Popular Music

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DAVID BUCKLEY

This chapter has four sections: 1. Biography, Autobiography and Critical Survey of
Artists; 2. Anthologies, Collections and Encyclopaedias; 3. History and Analysis; 4.
Short Notices.

1. Biography, Autobiography and Critical Survey of Artists

The influence of the German group Kraftwerk on contemporary popular music is

unmistakable. Their music, which they dubbed motorik, fused together many of the
elements to be found in contemporary dance music, industrial music and
electronica—the use of the voice as an instrument, the emphasis on grindingly
metonymic beats, the 'disappearance' of the human and the pre-eminence of the
machine both in the studio and on stage—and was developed on a series of albums
from Autobahn (1974) through to their latest (and possibly last) full album, Electric
Cafe (1986). Yet, despite this massive influence, their work has largely gone
unnoticed within academia, whilst attempts to dissect their music by French writer
Pascal Bussy in Kraftwerk: Man, Machine and Music (S.A.F. [1993]); reviewed in
YWCCT 3[1995]) or the more straightforward biography of English rock critic Tim
Barr From Dusseldorf to the Future (with Love) (Ebury Press [1998]; reviewed in
YWCCT 8[2000]) stopped short of the detail required to tease out the full meaning
of their music. Wolfgang Flur was a member of the band until the late 1980s and his
memoir, Kraftwerk: I was a Robot, finally reaches us in English translation—but not
before Kraftwerk's Florian Schneider-Esleben and Ralph Hiitter tried to block
publication.
This failed attempt to gag Flur says less about the book's content (which can
hardly be described as wildly salacious) and more about the astonishing privacy of
the existing members of the band. In the Internet age, when pop stars with personal
websites are encouraged to 'fess up' and reveal intimate details of their private lives,
Kraftwerk's privacy is, in itself, an oddly eccentric feature, and their hermetic
working practices at Diisseldorf s Kling Klang Studios have become the stuff of
rock legend. Flur's florid account, translated by Janet Porteous, is an important
memoir, if, at times, a self-serving one. Frustratingly it stops short of a detailed
analysis of the music, but its value lies in (partially) demystifying the band. The

© The English Association

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duopoly of Hiitter and Schneider is discussed in some detail, their appetites and
increasing eccentricities adumbrated. By the late 1980s Kraftwerk had ossified into
a bizarre charade whereby the two guiding lights would spend most of the day
drinking coffee and cycling before work began on an ambitious and hugely time-
consuming exercise in remixing some of their old hits, a project that took five years
to complete. The main theme of / was a Robot, however, is the impact travel had on
the band; its culturally dislocating effects on a parochial foursome the core of this

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memoir. Ultimately, / was a Robot is the story of a non-rock band on the road, and
a bizarre tale it is too.
If Kraftwerk's code remains largely a secret, then the working practices of other
major rock acts have at least been covered in more detail. Whilst the partisan fan
might pore over each lyric as if it was the result of some sort of mystical cogitation,
in reality, as many musicians would tell you, the words the singer sings are often a
jumble of affecting words scrambled together to make a rhyme after a session in the
pub. Music journalist and broadcaster Stuart Maconie's new book, James:
Folklore—The Official History, is valuable for popular music scholars in that it
gives a detailed account of interpersonal relations which fire musical production.
Whereas with many bands one or two strong individuals emerge as leading
conceptualists and songwriters, with Manchester's James, a band with one front man
but no leader, the creative direction has ebbed and flowed with factional interest. A
constantly changing roster of band members has produced a fluid creativity. The
strength of the book (the authoritativeness gained by the band's co-operation) is
simultaneously a weakness (since punches are pulled and frank assessments
generally avoided). Maconie also elects not to interweave the oral testimony from
the band and from producers (most notably Brian Eno) into the main body of the
text, but leaves them as free-standing interlocutions inside the main narrative, a
technique pioneered in early 1970s by Anthony Scaduto in his biography of Bob
Dylan (reviewed in YWCCT6[1998]). The result is that Maconie's work is a mix of
oral testimony, narrative and, occasionally, perceptive cultural scene setting, and
works satisfactorily within this framework. Some other pertinent issues, such as how
James found a niche for their music in the UK, but went largely unbought globally,
still remain to be answered. Like that other mercurial Manchester band, the Smiths,
James's music has remained a parochial pleasure.
Rock auteurs such as Bob Dylan, a musician whose body of work stretches over
four decades and whose cultural importance is global, offer up a different sort of
challenge for the biographer. With dozens of albums and thousands of live
performances to analyse, the skill for the commentator is in selection. One of the
leading Dylanologists is Michael Gray. His book, Song and Dance Man III: The Art
of Bob Dylan, is a new version of a book first published in 1972 and then revised a
decade later. Four times longer than the previous version and with extensive new
analyses of Dylan's indebtedness to the blues and of post-structuralism, this new
book is published to mark the sixtieth birthday of the former Robert Zimmerman. It
will delight those with a familiarity with Dylan's oeuvre looking for detailed
cultural analysis, but will disappoint the casual fan. Rather than select, Gray's
analysis is all-inclusive, and rather than tease out the cultural significance of his
greatest performances, Gray laboriously challenges us with detailed deconstructions
of minor songs too. Dylan the man is also sometimes absent from the text too and
those less partisan of Dylan fans might find the lack of biographical detail a
124 POPULAR MUSIC

handicap. This is also not a book to convert the disbeliever. Dylan's majesty is
assumed and then evidenced over 800 pages of detailed explication:

