See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/273256444

Cómo Vino la Mano: Orígenes del Rock Argentino. By Miguel Grinberg. Buenos
Aires: Gourmet Musical Ediciones, 2008 (4th revised and expanded edn). 285
pp. ISBN 978-987-22664-3-1

Article  in  Popular Music · May 2010

CITATIONS READS

0 130

1 author:

Michael O'Brien
College of Charleston
7 PUBLICATIONS   6 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

Book reviews View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Michael O'Brien on 17 January 2019.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

The second half of the book, ‘Genres in Performance’, considers how ‘perform-
ance events can be viewed as occasions for critical reflection on social life’ (p. 173).
Incorporating passages from ethnographic field notes to capture the immediacy of
performance, Wallach discusses street musicians, dangdut performances, acara events
with multiple performance modes and concerts of pop Indonesia and underground
music. Wallach posits a metonymic relationship between music and society that
allows popular music performance to represent a national utopia of social hybridity
and solidarity. Social solidarity is achieved not only through the practices discussed
in the first half of the book, but through musical performance events that ‘enact an
ethic of inclusiveness, within which musical differences indexing social differences
between people and their divergent allegiances are rhetorically transcended’
(p. 175, emphasis in original). The author’s musings on possible motivations for a
crowd’s response speak to the complexities of and need for ethnographic work on
performance that considers how multiple and nuanced musical meanings are formu-
lated through practice and discourse, and how these dynamics are themselves situ-
ated in complex social and cultural contexts.
Wallach’s emphasis on breadth provides an important overview of Indonesian
musical and social spaces, laying the ground for subsequent work that explores the
richness and texture of select ethnographic cases while considering how a certain
idealism of musical sociability might also reflect some of the tensions of a national
project of harmony in difference. The accompanying CD, with tracks of dangdut,
pop Indonesia and musik underground, complements the richness of the text with the
aural experience of ‘what the stuff sounds like!’

Marina Peterson
Ohio University, USA

Cómo Vino la Mano: Orígenes del Rock Argentino. By Miguel Grinberg. Buenos
Aires: Gourmet Musical Ediciones, 2008 (4th revised and expanded edn). 285 pp.
ISBN 978-987-22664-3-1
doi:10.1017/S0261143010000127
Buenos Aires, Argentina was home in the late 1960s and early 1970s to one of the first
truly local and original rock music scenes in the Spanish-speaking world. The 1967
release of the countercultural anthem ‘La balsa’ (‘The raft’) by Los Gatos marked
the emergence of a movement of local rock musicians singing in their native
Spanish and performing not only covers of English language hits but also original
songs. Bands including the heavily blues-influenced Manal and the more acoustically
oriented Almendra dominated the early scene, but by the mid-1970s a subculture
centred around ‘progressive national music’ had seen the emergence of a surprising
number of artists who would rise to national and international prominence for sev-
eral decades to come: Charly García, Luis Alberto Spinetta, Gustavo Santoalalla, Litto
Nebbia, León Gieco and Claudo Gabis have all enjoyed long careers across a range of
genres and are important referents for any student of Spanish-language rock.
These figures all also share the commonality of having known the author, jour-
nalist and activist Miguel Grinberg, and their interviews with him form an important
nucleus of intriguing primary documents collected in this re-edited and expanded
volume. Grinberg was one of the few journalists who was quick to support the

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Marine Resource Library, on 17 Jan 2019 at 17:34:23, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261143010000127
 Reviews 305

