots music, but operated amidst this savvy series of dichotomies. Its authors remain devoted to Americana, cognizant and respectful of its origins, its historicity and claims on authenticity, without making the mistake of fetishizing the people or places from which it came.The editors’ choice to place Abigail Washburn and the Sparrow Quartet featuring Béla Fleck on the cover highlights this awareness. Washburn has taken to hybridizing American bluegrass with traditional Chinese music, using the same quartet to play both forms and, then, performing the first musically while singing its lyrics in Mandarin. At first listen, American roots music might seem an unlikely place to find the trans-national at work, but in reality the genre’s regional frame complements the global one in subverting the primacy of the categories of the nation and nation-state. Even those No Depression artists seemingly most grounded in the authentic roots region of American music, such as the Homemade Jamz Blues Band of siblings Ryan, Kyle, and Taya Perry of Tupelo, Mississippi, act with a reflexivity and awareness born of the times in which they live. No Depression eschews the easy clichés of the folk that have shadowed discussions on American music at least since the days of the Lomaxes, if not Stephen Foster or some prior collector of song.Though the profiles collectively signify on these themes, and the reader begins to find an argument to the collection through repetition, the commitment to the artist profile in this first edition of the bookazine perhaps misses the wider opportunities that the format offers. The editors seem to have approached the project as another No Depression issue, only larger. However, the quality of the writers that No Depression has at its disposal, together with this new, bookish form produced by an academic press, open the possibility of more in-depth critical essays. Paul Cantin takes a stab with a closing essay on the category of youth and American music that sums up the prior profiles and comments on the perennial grumpiness of middle-aged critics writing on younger artists. The essay punctuates the collection well and hopefully augurs the inclusion of more like it in the future. That said, if Alden and Blackstock have yet to take full literary advantage of the format, they have maximized the visual ones. The new No Depression is an attractive volume with interesting photography throughout and an entire photo essay midway as intermezzo.
In all, the editors of No Depression have done well in their attempts to grow beyond the magazine format, and the continuing “bookazine” produced by the University of Texas Press will likely remain a influential source of writing on American music that will complement, corroborate, and, at times, outshine more self-professed academic efforts to do the same.

2008-10-13T20:28:00.001-07:00

Sounds of Change: A History of FM Broadcasting in America. By Christopher H. Sterling and Michael Keith. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, July 2008. Cloth: ISBN 978-0-8078-5888-2, $22.50. 336 pages.
Review by Joseph Michael Sommers, University of Kansas

In light of the rapid development in communications over the last decade, it feels unusual to pick up a recent study accounting for the history of FM radio in a twenty-first century dominated by live-streaming internet broadcasts, .mp3s and Steven Paul Jobs’s seemingly ubiquitous contribution to digital media: the iPod. As Lynn Christian notes, “the big question,” in this day and age, seems to be less where the medium of FM broadcasting began, but, rather, where is the once predominant distribution hub of all musical programming headed in a century primed to abandon the airwaves for smaller, clearer, and less ad-driven portable handhelds (x)? What will FM radio’s legacy be as a new millennium ushers in a new medium? Will FM radio remain a relevant participant in the discussion, or will it fall by the wayside like its predecessor, AM radio? In Sounds of Change: A History of FM Broadcasting in America, Christopher H. Sterling and Michael C. Keith suggest that we can focus our understanding of FM radio broadcasting’s future by revisiting the cyclical nature of its past. The book tells a story of the unstoppable will of technology and consumerism forcing the medium’s advancement, followed by the medium’s unwilling self-consumption.This is not to say that Sterling and Keith claim to know, or even speculate thoroughly on, FM’s future. On the contrary, one of the few criticisms that can be lobbied at this masterful investigation into the FM radio story is its lack of interest in the last fifteen years of the medium. While the authors rightly pay respect to analog radio as it enters the final days of its lifecycle—its “decline,” beginning with the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (echoing, as they note, AM radio’s death knell with the Communications Act of 1934)—they pay only middling attention to FM’s august years in a terse, truncated montage of a final chapter. This becomes especially evident when this ultra-brief coverage is compared to the replete investigation of FM’s infancy, early struggles, and boon years. Given that their argument hinges on the notion that the digital revolution seems to mirror FMs usurpation of AM radio a half century earlier, it is odd that the authors do not make a stronger connection to the next evolutionary step in the format. In other words, in shirking a greater investigation of the current moment, particularly as it is so well-documented, Sterling and Keith fumble in a manner similar to the AM operators they write about, who did not believe that there was any future in FM transmission. The authors do acknowledge this point, indicating with some sense of wistful nostalgia that they know the end for FM radio is nigh, but that does not mitigate treating the “phase out” years as a somewhat sentimental montage (213).Minor criticisms of their treatment of the contemporary moment aside, this study is far more handsome and replete when documenting the early and middle years, even if it does come up short closer to the present day. Written with a prose as lively as it is erudite, the authors connect the rise of FM broadcasting to a global event and a man—The Second World War and Howard Armstrong—and that man’s struggle to convince American broadcasters to embrace a tiny slice of the band that would eventually come to dominate the spectrum. More importantly, besides simply accounting for the dramatic rise of the medium, theirs is a study that fills a dearth in the research documenting the greater cultural history surrounding the project: FM’s birth in New England; its struggle with corporate AM, Congress, and RCA (a story as dramatic, arguably, as the struggles history suggests occurred between Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla); the Eureka! moment of stereophonic sound; and the migration into cities and into automobiles by a swelling American population after WWII. Hundreds of such narratives give the greater pastiche a well-defined and discernable shape. The names and faces are familiar, and the authors use a deft methodology to cover an immensely dense field of personalities ranging from Orson Welles and his famous War of the Worlds broadcast in 1938 through Sirius’s recent acquisition of Howard Stern, with the narrative tact of a nineteenth-century Russian novelist.In the end, Sterling and Keith make a more-than-commendable, and largely successful, effort to make FM radio’s story reflect a larger socio-cultural relief. They examine FM’s history as a test case for the question of “Who owns the media, and how does that matter?” (5). In recent days, as questions such as these seem to occupy the American zeitgeist across the greater media, Sterling and Keith’s volley into the discussion is a well-considered exploration and response. The authors use FM radio as one such example in order to illustrate George Santayana’s famous dictum concerning the ramifications befalling those who fail to remember their past. That the authors do not prognosticate the immediate future of FM radio is not necessarily a fault as much as a caution, given the speed with which the medium is evolving. Yet, given the otherwise overwhelming successes and merits accomplished in this whirlwind barnstorm across the dial over the course of some eighty years, even Sterling and Keith’s opinions on FM’s future would have been appreciated. As is, the study is marked by an intrepid effort into a history that still floats out into the reaches of space as radio waves. Given the strength of their analysis, superb prose, and generosity of spirit toward the subject matter, Sterling and Keith seem to have spent long nights listening to those broadcasts while composing this fine contribution to the field of communications.

2008-08-19T18:02:00.001-07:00

from Texas A&M University Press

Texas Blues: The Rise of a Contemporary Sound

by Alan Govenar

under review by Jonathan C. R. Hill, National University of Singapore

2008-08-19T17:58:00.001-07:00

from Palgrave Macmillan
The Funk Era and Beyond: New Perspectives on Black Popular Culture
by Tony Bolden
under review by Meida Teresa McNeal, Brown University

2008-08-19T17:55:00.001-07:00

from University of Illinois Press
The Hayloft Gang: The Story of the National Barn Dance
by Chad Berry
under review by Sarah Boslaugh, Ph.D.