If the oddness of Dylan as a pop figure, with all his perplexing

innovations, suggested that intelligence was assaulting the pop scene,
that didn't mean that no clever people besides Bob Dylan had ever
made their mark in pop. Among others Phil Spector, Mick Jagger, John

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Lennon, Joan Armatrading, Elvis Costello and David Bowie are all
intelligent artists. Yet they haven't accomplished fundamental changes
as Dylan has. They've come into rock music accepting it more or less
as they' ve found it: all they've done is find themselves a corner each to
sit in. (p. 117)

The scope and scale of the book, together with its detailed literary criticism, does,
nevertheless, make this an admirable work and still something of a landmark in
popular music scholarship.
If Dylan is analysed in Gray's work, he is itemized in a new work, The Complete
David Bowie, by Nicholas Pegg. Whereas many previous Bowie biographers have
followed the painful path of contacting ex-producers, ex-musicians, ex-lovers and
ex-friends of the man Q magazine dubbed the Dame, Pegg decides to keep sanity
intact and replaces first-hand testimony with kindly, though zealous synopticism.
With headache-inducing small type, Pegg's book organizes Bowie into lists, with
sections on the songs, the albums, the films, live performances, videos and so on.
This taxonomy jars, since the whole rationale behind Bowie is that he mixed media
and elided boundaries between the musical and visual (and between his persona and
that of the characters he created). Pegg imposes his own order to the chaos of
Bowie's career, and the result is an uncontroversial and generous book. The analysis
that appends itself to the listing is overwhelmingly based on a collage of existing
printed journalistic sources, though when Pegg's voice is heard through the chatter,
it is a sensible one. For a David Bowie fan, this is an indispensable reference book
and a kindly tome for rock completists everywhere. Big on detail, small on any sort
of cultural or contextual analysis, it is a book that sates the very male desire for
itemizing and codifying.
If Pegg's industrious work anatomizes Bowie's career, then Bill Drummond,
musician and cultural agent provocateur's rock memoir, 45, is a bewildering mix of
chronological jump-starts, flashbacks, cultural ruminations and personal witticisms.
It is also a terrific read. We should expect no less from a man whose group, the KLF,
satirized dance culture so successfully and who ludicrously invited (and made a
laughing stock out of) a hapless Tammy Wynette to sing on their biggest hit. The
quixotic Drummond switches from a candid personal history of his involvement as
manager with internationally-successful Liverpool rock band Echo and the
Bunnymen to a trenchant discussion of pop copyists, Spice Girls-style, before his
analysis morphs again into an idiosyncratic deconstruction of why the Scots hate the
English. Underpinning Drummond's analysis is his middle-age enthusiasm for all
things pop, an infectiousness, enthusiasm and knowledge that so much academic
writing about popular music lacks. In an era in which thirty- and forty-something
(male) nostalgia for pop's past is de rigueur, Drummond's enthusiasm for pop is less
for the mainstream than it is for the margins, for those pop 'failures' who release one
 POPULAR MUSIC 125

great record, then explode into dust—'it's strange, weird, fucked-up, unsuccessful
pop music that I dig' (p. 7). So 45 is the product of an ageing pop obsessive and, as
a study of such obsessions, it's a fascinating psychological drama of the power of
pop fandom. This is music as contagion:

Pop music has become a cancer that has spread through my whole
body and is now affecting my brain. But what if I were cured? What

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would be left of me? I'd be like a shrivelled-up party balloon seven
days after the birthday party ... But still it goes on, this internal
soundtrack of riff, hook, chorus and backing vocals to every moment
of waking life. I can't pass a mirror without hitting a power chord.
Can't pass a sweet shop without hearing the Shangri-Las. Can't put out
the milk bottles without wondering what happened to the Hermits. It's
got to stop. I've tried everything, and it's too late to hope I die before I
get old. (pp. 3-4)

