|
Institute for Studies In American Music |
|
|
|
|
|
Inside This Issue: Inside This Issue Jungle Jive: Race, Jazz, and Cartoons by Daniel Goldmark
Taking Henry Flynt Seriously by Benjamin Piekut Hearing Hip-Hop’s Jamaican Accent by Wayne Marshall Capturing Sound and Making Beats: Review by Joseph Auner Ives's 129 Songs: Review by Gayle Sherwood Magee American Popular Music: Review by Daniel Sonenberg |
American
Popular Music: Review by Daniel
Sonenberg
The Supremes “The
history of American popular music,” write Larry Starr and Christopher
Waterman, “is best thought of, not as a single story told in a single
voice, but as a variegated and continually shifting landscape, characterized by
the complex interaction of various styles, performers, audiences, and
institutions.” In charting this diverse terrain for their book American
Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MTV (Oxford University Press, 2003;
$69.95), Starr and Waterman rely on a similarly eclectic range of expertise.
Starr, a professor of music history at the University of Washington, has
published books on Charles Ives and Aaron Copland, and it is worth noting
that the title to his book on Ives, A Union of Diversities, could have
served equally well as a subtitle to the current volume. Waterman, a
professional jazz bassist, anthropologist, and ethnomusicologist, is
Professor of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA, and has written Jùjú: A
Social History and Ethnography of an African Popular Music (1990).
Bringing their various strengths to the task, Starr and Waterman achieve a
remarkably well-balanced and thorough survey. As the authors point out on the first page of their
preface, the interdisciplinary nature of American Popular Music, which
combines “the study of cultural and social history on the one hand, and
the analytical study of musical style on the other” (p. vii),
distinguishes it in its field. Starr and Waterman's seamless union of two
potentially conflicting orientations, the historical and analytical, should
be as instructive to denizens of popular music studies journals, conferences,
and listservs as it is enlightening to the book’s non-specialist target
audience. The attempt to achieve such a balance has exercised scholars of
popular music for the past quarter century, during which time pop has emerged
from its once ghettoized position in the ranks of musicological subject
matter to become a hot topic. It is this rise from oblivion that has
engendered the kind of college-level popular music survey for which American
Popular Music would be an excellent textbook. If the
“diversities” of American popular music—ranging from
nineteenth-century minstrelsy through twentieth-century Tin Pan Alley song,
swing, blues, country, doo-wop, rock ’n’ roll, heavy metal, punk,
new wave, rap, reggae, and techno—are self-apparent, ways in which
these disparate strands might be understood to constitute a
“union” may be less so. To that end, Starr and Waterman identify
several “themes and streams” in their opening chapter, narrative
threads and sources of influence that span the chronological divide from
Steven Foster to Ani DiFranco, offering some sense of diachronic continuity
to an otherwise dizzying array of
styles and milieus. These themes include “Listening,”
“Music and Identity,” “Music and Technology,”
“The Music Business,” and “Centers and Peripheries,”
and these are by no means mutually
exclusive. Thus can the “long, complicated history of white
fascination with black music” (p. 453) including the music of minstrelsy, Paul Whiteman, Bill Haley, the
Beatles, and the Beastie Boys be understood in the thematic contexts of Music and Identity, Centers and
Peripheries, and the Music Business. While these monikers are only explicitly
rearticulated in the book’s conclusion, their presence as an organizing
principle is felt throughout and infuses the narrative with nuance. Starr and Waterman resist essentialist arguments and
tired standard tropes. About the common distinction between black and white
music, they observe: "The very fact that Americans speak of black and
white music as though these were self-evident, well-defined entities stems
from a particular history of racial segregation—and from the so-called
Jim Crow laws designed during the early
twentieth century to prevent racial commingling in the American
South" (p. 453). This tendency to deal unblinkingly with sensitive issues
extends to their treatment of gender and sexuality, politics, race, and
ethnicity in relation to such contrasting artistic personae as those of Merle
Haggard, Ice Cube and k.d. lang. Listening is the central unifying theme of American
Popular Music, which comes packaged with two CDs of musical examples,
representing only a fraction of the many songs and recordings invoked over
the course of the book. It is in considering specific songs and styles that
Starr and Waterman’s interdisciplinary approach shines the brightest,
as neither technical detail, nor social significance, nor the ever-elusive “meaning,”
in all its myriad guises, are treated as secondary. Listening examples are
treated in a number of ways, from brief mentions that last a sentence or two,
to multiple-page “Listening and Analysis” sections, complete with
listening charts. Like the rest of the book, these detailed accounts are
written in a lively, engaging manner, and routinely present fresh insights on
familiar material. After describing the unconventional formal structure of
The Supremes’ “You Can’t Hurry Love,” the authors
deftly observe that: All this play
with form would be just so much intellectual busywork if it didn’t
reflect on the meaning of the song.
“You Can’t Hurry Love” is a song about the importance of
waiting. Formally, the song keeps us guessing—waiting for clarification
for the functional relationships among the different sections. (p. 243) The analyses
do without musical notation, and technical terms that appear in boldface are
defined in a glossary. One of the few shortcomings about American Popular
Music concerns the accompanying audio examples. The CDs are at times
painfully incomplete, due of course to licensing restrictions and cost as the
authors acknowledge in the preface, and even for some of the larger analyses
the reader will have to find recordings elsewhere. In the age of iTunes,
however, this absence is a diminishing inconvenience. A future edition would
benefit from a discography and a list of listening examples in addition to
the list of CD tracks, which is provided. These points aside, American Popular Music: From
Minstrelsy to MTV is a tremendous accomplishment. A vast array of styles
and contexts are skillfully brought together in a coherent and thoroughly
readable narrative, and the authors’ delight in their subject matter is
palpable on every page. For the student, teacher, or general reader
interested in pop, this book unquestionably becomes the definitive survey
text. —Daniel Sonenberg University of Southern Maine ISAM home Who we
are Contact us
ISAM Conferences and Lectures Copyright © 2005
Institute for Studies in American Music, Conservatory of Music, Brooklyn
College. All Rights Reserved.
|
