Hole in Our Soul: the Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music.

AuthorDoherty, Brian

Bewailing the content and character of American popular music is often a sport of intellectuals and would-be culture critics who try their hardest never to have to listen to pop music. So this book starts with an advantage: Its author, Martha Bayles, is a serious, credentialed cultural critic who claims no inherent antagonism toward popular music. Her stated goal is to grapple with exactly what has happened to her once-beloved American pop to make it ring so harshly in her ears.

Coarse, vulgar, nihilistic, grating, unlovely in every sense--those are the qualities that Bayles hears in today's pop music. The problem, she says, is that the pure stream of life-affirming Afro-American music, which gets a loving historical overview from her, has been polluted by an injection of attitudes and approaches imported from the European modernist avant-garde. She parses out three strains of modernism, which she calls "introverted" (overly self-obsessed, hermetic, unconcerned with connection with an audience), "extroverted" (striking a balance between skilled formal innovation and respect for tradition), and "perverse" (obscene, nihilistic, obsessed with shocking the bourgeoisie). The middle one, she argues, has been salubrious; the first and last have proven venomous to the system of American pop.

Bayles praises the "tough, affirmative" spirit of the blues, and it is in general a good-natured humanism--and a perceived lack of obscenity, violence, and bombastic romanticism--that she seems to admire in it. (The material of the blues was not, of course, actually devoid of obscenity and violence.)

But only jazz enjoys extended musico-logical definition or appreciation from her. It is not the multi-leveled and multi-influenced tradition of the American popular song that really excites Bayles. While posing as an open-minded lover of America's multifarious Afro-American music tradition, she reveals herself instead as that stuffiest of 20th-century musical nuisances, the jazzbo.

As for funk, hip-hop, and most rock 'n' roll, well, that's not even authentically black to her. It's a corrupted nugget of Afro-American root coated with an unpalatable layer of European "perverse modernism." She longs for the old days of buoyant, positive, rhythmically syncopated music made with a certain degree of compositional and melodic complexity and rooted in Afro-American musical traditions. In other words, she misses jazz, a music that hasn't been considered "pop" by most people for around 50 years.

With certain elements of the Republican Party calling for a "culture war," matters that could be considered personal taste--such as appreciation for modern popular music--are becoming presumptive signs of being an alien influence. (Bayles echoes this charge about the aspects of modern pop she dislikes.) Certain questions are entering the realm of politics (which of course, in the end, is the realm of force) with disturbing regularity. Is culture, especially modern culture, "good for you"? Are there essential differences in being good aesthetically and good morally? Is it enough, if you care about a healthy and humane culture, to simply let people like what they like?

Cultural criticism runs a strong risk of reading to many otherwise intelligent readers as if it is written in a foreign tongue. Discussions of the relative beauty or syncopation of popular music might seem like irrelevant babble to someone who isn't a devotee or scholar. Though Bayles tries to deny it by her insistent linkage of the aesthetic and the moral, much of this really is a matter of taste and relative refinement of ear. I suppose she wouldn't believe me if I told her that her judgments about such bands as the New York Dolls, the Kinks, Led Zeppelin, and the Velvet Underground are signs of an untutored ear when it comes...

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