By the early 1990s, certain cultural commentators were talking pessimistically about
the 'death of rock', of how a demotivated Western youth had relegated music to a
background role in their lives. However, if certain strands of rock music had become
pastiche, then dance culture was energizing contemporary debate. Throughout the
1990s, a new wave of British fiction writers, inspired first by acid house, then by the
bewildering fragmentation of dance culture which occurred in the early 1990s,
began to report their experiences through both the novel and the short story format.
Steve Redhead's Repetitive Beat Generation is a collection of fourteen interviews
with many of the leading hip literati of their day, including Nicholas Blincoe, Sarah
Champion and Irvine Welsh. Roddy Doyle's inclusion is a necessary backwards
glance to the mid-1980s, an era in which the connection between pop music and pop
fiction was less obvious. Most of these writers lived through a time when the New
Right began aggressively policing popular culture and began to be published in the
wake of a succession of moral panics (the phrase, 'repetitive beat generation', is
taken from the text of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of the Major
government in the UK). A feature of many a tale told to Redhead is the story of a
parochial resistance to centralizing London politics and culture. An interview with
author Gordon Legge highlights the slower pace of cultural change in the provinces:
'The Scottish hardcore scene is basically to acid house what "oi" was to punk—it's
that kind of boom boom boom all the time. It's just taking these basic elements.
Things like that do stick longer in the provinces. We rely more on this. We don't
have the same input from friends and all that to change us' (p. 69).
What comes across from these conversations is the fact that the literary can be just
as good at capturing truths about contemporary society as investigative journalism
or academic research. 'The repetitive beat generation authors interviewed in this
book wrote a cultural history as it was happening', affirms Redhead, 'but they wrote
it in fiction, not in the language of sociology, history, jurisprudence or politics. They
used all kinds of forms of story-telling—science fiction, horror, crime fiction, drug
fiction, short story, reportage, biography, performance art—to tell the fascinating
tale of the last counter cultures ... of the twentieth century' (p. xxvii). The
immediacy of racy, lived experience fires works such as Trainspotting by Irvine
Welsh (Minerva [1994]). Perhaps not unsurprisingly, Redhead's interview with
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Welsh is the key contribution to the anthology. The main theme of the interview is
the distorting influence of the media. According to Welsh, the media is obsessed
with power: 'If you ask people, if you took a poll amongst journalists and asked who
is more important in culture in the seventies, John Lydon or Julie Burchill, I bet you
the journalists would say Julie Burchill. If you ask people outside in the street,
outside of that world you know, it would be "who is Julie Burchill?" Power becomes
more concentrated. The media has become very much a kind of self-serving stagnant

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pool' (p. 138). Welsh goes on to attack the media for distorting reality through
labelling and categorizing: 'I feel the media have created an industry in inventing
spurious divisions which are superficial. It's no longer to do with understanding
complexity but with niche marketing. They thrive on creating false deficiencies so
that they can sell products to make us more "complete"'. Although Redhead hints at
the inherent contradiction of this stance (Welsh rails against a media that makes his
work/fame and wealth possible in the first place), the oppositional nature of Welsh
(and indeed of all the writer's interviewed here to a greater or lesser extent) is taken
as read. The counter argument, namely that the repetitive beat generation spurned a
generation of apolitical defeatists who merely created a counterculture of hedonism
not rebellion, is one which the book studiously avoids.
Finally in this section, another academic book about the Beatles. Following on
from Henry W. Sullivan's 1995 study, The Beatles with Lacan: Rock 'n' Roll as
Requiem for the Modern Age published by Peter Lang (reviewed in YWCCT
5[1997]), and Allan Moore's Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Cambridge
University Press [1997]), comes the collection Beatlestudies [sic] 2: History,
Identity, Authenticity, edited by Yrjo Heinonen, Jouni Koskimaki, Seppo Niemi, and
Terhi Nurmesjarvi, a research report from the Music Department at the University
of Jy vaskyla, Finland. Unfortunately something is lost in the translation, in that one
suspects that quite elaborate and complex ideas in the original Finnish are expressed
in a generalized way in the English. The lead off article, 'The Beatles and Their
Times: Thoughts on the "Relative Autonomy" of Stylistic Change' provides a useful
guide to popular music historicism before embarking on an ambitious, though
sketchy discussion of the post-war musical antecedents to the Beatles. There then
follow essays on the likes of the Beatles' studio technique, on the Liverpool sound
from 1957 and 1962, and an in-depth analysis of the track 'Lucy in the Sky with
Diamonds', but, with so much academic and journalistic writing to compete against,
the Beatlestudies project has a rehearsed quality. Surely it's time for academia to
leave Dylan, the Beatles and, for that matter, Madonna alone and to seek out
different artists to re-freshen critical discussion?

2. Anthologies, Collections and Encyclopaedias

At over 110,100 words, but now, for reasons of space, shorn of Harry Horses'
idiosyncratic cartoon portraitures of many of the leading rock acts under the
microscope, The Great Rock Discography by Martin C. Strong has fast become an
essential reference work. Strong provides chapter and verse on around a thousand
top rock and pop acts, including serviceable biographical details and a full list of
recorded material both on album and single, along with chart positions, snippets of
trivia, and handy cross-references to solo projects, splinter groups and side projects
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where appropriate. However, the discography's beauty lies in its partisanship.

