Popular Music

http://journals.cambridge.org/PMU

Additional services for Popular Music:

Email alerts: Click here

Subscriptions: Click here
Commercial reprints: Click here
Terms of use : Click here

Musical Theater and American Culture. By David Walsh

and Len Platt. Westport, CT & London: Praeger, 2003. 200
pp. ISBN 0 275 98057 X (hardcover)

John Street

Popular Music / Volume 25 / Issue 01 / January 2006, pp 133 - 134

DOI: 10.1017/S0261143006220774, Published online: 17 February 2006

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0261143006220774

How to cite this article:

John Street (2006). Popular Music, 25, pp 133-134 doi:10.1017/S0261143006220774

Request Permissions : Click here

Downloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/PMU, IP address: 169.230.243.252 on 19 Mar 2015

 Popular Music (2006) Volume 25/1. Copyright © 2006 Cambridge University Press, pp. 131–143
Printed in the United Kingdom

Reviews

Rockin’ Las Américas: The Global Politics of Rock in Latin/o America. Edited
by Deborah Pacini Hernandez, Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste and Eric Zolov.
Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004. xii+420 pp. ISBN 0 8229 5841
4 (paper)
doi: 10.1017/S0261143006210778

The editors of this fine collection of essays should be commended for their decision to
narrow the scope of the volume to ‘rock’. Previous collections on popular music in
Latin America, as much as they are illuminating, are mostly surveys of a wide range of
styles, genres and related socio-cultural phenomena that do not have much social
and cultural common ground to them, except for being created in that part of the
world. This book concentrates on a sample of the music cultures that are sometimes
referred to collectively as rock en español or latin alternative. These music cultures and
genres, in other words, are connected by very specific thematic threads and theoretical
issues.
One thing the editors rightly emphasise in their excellent lengthy introduction,
is that for Latin Americans, as elsewhere in the world, ‘rock’ is often an umbrella term
that includes ‘all music that is mass-mediated, self-consciously ‘‘contemporary’’,
makes at least some use of electric or electronic instrumentation, is associated
primarily (but not exclusively) with youth, and whose aesthetics are hybrid, that is,
reflecting multiple cultural sources’ (p. 5). This assertion voices the fact that in many
parts of the world – contrary to recent attempts to differentiate ‘rock’ from hip-hop
and electronica within Anglo-American discourse – ‘rock’ is indeed a broad cultural
formation (or template, as it is called here) whose meaning is derived from its
complex and ambiguous relationship with traditional, dominant national culture.
‘Rock’, in other words, is all that ‘new’, late modern, electric and electronic music
stigmatised and excluded because of its alleged embodiment of cultural imperialism
(in the eyes of the left) or cultural deterioration (in the eyes of the right).
The essays collected here thus document moments, events, genres, periods and
other phenomena of rock in different Latin American countries, and narrate them
along issues of national identity. Namely, how does rock music and culture challenge
existing notions of national music, the exclusion and marginalisation of certain forms
of rock from national rock histories (like female rock in Mexico or Brazilian soul
music), and how rock cultures, successfully or not, struggle for national legitimacy.
About half the studies do this by examining historical cases. These include the
chapters on rock in Cuba (by Deborah Pacini Hernandez and Reebee Garofalo),
Brazilian soul (by Bryan McCann), Uruguayan rock (Abril Trigo), and the
Guatemalan band Alux Nahual (by Paulo Alvarado). Others concentrate on recent
phenomena, like Boricua rock (in Puerto Rico, by Jorge Arévalo Mateus), Los
Angeles’ latino female punkeras (by Michelle Habell-Pallán), Colombian rock and its
reception in the US (by Héctor D. Fernández L’Hoeste), and Chilean rock (by Walesca
Pino-Ojeda). With three historical studies (Eric Zolov about La Onda Chicana; Julia
131

http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 19 Mar 2015 IP address: 169.230.243.252

 132 Reviews

Palacios and Tere Estrada on early women rockers; Héctor Castillo Berthier on youth
bandas) and one dealing with the current scene of nortec in Tijuana (by Susana
Asensio), I find Mexico to be over represented in this volume. Especially since rich
and influential rock cultures like those of Argentina and Chile have only one chapter
each.
At their core, all these essays are about recognition. As George Yúdice writes in
the Afterward, all these essays

