Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music [Hardcover]

Martha Bayles (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 28, 1994

"Hole in Our Soul" looks at popular music from the early days of jazz, blues, country and gospel through the rise of rock 'n' roll and the excesses of the MTV era. Martha Bayles defends the hardy, affirmative spirit of Afro-American music against the anarchistic, nihilistic impulses of the European avant-garde, which, she argues, were grafted onto rock in the late 1960s and led to a cult of brutality and obscenity in subsequent genres like heavy metal, punk and rap.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Bayles, former TV and arts columnist for the Wall Street Journal , takes the title for her book from the old saying, "If you don't like the blues, you've got a hole in your soul." The author of this wide-ranging study of American popular music maintains that the African American tradition--blues, jazz, gospel--is this country's "distinctive musical idiom . . . truer to civilized values" than punk, heavy metal, rap and other antisocial impulses descended from the late-19th century European avant-garde trends in art that led to futurism, surrealism, dada and ultimately to music whose aim is to shock. It is a powerful thesis, but Bayles obfuscates her arguments by forcing all types of music and art into such rigid categories as "introverted modernism" and "extroverted modernism." She calls the tendency to shock, for example, "perverse modernism" and claims that this antiart, together with racial stereotypes, has kept African American music, which should be a humanizing antidote to the brutal and the obscene, out of the mainstream.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Impressively researched and organized, this work explores historical, cultural, and sociological factors that figure in the evolution of American popular music. Bayles, an educator and arts critic, leaves few stones unturned in her effort to shed light on the current state of pop music. She begins by contrasting European and African American musical influences and defining musical modernism. She then factors in race, politics, sex, radicalism, religion, and commerce while evaluating the relative importance of each to the musical scene. Her approach is richly complex: a mixture of in-depth reflection, history, quotes, and analyses of styles and performers within the idioms of jazz, blues, rock, country, punk, rap, and the like. For large music collections with a scholarly readership.
- Carol J. Binkowski, Bloomfield, N.J.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 300 pages
• Publisher: Free Press (March 28, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0029019621
• ISBN-13: 978-0029019627
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,799,940 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Randy Gelling misses the point of the book entirely., August 27, 2003

By 

Reginleif II "reginleif2" (Noo Hampsha) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music (Paperback)

Did Randy Gelling read the same book I did? He's taking Martha Bayles to task for rejecting in a "reactionary" manner "anything that may express true dissatifaction with the status quo." Bayles seems to consider the blues one of the two highest forms of American music (the other being jazz), and so much of the blues is trenchant social criticism  as she makes clear many times in her book.

She certainly is no apologist for Springsteen; she states more than once in her short (less than a full page) passage on him that she considers his musical abilities "limited." What must have annoyed Gelling was Bayles' acknowledgment that many, many people enjoy Springsteen's music. I agree with the point she somewhat obliquely makes in that acknowledgment: if he's been pleasing both a loyal fan base and new, young ears for three decades, that's good enough, as far as such things go. Why the heck do we need to read a "lowdown" on the political implications of his discography?

I haven't listened to enough BoyzIIMen to see if Bayles might be right in that they're a cut above New Kids on the Block or other vapid boy bands. Gelling's exclamation point after the band's name seems to say, "What a ridiculous idea! They're a popular, mass-culture group, so OBVIOUSLY they must suck."

Which is just the attitude that Bayles tried to combat by writing "Hole in our Soul": that if your music pleases the ear and you treat your audience with respect, you're a "sell-out;" and that the uglier and more inaccessible your sound is to the average person, the more "sophisticated" it is, and behaving obnoxiously on- and offstage only adds to your "mystique."

In my opinion, it's a GOOD thing Bayles is "no Adorno." Popular music has most definitely suffered from all the tone-deaf and talentless people who took it up in the recently departed century because they had a "point" to make, usually a left-wing one but often, and especially in the case of Brit art-school types who fancied themselves "bad" boys and girls, an aggressively anti-social one. Not to mention that crowd's compulsion to "deconstruct" everything and anything, especially things that are "too" popular and "insufficiently" radical  an attitude that's poisoned the atmosphere of U.S. college campuses for at least the last decade.

Sure, Bayles quotes conservative social critics like Stanley Crouch and Allan Bloom, and sure, she decries the hate, violence, and mechanical sex that characterize lyrics in much of punk and rap. But what she decries the most is violence done to music itself. The central point of "Hole in Our Soul" is that the most important thing about music is how it *sounds*: whether it moves people to laugh, cry, dance, or sing along... and it's a point Gelling seems to have missed entirely.

I'm only giving "Hole in Our Soul" four stars, however, because there is a bit of tunnel vision in it. Bayles seems to think that a "funky" sound -- polyrhythms and other musical elements integral to the blues -- is the only source of magic and wonder in music, especially American music. Sure, a bluesy sound is a terrific thing and tremendously important to the nation's music, but there are certainly musical traditions in this country that stem more from Europe than Africa, and they're as vital and lively as anything that came out of the Mississippi Delta or Chicago's South Side.

Traditional English and Celtic music has enjoyed a renaissance in recent years on the coattails of the folk resurgence, and it's as much a part of this country as it is of the United Kingdom, given how many of our forefathers and -mothers came from the British Isles. While so much of "Celtic" music is indeed overly precious -- "airy-fairy," as the more hard-bitten pub players might put it -- a virtuoso blazing away on the fiddle has no trouble bringing an audience to its feet.

Then there's Mexican and Mexican-influenced music. While Tex-Mex is part country, and country owes a huge debt to the blues, I don't hear that big of an African-American influence in it. And the further south you go into Mexico, of course, the truer that is. Then there Jewish influences that aren't particular admixed with black ones. And polkas brought over by Central and Eastern Europeans. And so on, and so forth. Perhaps Bayles merely categorizes these genres under "world music," but it's a world within our borders, not without.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Gust of Fresh Air, June 8, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music (Paperback)

Most writing about popular culture is deeply flawed, ruined by one or more of several bad things: flackery, philistinism, highbrow condescension, smirking transgressivism, or, worst of all, pretentious and self-absorbed pseudo-academicism. Martha Bayles avoids all these pitfalls in this passionate, knowledgeable, opinionated book. It's a gust of fresh air. Not only is it fabulously well-written and unfailingly intelligent, but it is animated throughout by the author's genuine love of her subject. She really believes in the possibilities of popular culture, and knows what she's talking about. Anyone who wants to think more clearly about what it means to have a vibrant democratic culture, and why we don't have one today, ought to begin here.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars At last an intelligent--and intelligible--treatment, May 3, 2001

By 

W. C. Rice (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music (Paperback)

Martha Bayles's highly accessible study of popular music is a fine read, intelligently controversial, pandering to no crowd, deeply and broadly informed. It's not only important for those of us who care about her subject and enjoy a well-crafted argument, it's also a fine tonic for those--especially academics--who are put off by the barbed-wire prose of culture studies professors and their Marxist progenitors Benjamin, Adorno, et al. If you can't get through more than a cryptic, knowing page of Greil Marcus, try Bayles. You'll learn a lot, you'll be challenged, and you'll make a friend.