Rather than the dully-neutral biographies of many reference works, Strong is not
afraid to express his opinion, to assess and evaluate. Although not an academic
work, The Great Rock Discography is, none the less, essential for any serious
scholar of Anglo-American contemporary popular music. Those researchers
interested in non-Western music outside of the rock tradition must look elsewhere.
Strong's publisher, Mojo Books, an offshoot from the respected UK monthly rock

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magazine, has also published a new critical guide. Edited by Jim Irvin, The Mojo
Collection: The Greatest Albums of All Time discusses what they regard as the
seminal albums of the rock era, a page per record. 'Rock' is defined pretty loosely,
with entries on folk, funk, jazz and punk, though the selection reflects the Anglo-
American bias of the source magazine, and, like its parent magazine, shows little
affection for contemporary dance styles or teen pop. The Mojo Collection is,
therefore, a proudly rockist affair, and, at times, an inaccurate one (no, Brian Eno did
not work on Bowie's Scary Monsters for example), but the actual selection of
albums is fairly indisputable and the book is a handy reference tool.
If the Mojo Collection has a faint air of male clubiness, written, as it is, by a roster
of tried and trusted venerables, Expression in Pop-Rock Music: A Collection of
Critical and Analytical Essays has all the advantages and draw backs of youthful
enthusiasm. There are groundbreaking analyses, but also uncertain writing and
overly technical theorization. The anthology's editor, Walter Everett, lays down the
book's prime objective as follows: 'We have sought to bring to the table a
multiplicity of issues, a mix of various techniques and perspectives and (as affirmed
by a glance through the index) the representation of a great variety of styles from all
periods of pop-rock history' (p. ix). Discussions of acts as diverse as early Genesis,
U2, the Cure, Frank Zappa and Tori Amos make good on this promise. The analysis
of Genesis' 1972 epic 'Supper's Ready' by MarkS. Spicer in his essay 'Large-Scale
Strategy and Compositional Design in the Early Music of Genesis', is particularly
welcome. Genesis have always been rather a guilty pleasure. Their huge cult success
in the UK remains a lacuna in virtually all histories of the 1970s. However, Spicer's
analysis makes no concessions to the non-musician and, in his keenness to link some
of the overall structures of the music to classical composers such as Stravinsky,
Liszt and Mahler, makes for a strangely traditional interpretation. Everett's
collection seeks to provide a 'post-journalistic' music analysis, but the analysis itself
often remains too technical for all put the most gifted of musicians to understand.
Far more assured is The Cambridge Guide to Singing, edited by John Potter. This
is an excellent work, collecting as it does nineteen essays on vocal style, touching on
both popular and classical music. An introduction by John Potter yields to the likes
of John Schaefer on world music, Richard Middleton on rock singing and an essay
on rap by David Toop. The most innovatory articles are those concerning the
pedagogy of vocal technique. Felicity Laurence's essay 'Children's Singing' is a
fascinating analysis of the development of human musicality and contains practical
information on how to teach singing at school: '85 per cent of secondary schools
provided no vocal curriculum at all' (p. 222). Dave Mason's contribution, 'The
Teaching (and Learning) of Singing', is a valuable cultural history with information
on early modern developments in the teaching of vocal style, whilst 'Where Does
the Sound Come From?' by Johan Sunderg, is a helpful analysis of vocal production
and the site of sound itself.
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The Musical Work: Reality or Invention?, edited by Michael Talbot, is the first in
the Liverpool Music Symposium series, co-ordinated by the Institute of Popular
Music and the Music Department at the University of Liverpool. Once one gets
beyond the illogicality of the anthology's title, one finds a sensitive, but at times
densely theoretical discussion of the status of the text within both classical and
popular music studies. Talbot's introduction problematizes the definitional
complexity pertaining to a musical 'work' discussed in the symposium: 'I cannot

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pretend that a firm consensus was reached, although some common ground was
found. There was at least broad agreement among the contributors, as in the world
at large, that a musical work, to merit the description, has to be discrete,
reproducible and attributable ... although each of the three mentioned primary
conditions possess a measure of elasticity, which from the very outset creates
immense potential for controversy' (p. 3). In his 'Introduction', Talbot goes on to
argue that the:

battle over definitions and their application is perhaps, in the final

analysis, a battle over priorities and even ideals ... To sum up the
situation empirically, but I think accurately: a proponent of the work as
'text' ... is likely to enjoy actively collecting and perusing scores; the
advocate of the work as 'act' is likely to go to many concerts (or listen
to many recordings). In other words, out concept of the musical work
probably correlates closely with our attitude to the written (as opposed
to spoke) word; to the relative weight we attach to durability and
topicality; and to the raft of other factors that have more to with
educational background, professional activity and social attitudes than
with reason and judgement, abstractly considered, (pp. 6-7)