seek recognition for musical expressions that were repressed and historically remain over-
looked. . . . This will to provide recognition is also consistent with the premise that something
about these expressions is or was transgressive, the very reason for their repression or exclu-
sion. Transgression here is a contestation of normative national identities promoted by Latin
American elites . . . (p. 347)
But the quest for recognition also means being accepted as legitimate expressions of
national culture. For this end, national rock cultures have to assess their specificity
and uniqueness vis-à-vis Anglo-American rock. Thus, while most essays document
the struggle of specific genres to be heard and make a difference, few confront what
seems to be one of the most difficult questions in this regard. Namely, what makes the
rock music of a given country locally unique? In other words, what is Mexican about
rock made in Mexico, or what is specifically Chilean about rock made in Chile? Two
articles that confront this question are the one on Brazilian rock (aka BRock; by Martha
Tupinambá De Ulhôa) and the one on the 1990s rock chabón phenomenon in Argentina
(by Pablo Semán, Pablo Vila and Cecilia Benedetti). Ulhôa’s approach is empirical.
Her research combines semiotics and reception studies. She surveys fans of Brazilian
rock, asking them what they see as ‘Brazilian’ in the locally made rock music. In
addition, she analyses music and lyrics of salient songs. Her conclusion as to what is
‘Brazilian’ about BRock is not definitive, but her research does show a way of dealing
with this intricate question.
Another angle on national uniqueness is offered in the chapter on Argentina’s
rock chabón. This wave within Argentinean rock of the 1990s expresses, according to
the authors, both departure from and continuity within the long tradition of rock
nacional in this country. Keeping the oppositional heritage of earlier rockers, rock
chabón nevertheless transforms it from a middle-class individualised form of critique
into a lower-sector, collective and nationalistic opposition against current conditions
in Argentina. It is thus made clear that the ‘Argentineaness’ of local rock resides in its
own logic of development, in the specificity of its stylistic genealogy, which by the
1990s has decoupled itself from the stylistic dictates of Anglo-American rock.
In the end, the importance of this book resides not only in its revealing
documentation and analysis of rock en español, but in its implicit call for a rewriting of
rock history as a global phenomenon from the outset; that is, no more an understand-
ing of ‘rock’ as a cultural form that has been first Anglo-American and then spread to
the rest of the world, but a consideration of ‘rock’ as a hierarchical global cultural
form, whose centres of power are of course Anglo-American, but whose presence has
been experienced in many parts of the world practically from its very early moments.
Motti Regev
The Open University of Israel

http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 19 Mar 2015 IP address: 169.230.243.252

 Reviews 133

Musical Theater and American Culture. By David Walsh and Len Platt.
Westport, CT & London: Praeger, 2003. 200 pp. ISBN 0 275 98057 X (hardcover)
doi:10.1017/S0261143006220774

Over the past two decades, Popular Music has published few articles on the musical.
There is Charles Hamm on Irving Berlin in 13/2 (1994) and Jonathan Burston’s piece
on the ‘megamusical’ from 17/2 in 1998. But as David Horn noted in his own piece on
Porgy and Bess, also in 13/2, ‘the musical theatre has been almost entirely ignored by
popular music scholarship’ (p. 165). It is for this reason that we should welcome
David Walsh and Len Platt’s study, Musical Theater and American Culture.
Their book is an interesting attempt to link the history of the musical to its wider
social, political and occasionally economic context. And if the authors’ argument is
not always persuasive, they do raise intriguing questions. Should we, for example,
write the history of the musical in the same way that we might write the history of
other musical forms or genres? More generally, how should we connect the textual
and contextual elements of the story; how should macro-economic change be linked to
micro-cultural patterns and processes?
Walsh and Platt offer an answer to both questions in their section on ‘How to
Study the Musical’ (pp. 10–12). For them, the musical, ‘like all popular texts and
works of art’, is inextricably and reflexively bound up with ‘the cultural and social
structures of society’ (pp. 10–11). They see the musical as part of the articulation
of changing American identities, as a vehicle for the ‘American Dream’ and the
ideologies that lurk within it. They do not, though, offer a systematic theory or model
for making these connections. Instead, they present their work as an interpretation of
history, rather than a detailed and annotated version of it.
They begin by tracing the emergence of the musical by identifying the cultural
forms that, they say, combined to create or influence it. These progenitors include the
ballad opera and burlesque, the minstrel show and operetta, the revue and vaudeville.
In tracing these antecedents, Walsh and Platt are able to highlight the stylistic patterns
and inheritances of the modern musical. Their history looks – you might say – at the
internal processes of replication and mutation. It does not, for the most part, look to
external environmental factors, and it does not offer a broader theory of the changes
that would connect the different musical formations.
If the story of the emergence of the musical concentrates on the local connections,
then its subsequent story is painted onto a much broader canvas. The music becomes
the product of national and global trends and experiences. So, for example, an
extended political history of McCarthyism and the Cold War (and the rhetoric of the
‘end of ideology’ that accompanied it) ends with the claim that musicals like Oklahoma
were, ‘in a whole series of ways, a complex and reflexive engagement with this
end-of-ideology Americanism in a mainly celebratory fashion, reconciling the liberal
version of social engineering with the conservatism quietist manifestation of this
ideology’ (p. 100). This is quite a weight of historical significance to lay upon ‘Oh,
What a Beautiful Morning’ and ‘The Surrey with the Fringe on Top’. Or rather, it begs
questions about which musicals are singled out to bear this history and about how
political experience (and the interpretation given of it) is articulated in song and
dance.
This is not to deny the importance of context, but to ask about how text and
context connect. My complaint is that the broad sweep of political and social change is
presented as a prelude to the particular musicals, rather than as part of them. And

http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 19 Mar 2015 IP address: 169.230.243.252

