Bad Music: The Music We Love to Hate [Paperback]

Christopher J. Washburne (Editor), Maiken Derno (Editor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0415943663 | ISBN-13: 978-0415943666 | Publication Date: September 28, 2004 | Edition: 1

"There are only two kinds of music: good and bad", said the late and great Ray Charles. This book explores his instinctive opinion. Some popular musical forms and performers are universally reviled by critics and ignored by scholars - despite enjoying large-scale popularity. How has the notion of what makes "good" or "bad" music changed over the years - and what does this tell us about the writers who have assigned these tags to different musical genres? Many composers that are today part of the classical "canon" were greeted initially by bad reviews. Similarly, jazz, country, and pop music were all once rejected as "bad" by the establishment that now runs courses on them. This book addresses why this is so through an eclectic series of essays on different musical forms and performers. It looks at alternate ways of judging musical performance beyond conventional criticism and academia and suggests new paths to follow in understanding of what makes some music "popular" even if it is judged to be "bad." High brow, low brow, no brow - this is the book for you.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Every now and then a book comes along that is embedded in our collective cultural conscience that we rarely see publicly discussed. Bad Music: The Music We Love to Hate is such a volume.
–Laura J. Gray, University of Wartloo, Notes, September 2005

About the Author

Chris Washburne is an Assistant Professor in the Music Department at Columbia University. He is also a trombonist who has played with major bands led by Tito Puente and Eddie Palmieri, and leads his own Latin-jazz group.
Maiken Derno holds a Post-Doctoral Fellowship in the Dept of Comparative Literature at the U of Copenhagen, and was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia U from 1997-98. She also serves as an editor for Brondum Art Publishers, Copenhagen. They reside in New York City.

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Routledge; 1 edition (September 28, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0415943663
• ISBN-13: 978-0415943666
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,420,673 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Good, no, make that GREAT book about "Bad" Music, February 17, 2008

By 

Dan Starr - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bad Music: The Music We Love to Hate (Paperback)

Truth in advertising demands that I start this review by stating that I'm hardly an objective observer of music (as if anyone actually is!) No, I'm a professional pianist, piano instructor, and author of my own piano instruction manuals. I live music.

This alone might make you think of stuffed shirts snooty elitist musicians and cloud your perception of my perceptions. But keep your mind open, 'cause I hail from a musical school which sees value in almost every type of music, not just classical but country, not just Bach but blues. I like them all, play them all, and get a real charge out of teaching them all.

And that's the first reason why I like this book so much - it says so much about PEOPLE and our likes and dislikes. I've always held that music is the way it is because people are the way they are, and any book which examines the human side of what is smugly called "music theory" is a book I've got to read. Thus, the first point in favor of this sanely sized book is subject matter - people and their opinions.

Second point of success is that the editors have gathered a truly eclectic batch of essays which deal with music from a dizzying variety of angles. Eclectic is good, to my way of thinking (so what that you can play everything Chopin ever wrote? can you play a Beatles tune or improvise some jazz?) Just consider these chapter headings:

Does Kenny G Play Bad Jazz?
The Good, the Bad, and the Folk
Extreme Noise Terror: Punk Rock and the Aesthetics of Badness
Rock Critics Need Bad Music

Gad, what a grab bag!

Some of these essays are seriously serious, inserted I think with the editors' tounges firmly in cheek, to demonstrate the uber-complexity of the "minds" of some music "theorists." Other essays simply and quickly make points about how various genres have been marketed. Oh, this is wild stuff, and even my years in the music field didn't provide some of these understandings. Any reader interested in the ebb and flow of music and society will find fascinating material here.

The chief editor, Christopher Washburne, contributes an introduction and only one essay, one of those mentioned above, the one concerning Kenny G. I find myself still a bit confused by him, albeit in an interesting, entertaining fashion. Is Mr. Washburne a card-carrying member of the Music Snob Society? His excellent musical credentials in both teaching and performing of classical and pop music might make you think so. Or is he pulling our legs with wild abandon, hamming up his role as the elitist Music Professor at Columbia University while secretly trashing so many of his snooty fellows in their ivory towers? Whichever, he's assembled a great collection of information here which deserves a read from any person who finds humans and their forays into the world of the arts to be worth more investigation.

0 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Most of the essays are drivel, August 4, 2009

By 

A normal musician - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bad Music: The Music We Love to Hate (Paperback)

This book is a waste of time and money. I wished they'd named it accurately, "Academic blowhards give opinions on obscure stuff". About 10% of this book is actually interesting. If you're an academic into stroking intellectual egos, this is the book for you.