David Horn, Serge Lacasse, Richard Middleton and Philip Tagg all make
worthwhile contributions, although the quality and intelligibility of other
contributions is less consistent.
Undergraduates are now well served by introductory anthologies, and Richard
Middleton has edited one of the best yet, Reading Pop: Approaches to Textual
Analysis in Popular Music. Its value lies not in new research (although there is a
typically perspicacious new introductory chapter from Middleton, which helpfully
gives a summary of the entire terrain of popular music studies for the newcomer) as
this collection simply reprints sixteen previously published articles from the journal
Popular Music. Rather, this collection is invaluable in that it gives a 'greatest hits'
selection from a journal which some undergraduates may not have access to. Part 1
of the book is centred on musical analysis and reprints David Brackett's excellent
article on James Brown, along with articles from Peter Winkler, Stan Hawkins,
Philip Tagg, Sean Cubitt and Richard Middleton. Part 2 of the collection is
concerned with the interplay between music and words, and includes Umberto
Fiori's excellent deconstruction of the 1982 Peter Gabriel song, 'I Have the Touch'.
Part 3, 'Modes of Representation', broadens the discussion to deal with visual
cultures, questions of ideology and power, and gender issues of which Sheila
Whitely's 'Progressive Rock and Psychedelic Coding in the Work of Jimi Hendrix'
and Alf Bjornberg's 'Structural Relationships of Music and Images in Music
Videos' remain powerful pieces of analytical writing. In the main, the writing in this
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collection is admirable and the concerns refreshingly pluralistic, which is more that
can be said for the journal as a whole which has, regrettably, shown an increasing
tendency to print careerist cant.
Finally in this section, Sniffin' Glue: The Essential Punk Accessory by Mark
Perry, is edited by Terry Rawlings and has a foreword by punk poet John Cooper
Clarke. The first half of the book contains a punk retrospective, illustrated with some
really excellent photographs of the leading figures. The second half of the book

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reprints the original fanzine. Mark P's Sniffin' Glue, originally published between
the summers of 1976 and 1977, was the most visible punk fanzine. For the first time
all twelve issues are reprinted in the second half of the book, and they make for
fascinating reading. A separatist dialogue between editor and fan, a call to arms to
create a new scene—'We don't need New York, we've got it here'—tempers the
fanzine's appreciation of love of American new wave. There are some interesting
contemporary observations concerning the rise of the Sex Pistols. Far from being the
musically limited dupes of popular myth, the band is praised for their musicianship.
A review of a Sex Pistols gig from January 1977 notes that Johnny Rotten stands in
the crowd after the final number and claps his own encore, a telling image of punk's
wilful deconstruction of the fan-idol power nexus.
Out of the curious medley of gig reviews, interviews and personal rants, comes a
highly confused and contradictory ideology that reflects a calamitous time for white,
urban, male youth in the failing economy of post-corporatist Britain. One of the
striking features of these reissued magazines is the Catholic, some might say
contradictory, definition of the new wave. Take issue one, for example, which
contains material on the unmistakably Ur punk of the Ramones, but also includes a
review of the work of the Blue Oyster Cult, a band most known for their big fat rock
hit, '(Don't Fear) the Reaper'. Perhaps there's a lesson for us here. In attempting to
tease out the oppositional standard of punk, we should perhaps return to the original
punk commentary itself and recognize just how inconsistent was the voice of
protest.

3. History and Analysis

One of the most important roles in the drama of popular music history over the last
hundred years or so has been acted out by Jews. Michael Billig's slight, though
worthwhile history, Rock 'n' Roll Jews argues that whilst most of the major figures
in twentieth-century popular music were not Jewish, a crucial number of behind the
scenes operators were. The existence of Jewish managers and impresarios confirms
the stereotype of Jewish business acumen and self-help. However, the astonishing
impact of Jews as songwriters is less often discussed and it is here that Billig makes
a useful contribution. There are drawbacks to the book though. Billig is largely
uninterested in contemporary popular music and his analysis often tends towards the
general rather than the particular. He would win few plaudits for vague
simplifications such as 'musically speaking, "sixties music" did not really get going
until about 1964' (p. 6) or, 'Pop was changing. A more educated, middle-class type
of person was beginning to use rock as a means of expression. More complex, even
poetic, lyrics were being written'. In fact, it's such hazy wordings that many
130 POPULAR MUSIC

tenacious rock journalists would rumble in reviews, but which academics endure
more kindly.
One of the most incisive modern-day journalists is David Cavanagh, and his
history of the Creation record label spans two decades and almost 600 pages. The
Creation Records Story: My Magpie Eyes are Hungry for the Prize is a model of
painstaking research and, astonishingly, contains the input of over 170 interviewees.
The prime evidence comes from the labels' creator, Alan McGee, whose personal