underground movement almost from its very beginning, and this volume is suffused
with nostalgia for those early, heady days of what would only later earn the title ‘rock
nacional’ as well as no small amount of disdain for what he perceives to be the narrow
commercial aims of contemporary Argentine rock. On this topic, as on the relative
aesthetic, political and ideological merits of all the music of the time period,
Grinberg’s authorial voice is emphatically that of the critic-fan rather than the
detached scholar; he laments that ‘almost the totality of “youth” music today . . .
leaves one with the impression of a multifaceted jingle aiming only at selling soft
drinks, beer, clothing, and cell phones . . . the Malvinas (Falklands) war entirely
rotted our collective vitality, and the legacy of the military dictatorship was a splin-
tered country that, in the last twenty-five years has done no more than to intone the
tango of failure’ (pp. 15–16, my translation).
But to lament the lack of scholarly contemporary cultural criticism in this book is
to miss the point entirely. Each of the successive three re-editions of this volume after its
appearance in 1977 as one of the first substantial volumes dedicated to Argentine rock
has included a new preface, and to read the four of them successively (they all appear in
this edition) is to witness the diminishing returns of an author who has since largely
devoted his attentions to other topics and activities. This new edition is nonetheless
important in its own right for several reasons: it includes previously unpublished inter-
views with Miguel Cantilo and Rodolfo García (former drummer for the seminal
groups Almendra and Aquelarre), 16 pages of beautiful black-and-white candid
photos of musicians and lyricists, and 70 pages of Grinberg’s collected articles and
reviews spanning the period 1968–1977.
The heart of the volume, though, and for this reviewer the book’s greatest con-
tribution, remains the set of lengthy, often candid and personal interviews with
many of the most important personages from the first decade of Argentine rock.
We see Spinetta, in a 1977 interview recorded in his home during a violent thunder-
storm, muse confusedly about his future projects by candlelight. Santoalalla, years
before his first Oscar or Grammy, recalls the adventures in monastic-style collective
living with his first band, Arco Iris. León Gieco, several months before going into
exile during the military dictatorship, is frighteningly candid about the repressive
government’s tactics of silencing musicians. The musicians and lyricists contradict
one another and Grinberg himself in what ultimately functions quite well as a mul-
tivocal oral history of a turbulent and fascinating period in Argentine musical
history.
While this edition does make some concessions to the non-specialist or fan –
an unnamed editorial hand has provided some helpful biographical and other
glosses in footnotes – ultimately this book is not likely to garner a great deal of
interest for audiences outside the scholars and fans of Argentine rock. The reader
is provided with little in the way of historical or musical analysis or context, and
neither does the author attempt to engage any of the scholarly conversations
(now much lengthier than when this volume originally appeared) about rock nacio-
nal. (For an excellent overview of these sources, see Fanjul 2008.) But for the histor-
ian, musicologist, sociologist or other scholar interested in this subculture and
period, this volume has enormous value as a meticulously edited set of fascinating
primary documents.

Michael S. O’Brien
University of Texas at Austin, USA

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Marine Resource Library, on 17 Jan 2019 at 17:34:23, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261143010000127
 306 Reviews

References
Fanjul, A.P. 2008. Acúmulos e vazios da pesquisa sobre o rock Argentino (Accumulation and gaps in the
research on Argentine rock), Latin American Music Review, 29/2, pp. 121–44

Pop Idols and Pirates: Mechanisms of Consumption and the Global Circulation
of Popular Music. By Charles Fairchild. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. 182 pp.
ISBN 978-0-7546-6383-6
doi:10.1017/S0261143010000139
Fairchild’s Pop Idols and Pirates is a good read for those wanting an introductory
examination of the consumer/producer relationship within the music industry as it
relates to Australian Idol, but it falls short of an in-depth analysis. Fairchild ‘focuses
on all that happens in between the musician and the fan in an effort to better under-
stand how the links between the two are produced and maintained’ (p. 2). Two see-
mingly unrelated arenas of the music industry are described and compared in order
to demonstrate what the music industry sees as ‘right’ (the ‘Idol’ phenomenon) and
‘wrong’ (music piracy) ways of consuming popular music. Fairchild argues that: ‘The
handling of both reveals explicit attempts to control and justify the ways in which the
music industry makes money from music’ (ibid.).
Part I focuses on the link between production and consumption through a com-
parison of two distinctly different venues: a Virgin Megastore and a small-scale inde-
pendent record store. Here, Fairchild argues that the relationship between the
consumer and producer is a cyclical process, and much broader than merely purchas-
ing a CD. While the description of the two sites is of interest, it is not really adequate,
as Fairchild does not take into account other viable sites, most notably online stores,
which are relevant to the topic at hand.
Part I continues with a critique of the field of popular music studies. Fairchild
asks ‘what the ontological status of “the music itself” is, what counts as part of a musi-
cal work, and how these ideas relate to the ways in which that work is made meaning-
ful as it moves through the world’ (p. 36). As with most of this book, these are quite
lofty goals, and ones that would best be dealt with separately, as opposed to discussed
within a short chapter. Through the views of Lawrence Grossberg, Allan Moore and
Theodor Gracyk, Fairchild concludes that there is no coherent definition of popular
music but, while it is fine to critique the field of popular music studies, it would
also be beneficial if Fairchild offered some constructive contributions.
Part II looks at the phenomena which bridge the gap between production and
consumption, the struggle over control of technology (CDs, MP3, downloading), and
the power of branding/advertising (consumer relationships). Fairchild traces the his-
tory of the MP3 and how the music industry has struggled to maintain power over
the piracy of its products. Here, Fairchild notes that ‘consumption is the reality of the
music market. Each time we consume music we are a central participant in the
material expression of a system of power’ (p. 73). He argues that advertising and
the power of branding are a major aspect of this system of power – the music indus-
try is having to rely on ‘cool-hunting’ and ‘trend-spotting’ in order to break into the
youth market, ‘whose behaviour is often poorly understood’ (pp. 81–82). In terms of
relationships, power falls at the hands of these youths through the power of
consumption.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Marine Resource Library, on 17 Jan 2019 at 17:34:23, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261143010000127
View publication stats