Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

It's great to see such critical intelligence brought to a subject that's all too often treated only with emotion. Bayles knows her subject and enlightens her readers, unlike many other writers on the subject who pepper their monographs with paens to jazz greats and their music or who stoop condescendingly to their readers with pretentiousness. The author obvioulsy loves the music but maintains a keen perspective throughout.

I love this book. Reading it was a series of epiphanies for me.

As a "classical" composer who has always had a love of jazz and popular music, I have long puzzled over the extreme gulf between classical music and jazz, folk, and popular music that is peculiar to the 20th century. I have also been eternally frustrated by the overwhelming weight that is given to weirdness for weirdness' sake by music and other art critics, as well as by their general dismissal of art that has overt beauty as one of its priorities.

Bayles's explanation of modernism and its various branches is priceless, and it, among many other aspects of the book, helped me to solve some of these puzzles, as well as to take a more activist attitude about my own artistic aesthetics.

Martha Bayles is a conservative. I am not, at least as the term has been perverted in the contemporary USA (but if conserving the natural environment is the most conservative position of all, then I'm a radical conservative!). Despite this ideological difference, I find her aesthetic position on American popular music quite compelling. Her saving grace is her love of African-American music! The core of her analysis is her distinction among three types of modernism: introverted, extroverted, and perverse. The book is motivated by her outrage at such recent youth music genres as gangsta rap, heavy metal and punk, which she sees as the outcomes of perverse modernism. (I tend to agree with her that much of heavy metal and rap are reactionary, but part ways with her on punk.) She tours the 20th century, though, only dealing with these contemporary forms toward the end, and her treatment of blues, rhythm and blues, and soul is excellent, showing her love of and respect for the music and the musicians. Her analysis of Chuck Berry and Elvis is one of the highlights. Don't expect much coverage of jazz. She respects it (putting it in the category of extroverted modernism), but doesn't seem to listen to it much. Without agreeing with all her judgements, I strongly recommend "Hole In Our Soul" to anyone interested in popular American music, and the African-American tradition in particular.

This is the best appreciation available of American pop music and what has become of it in our time--indeed it is the best one imaginable. It is written in the tradition of the great classics on American pop culture by Henry Pleasants, Constance Rourke, Gilbert Seldes, and Albert Murray. Rich in the detailed knowledge that only the most refined and loving sensibility can gather, it is free of jargon and cant. Bayles writes with greater erudition and sophistication than anybody, but no one who reads her will confuse her with the snooty elitists who write about culture on the right or left. Nor does she steer away from controversy into a mushy center. Rather, she writes with invigorating independence and originality.

Bayles complains that the "popular" music of our day has lost beauty and meaning. But she does not turn her nose up at popular tastes--she avoids the errors of Allan Bloom, whose embarrassing ignorance of the culture of his fellow Americans is still widely shared among "conservatives," and helps explain why he and they cannot reach the masses they claim to want to save.

With a greater knowledge of the history of both classical and popular music, Bayles insists that popularity is compatible with refinement and innovative genius. (The popularity of Shakespeare and Duke Ellington, among others, ought to make this immediately clear.) Bayles clearly loves the best of jazz, pop, R&B, rock 'n roll, soul, and other parts of what she (following Henry Pleasants) calls the Afro-American tradition. She recognizes that snobbery cannot cure the tendency of our culture to substitute outrageousness for genuine innovation. Highbrow disdain only encourages bad musicians to think that their shock-tactics really challenge bourgeois morality.

Bayles finds hope in the abundant historical evidence that "ordinary" listeners often demand--and feel they have a right to expect--tasteful, sensitive, truly challenging music.

Surprsingly, she does not blame commercialization for their failure to get much of it lately: not only has our greatest music often been popular, it has also been commercially successful. (She parts company with a number of self-described leftist critics here, as well as conservatives.) As a rule, commerce does debase art, Bayles says, yet the greatest music can survive mass-production, mass-marketing, and mass-consumption.

More damaging than commercial exploitation of artists, Bayles thinks, is the insincere pose of rebellion that artists and their promoters feel they have to strike in order to get noticed. She holds out hope that audiences will get better popular music when they (and the critics who claim to speak for them) show that they care about it--when they condemn meaningless noise (on musical rather than moralistic grounds), and when they encourage and reward those who work hard to distinguish themselves by making new and beautiful sounds.

The best thing about Bayles is not her scrappy attitude toward whatever commercial or critical goliath comes along, but her wry humor and detachment. Her vision is not simply more accurate and original than the politicized drivel that passes for criticism of pop music today. It is more fun.

Martha Bayles sees a decline in popular music because much of it has deviated from its vitalising Afro-American roots.She makes some very perceptive comments on various artists.For example: "the young Dylan was more interesting than a lot of 1960s rock stars because he was genuinely torn between the musical tradition he loved and the counterculture that loved him.""Heavy metal offers ritual death, but at the end of the ordeal, there is no rebirth."After commercial success, Nirvana "quickly retreated back into thrash, noise, and an emotional gamut running from A (for angst) to B (for blitzkrieg)." Van Morrison "at his best sounds like exactly what he is: a sorrowful amateur poet who's been dunked in the life-giving waters.""Prince's goatishness is preferable to the icy decadence purveyed by Madonna."And "Springsteen's best songs have a melodic force capable of defying gravity, in effect lifting the dinosaur off the ground and making it fly-albeit heavily, like an overfed pterodactyl."The author's forthright opinions will step on many toes, but it is refreshing to read someone who can write intelligently about popular music.She has a lot of challenging things to say, and she says them well.

Martha Bayles's Hole in our Soul is cultural criticism at its best. In the past many writers condemned pop culture because it wasn't high art; today many academic critics, especially those associated with cultural studies, refuse to make any judgments at all--except political ones. Martha Bayles, on the other hand, makes convincing judgments according to standards appropriate to the music she is discussing. She conveys both her genuine delight in the best of pop and her rejection of the worst. Without jargon and without relying on an all-encompassing theory, she makes a persuasive case about "the loss of beauty and meaning in American popular music." Hole in our Soul should be on anybody's short list of the best books on American popular culture in the last fifty years.

In our Age of SuperHype, it's difficult to find insightful criticism about our popular culture. "Hole in Our Soul" is therefore a most welcome book. Whether one agrees or not with all of Martha Bayles's conclusions is beside the point. The point *is* that her intelligence and tough-mindedness are truly refreshing, and her book is essential reading for anyone interested in American popular music.