Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
fight anti-music, December 30, 2005
This review is from: The Trouble with Music (Paperback)
Mat Callahan's The Trouble With Music is a scathing look at the "music industry": capitalism's disastrous effects on music, the people who make music, the people who listen to it, and the entities that profit off of it.
Callahan's argument is based on the distinction between what he calls authentic music and "anti-music." While there are many ways one might evaluate the idea of "authenticity" in music and other art, Callahan claims this is not simply a matter of taste. For Callahan, these two categories are discernable in fact: anti-music is music made in service to corporate "major" labels that are actually owned by large conglomerates and maintained by persons who care nothing about music, as opposed to authentic music which emerges organically from human communities themselves.
The book tackles this theme from a variety of angles, with chapters dealing with music criticism, the history of radio (including college radio), the role of dance and performance, lyrical themes, and the notion of intellectual property rights. Callahan grounds his dead-on rants with references from philosophy, history, and art criticism, including thoughtful appropriations of Tolstoy's What Is Art?, Theordor Adorno, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Karl Marx. Two of the more insightful chapters deal with the absolute joke-of-a-debate about filesharing, and a scathing look at how capitalism uses "left-leaning" celebrity musicians (such as Bono) to give the appearance of political progressivism while leaving the entire capitalist system unchallenged.
One weakness of the book is that Callahan focuses only on the corporate "major" labels while not really dealing with the independent music industry and how it at times tends to mimick the majors. As a musician involved in the indie music scene, a critique of "just how indie" the independent music system is would have been appreciated.
Callahan's strength in looking at - and combating - "anti-music" is that he doesn't simply want to fight it because it frequently results in aesthetically "bad" music. Ultimately, what Callahan is after is an answer to the deeper question: "What kind of world produces such music?" In answering that question, he gives the reader near-mystical hints at his vision of what a world truly in love with music, the infinite, would look like:
"What if the only people who made music were those who loved to do it? What if they only people who listened to music were those who loved to listen to it? What if MTV went off the air, the radios went silent and all that was left were people organizing their own concerts and playing the music they loved? What if the only recordings that were made were those musicians who had something important enough to say that it justified their own investment in it? What if the only way to find and hear this music was PAYING ATTENTION?!" [www.catholicanarchy.org]
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good arguments badly made., August 6, 2007
This review is from: The Trouble with Music (Paperback)
The only thing worse than a ranting polemicist is a ranting polemicist with whom you basically agree. Because although I find much of Matthew Callahan's central thesis sound---that popular music today is vacuous and provides a relentless soundtrack to the doings of a world that's become more and more inundated by superficial crud---ultimately he comes off as tiresome and humorless as any true believer, left or right, who grasps at any straw that justifies his mission. He uses the term "anti-music" quite a bit in this book, but, like it or not, one person's "anti-music" is another person's grand symphony, and he fails to make a convincing case for his term of art.
Added to this is Callahan's inability to grasp some of the strange ironies in the world of pop music. For example, The Ramones, who he briefly refers to as one of many punk bands in the vanguard of revived rebellion against the established order, contained one rock-solid liberal (Joey Ramone) and one rock-solid conservative (Johnny Ramone) who hated each other (though I gather this was for more personal reasons than political). And since the dawn of time, there have been outbreaks of teenage rebellion, and what's "healthy rebellion" and what's "hooliganism" depends on whose ox is being gored.
One important point that Callahan does make well is that the venues musicians and their own ORIGINAL musical voices use for others to hear are drying up rapidly, and in too many cases it really HAS come down to the bean-counters calling the tune, literally, on most of what the public gets to hear. This is a topic where Callahan's vague discussion points give way to righteous rage about this state of affairs, and right-on, say I. Music is NOT just a commodity, it's an art form and all of its permutations deserve fair, open hearing in as many ways as possible. Anyone who says different is full of it.
So, love the spirit of the book, but I have a feeling that, although I don't know Matthew Callahan's music, it's probably more effective than his writing.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I hope everyone involved in making music reads this, August 24, 2005
This review is from: The Trouble with Music (Paperback)
Mat Callahan investigates the forces at work in the music of our time in a critical and reasonable manner, addressing the problems that have saddled us with listening (voluntarily and involuntarily) to corporate garbage (he calls it anti-music). His views are flexible, intelligent, and non-monolithic. His writing is clear. Every paragraph is thought provoking. He doesn't rant or polemicize as many drawing his conclusions would be tempted to do. There is a lot of substance here: this book is deep -without becoming academic or ponderous- and very readable -without becoming shallow and facile like most writing about popular music.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
|