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life (including drug-addiction and a breakdown) and professional dealings are laid
bare in detail. The Creation Records Story is, in fact, two books in one. It is the story
of the label's history and the story of British post-punk alternative music and its
youth culture. Cavanagh discusses how unpopular indie music became popular, how
a punk-inspired kid from Glasgow became a member of Tony Blair's New Labour
think tank, and how an independent label has to continually reposition and redefine
its sense of independence in order to survive. The book also details the complex
story of Creation's leading lights—the Jesus and Mary Chain, Primal Scream and
Oasis.
It is a peculiar feature of popular music studies that so few detailed histories of
popular music itself have ever been written. Journalists regularly provide us with
illustrated rock histories of variable quality and television has also commissioned
histories of the rock era with reasonable regularity. Yet we have to go back decades
to find an academic work of such scope. Charlie Gillet's classic The Sound of the
City: The Rise of Rock 'n' Roll (second edition, Da Capo [1996]) remains one of the
few successful attempts by a writer to provide us with an academically minded
history of pop. Iain Chambers' Urban Rhythms (MacMillian [1985]), although
centred on the British experience, is likewise an astute piece of cultural history, but
it is nearly twenty years old itself. Why has there been such an unwillingness to
grasp the nettle that is rock 'n' roll history? Perhaps the reason lies in the fact that
surprisingly few professional historians are involved in popular music studies? Or is
it that with so much research now centred on the 'local', and on non-Western
popular music, the need for a totalizing grand historical narrative is no longer
apparent? The fragmentation of popular music studies may indeed leave us with
compelling mini-narratives, but surely the big picture should not be ignored? James
Miller, former journalist and critic and now a professor of political science, has
produced an extremely sharp, and at times controversial, piece of old-fashioned
historical analysis in his book, Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock and Roll,
1947-1977. Rather than start his analysis in 1954, 1955 or 1956, thus pinning the
elevation of Elvis Presley to the rise of rock 'n' roll itself as so many writers have
done before him, Miller begins his account almost a decade before, and investigates
the post-war scene. Despite this chronological novelty, the seismic impact of Presley
is once again the motor of Miller's enthusiasm. As the narrative unfolds
episodically, the book's strengths lie in some brilliant set piece analyses of Presley,
the Beatles, Bowie and the Sex Pistols. However, Miller's book is also a work of
psychology. Flowers in the Dustbin is an account of how his own pop world turned
sour. It is a tale of baby-boomer optimism sullied by post-countercultural blandness
and avarice. The history of rock is therefore a history of disappointment and
disillusionment. Miller writes in his preface: 'What had seemed mysterious to a
nine-year-old boy, and what augured a revolutionary youth culture in the mind of an
impressionable nineteen-year-old, became, to the adult critic, a routinized package
 POPULAR MUSIC 131

of theatrical gestures, generally expressed in a blaze of musical cliches' (p. 17). By

the time of Bowie's Ziggy Stardust, rock had become a simulacrum. 'Bowie himself
had experienced the rock revolution', writes Miller. 'He was its product. And no
matter what his younger fans might feel, Bowie knew that the Ziggy revue was, in
this sense, unreal: it was mummery, a simulacrum, a theatrical conceit' (p. 303). By
the 1990s, and Miller's own retirement from full-time music journalism, pop had
reduced to the production of 'artefacts of stunning ugliness. Punk rock had been a

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quintessence. Since then, most popular rock and roll acts have been musically crude
or gleefully obscene or just plain silly' (p. 352). Those who still find aspects of
popular culture to be vital and new, will doubtless find Miller's generational
misanthropy unappealing. However, popular music's function within our society
has changed, its place is now less central, and Miller's well-written analysis is a
welcome addition to the 'rock is dead' debate.
In the early nineties it indeed appeared to some that the moribund corpus that was
rock and pop was indeed dead, killed off by a volley of noise—the bleeps and blurts
of techno. The signature music of the nineties, so many cultural commentators
proclaimed, was contained in the dance 'track', rather than pop 'song'. Young adults
were now rooted in a different sonic tradition. Music as music, certainly music as
'song', meant less and less. 'No-one just sits around listening to music anymore—
do they?' says one teenage undergraduate in Ron Moy's book, An Analysis of the
Position and Status of Sound Ratio in Contemporary Society. Moy doesn't deal
directly with the thorny issue of why pop music itself is increasingly losing its power
over the minds of young people, but rather ambitiously attempts to describe an even
more significant shift in the way Western society consumes cultural texts. The
subject of this book is sound itself and its increasingly marginalized position. It is
not simply that young people don't play pop music very much any more, they don't
(perhaps even 'can't') listen anymore. Moy's central thesis is a simple but
persuasive one: in the late-modern world in which we live, the purely aural
experience is largely outdated or certainly uncommon. After a fifty-year sound
hegemony, modern society had now become increasingly 'specularised'—sight
over sound. The capacity of the Western intellect to decode sound has largely
atrophied. In its place is a confused terrain, a polysemic culture in which attention
spans are shorter, information is sped at us and spewed back out at an alarming,
dizzying speed. The last twenty years has witnessed a miscegenation of sound and
vision which has befuddled the 'pure' qualities of both.
It is when discussing the sense of lack sound that Moy's imaginative book comes
into its own. Sound is valued for its inherent ambiguity within the imaginative
process of humankind. Sonic experiences depend on making the listener work to fill
in the blanks and absences. Moy' s description of a Radio 4 drama in Chapter 2 of the
book amply evidences how radio drama, as a form, is both radical in its temporal
dislocation and accommodating in its open-endedness. In the 'blind' world of radio,
the listener is forced into an act of imaginative reconstruction. The Sound Ratio as a
valuable piece of historical investigation into a little regarded aspect of modern
society and, as a controversial and enlivening polemic in itself, is an essential read.
'Many of life's most ecstatic moments come when we deprive ourselves of the sense
of sight' concludes Moy. This book tries to tell us why.
One of the striking features of the development of popular music studies over the
last three decades has been the absence of much meaningful discussion of the music
132 POPULAR MUSIC

itself. Musicians remained intent on talking to other, musically literate musicians,

whilst non-musicians appeared to make it an article of faith that they didn't know
where middle C was on a keyboard. Thankfully, over time, the situation has
changed. Musicians have become increasingly happy to talk intelligently and clearly
about both culture and music, culturalists less blinkered about learning some music
theory. A new breed of talented scholars is emerging with a variety of specialisms to
call upon. For the non-musician, histories of how the history of music has developed

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have been few and far between. However, Howard Goodall's Big Bangs: The Story
of Five Discoveries that Changed Musical History is a welcome addition. As a
musician, writer and television presenter, Goodall (perhaps best known for
composing the theme tune to one of the BBC's biggest comedy hit of 1980s,
Blackadder) sets off on a musical journey, which is always powerfully realized and
clearly explained. His five 'moments' are the invention of notation, opera, the piano,
equal temperament and recorded sound. Although all five inventions are crucial to
the development of modern music, 'equal temperament' is the least understood:

Equal Temperament is probably the single most important

development in Western European music in the last 400 years and yet
most people haven't even heard of it. Even musicians don't really
understand it, but an enormous amount of the world's beautiful music
wouldn't exist without it. Equal Temperament is the tuning system by
which practically all the notes in our Western music are organised and
structured. It is to music what a calendar is to the days and nights or
what the 24-hour clock is to the minutes and seconds. As with the
calendar, Western man has taken what nature gave us and manipulated
it artificially—-every single note of our musical repertoire is a
monstrous compromise, (pp. 101-2)

Goodall's popular musicology, full of surprises for the non-expert, should be seen as
part of a general trend within trade publishing to demystify specialisms. In the same
way that popular science is now a large sector in the publishing world, it should be
hoped that more and more musicians and musicologists speak out not just to
academia but to a wider public too.

4. Short Notices

Some music critics have argued that youth culture simply doesn't hold popular
music in the same high regard as it once did. If so, what else are they doing with their
leisure time? David Buckingham's provocative new book, After the Death of
Childhood: Growing Up in the Age of Electronic Media deals with popular music
only indirectly, but deals directly with how 'childhood' as a concept is being
redefined and examines the perceived dangerous effects of the electronic media on
children. Sociologist Tina DeNora's Music in Everyday Life, uses an ethnographic
approach to tease out how music makes sense in lived experience (an aerobics class,
a karaoke evening, a music therapy session) 'Too much writing within the sociology
of music—and cultural studies more widely—is abstract and ephemeral; there are
very few close studies of how music is used and works as an ordering material in
 POPULAR MUSIC 133

social life' (p. x). Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity by Andy Krims looks at how
rap is 'composed' and critiques music theory and genre along the way. Clearly
written and solidly researched, Bass Culture: When Reggae was King, by Lloyd
Bradley, a cultural history of reggae, has established itself as the definitive
journalistic account. David Katz concentrates on just one reggae act, but arguably
the most influential, in his biography People Funny Boy: The Genius of Lee
'Scratch' Perry. Westsiders: Stories of the Boys in the Hood by William Shaw, gives

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an account of seven would-be rappers in Los Angeles. A senior lecturer in social
anthropology at the University of Manchester, Peter Wade's Music, Race, and
Nation: Musica Tropical in Colombia examines how the porro, cumbia, and
valenato styles became popular in a country which had hitherto prided itself on its
white heritage.
A new concept: rock biography by committee. The Ultimate Biography of the Bee
Gees: Tales of the Brothers Gibb by Melinda Bilyeu, Hector Cook and Andrew Mon
Hughs with assistance from Joseph Brennan and Mark Crohan, disentangles the Bee
Gees story unaided by the surviving Gibb brothers. Another multitasked biography
is Stoned, by Andrew Loog Oldham, the ex-manager of the Rolling Stones. His
memoir comes 'written and produced' by his good self, with 'interviews and
research' by Simon Dudfield, edited by Ron Ross. The result is an important piece
of firsthand testimony for those interested in countercultural London based on a
series of interviews with suitably swinging eye-witnesses, though the central
players, the Rolling Stones themselves, refused to co-operate with the project.
Finally, A Change is Gonna Come: Music, Race and the Soul of America by Craig
Werner, a professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin.
Werner's detailed history of intellectual and social trends, such as black
consciousness, seventies irony and eighties music in the Reagan era, together with
his discussion of jazz, gospel, blues, disco, hip-hop and rap, make this a formidable
contribution to the history of post-War popular music.

Books Reviewed

Billig, Michael. Rock V Roll Jews. Five Leaves. [2000] pp. 168. pb £7.99 ISBN 0
9071 2353 8.
Bilyeu, Melinda, Hector Cook and Andrew Mon Hughs with assistance from Joseph
Brennan and Mark Crohan. The Ultimate Biography of the Bee Gees: Tales of the
Brothers Gibb. Omnibus. [2000] pp. 688. £19.95 ISBN 0 7119 7917 0.
Bradley, Lloyd. Bass Culture: When Reggae was King. Viking. [2000] pp. 573. pb
£12.99 ISBN 0 6708 5563 4.
Buckingham, David. After the Death of Childhood: Growing Up in the Age of
Electronic Media. Polity. [2000] pp. 245. pb £14.99 ISBN 0 7456 1933 9.
Cavanagh, David. The Creation Records Story: My Magpie Eyes are Hungry for the
Prize. Virgin. [2000] pp. 584. £20 ISBN 1 8522 7775 0.
DeNora, Tina. Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge University Press. [2000] pp. 181.
pb £13.95 ISBN 0 5216 3447 4.
Drummond, Bill. 45. Little, Brown. [2000] pp. 361. pb £12.99 ISBN 0 3168 5385 2.
Everett, Walter, ed. Expression in Pop-Rock Music: A Collection of Critical and
Analytical Essays. Garland. [2000] pp. 372. $47.50 ISBN 0 8153 3160 6.
134 POPULAR MUSIC

Flur, Wolfgang. Kraftwerk: I was a Robot. Translation by Janet Porteous. Sanctuary

Press. [2000] pp. 287. pb £14 ISBN 1 8607 4320 X.
Goodall, Howard. Big Bangs: The Story of Five Discoveries that Changed Musical
History. Vintage. [2000] pp. 238. pb £7.99 ISBN 0 0992 8354 9.
Gray, Michael. Song and Dance Man III: The Art of Bob Dylan. Cassell. [2000] pp.
918. pb £29.95 ISBN 0 8264 5150 0.
Heinonen, Yrjo, Jouni Koskimaki, Seppo Niemi and Terhi Nurmesjarvi, eds.

Downloaded from ywcct.oxfordjournals.org at University of Adelaide on November 8, 2010

Beatlestudies 2: History, Identity, Authenticity. University of Jyvaskyla,
Department of Music: Research Reports 23. [2000] pp. 255. pb ISBN 9 5139
0733 3.
Irvin, Jim. The Mojo Collection: The Greatest Albums of All Time. Mojo Books.
[2000] pp. 914. pb £14.99 ISBN 1 8419 5067 X.
Katz, David. People Funny Boy: The Genius of Lee 'Scratch' Perry. Payback Press.
[2000] pp. 538. pb £14.99 ISBN 0 8624 1854 2.
Krims, Andy. Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity. Cambridge University Press.
[2000] pp. 217. pb £15.99 ISBN 0 5216 3447 4.
Maconie, Stuart. James: Folklore—The Official History. Virgin. [2000] pp. 266. pb
£14.99 ISBN 0 7535 0494 4.
Middleton, Richard, ed. Reading Pop: Approaches to Textual Analysis in Popular
Music. Oxford University Press. [2000] pp. 388. pb £14.99 ISBN 0 1981 6611 7.
Miller, James. Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock and Roll, 1947-1977.
Fireside. [2000] pp. 415. pb $15 ($CAN 22) ISBN 0 6848 6560 2.
Moy, Ron. An Analysis of the Position and Status of Sound Ratio in Contemporary
Society. Edwin Mellen. [2000] pp. 157. £64.95 ISBN 0 7734 7540 0.
Oldham, Andrew Loog. Stoned. Seeker and Warburg. [2000] pp. 374. £16.99 ISBN
0 4362 8866 4.
Pegg, Nicholas. The Complete David Bowie. Reynolds and Hearn. [2000] pp. 576.
pb £19.95 ISBN 19031 1140 4.
Perry, Mark. 'Sniffin' Glue: The Essential Punk Accessory. Foreword by John
Cooper Clarke. Edited by Terry Rawlings. Sanctuary. [2000] pp. 345. pb £20
ISBN 1 8607 4275 0.
Potter, John, ed. The Cambridge Guide to Singing. Cambridge University Press.
[2000] pp. 286. pb £ 14.95 ISBN 0 5216 2709 5.
Redhead, Steve. Repetitive Beat Generation. Rebel. [2000] pp. 177. pb £10 ISBN 0
8624 1930 1.
Shaw, William. Westsiders: Stories of the Boys in the Hood. Bloomsbury. [2000] pp.
388. pb £11.99 ISBN 0 7475 3529 9.
Strong, Martin C. The Great Rock Discography. Fully revised and expanded fifth
edition with a Foreword by John Peel. Mojo Books. [2000] pp. 1109. pb £20
ISBN 1 8419 5017 3.
Talbot, Michael. The Musical Work: Reality or Invention? Liverpool University
Press. [2000] pp. 260. pb £12.95 ISBN 0 8532 3835 9.
Wade, Peter. Music, Race, and Nation: Musica Tropical in Colombia. University of
Chicago Press. [2000] pp. 323. pb £13 ISBN 0 2268 6845 1.
Werner, Craig. A Change is Gonna Come: Music, Race and the Soul of America.
Payback Press. [2000] pp. 430. £12.99 ISBN 1 8419 5050 5.