 134 Reviews

when the musicals are themselves discussed, they are treated almost as works of
political theory. ‘Oklahoma, for instance’, write Walsh and Platt, ‘is wedded to and
celebrates the ideology and politics of liberal democracy, where differences of politi-
cal interest can be reconciled through cooperation and coexistence rather than re-
solved through conflict’ (p. 104). This might be said of the political science of Nelson
Polsby and Robert Dahl, but is it true for the words and music of Richard Rodgers and
Oscar Hammerstein? Walsh and Platt write of West Side Story as a manifesto for
American liberalism, or of Chicago as ‘exposing the ideology and myth of the Ameri-
can Dream’ (p. 129), the latter being deconstructed subsequently in the musicals of
Stephen Sondheim.
It would be wrong to undervalue the task that Walsh and Platt set themselves.
Connecting text and context is immensely difficult. There are the questions of which
text (which musical) and which context (what national and local events, interpreted
how)? While Walsh and Platt defend their answer as just one interpretation, it would
have been interesting to see them identifying musicals and events that did not fit their
account, that stood as anomalies or irregularities to their narrative. Nonetheless, this
remains a valuable contribution to a rarely tended field.
John Street
University of East Anglia

Smile When You Call Me a Hillbilly: Country Music’s Struggle for Respectabil-
ity, 1939–1954. By Jeffrey J. Lange. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press,
2004. 336 pp. ISBN 0-8203-2622-4 (cloth), ISBN 0-8203-2623-2 (paper)
doi:10.1017/S0261143006230770

Country music, like most musical genres, is simultaneously cultural form and
commercial product. But country music’s chronic discomfort with its commercial
underpinnings makes it an especially interesting musical genre for popular music
scholars. When country music struggles with generic change for commercial
purposes, it foregrounds, for fans, listeners and scholars, why those struggles matter.
Smile When You Call Me a Hillbilly considers, in admirable and extensive detail,
the various performers and genres that dominated American country music from
1939 until 1954. It offers outsiders to country music a clear description of six sub-
categories of country music, as well as documentation of the traits and fortunes of
each of these categories. It gives biographical details of key performers, and stylistic
descriptions of their most characteristic songs. Overall, Jeffrey J. Lange’s book
recounts a history of recorded songs, contextualised in changing patterns of perform-
ance, against a loosely sketched historical background, during a fascinating period of
development in the music industry as a whole, as well as the country music business
in particular.
Lange discusses the life and times of significant performers in each subcategory,
with a total of over fifty performers analysed. In his account of the progressive genre,
he describes the careers and key songs of such figures as Roy Acuff, Bill Monroe,
and the Shelton Brothers; for Western swing performers like Spade Cooley, Hank
Thompson, and Bob Wills; for the postwar traditional genre he includes, among
others, Flatt and Scruggs, Bill Monroe, and Molly O’Day; in the honky-tonk genre
performers like Lefty Frizzell,, Ernest Tubb, and Hank Williams; for country pop

http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 19 Mar 2015 IP address: 169.230.243.252

 Reviews 135

figures like Eddy Arnold, Red Foley, and Hank Snow; and for country blues the
Delmore Brothers, Moon Mullican, and Elvis Presley.
The book originated as a dissertation; it is an impressive compilation of
biographical and stylistic details, organised into a period of what he calls nationalis-
ation (before WWII) and then modernisation (after WWII until the rise of rock ‘n’
roll). Lange says in his preface that he listened to thousands of records, read fifteen
years worth of trade magazines, and unearthed countless primary and secondary
sources. He had the benefit of tutelage by an extraordinary group of country music
scholar-aficionados that were at the Country Music Foundation in the mid 1990s:
Ronnie Pugh, John Rumble, Alan Stoker, and Bob Pinson. Guided by this generous
group, the excellent CMF collection, and his own apparent indefatigability, he has
written an account that gives readers concrete and specific access to a fascinating
period of performers, styles, and generic shifts. For country music fans, this book will
offer an especially useful overview of often unacknowledged precursors to alt-
country.
But for popular music scholars, Lange’s book unintentionally offers a cautionary
tale about the challenges we encounter when trying to connect social, historical
and cultural processes. Lange argues as a historian, but says that country music
‘represented more than just a historical document of the times; it represented a vehicle
for survival, both on the individual and collective scale’. He describes how he came to
see the book as being about ‘people turning to their families, their friends, and their
faith as a means to persevering in the face of adversity’. In this way, he wants his
historical description of generic music to somehow explain country music’s meaning
for people. He wants to use biography and history to explain how and why country
music meant so much to its audiences during the period. Historical descriptive
analysis goes a long way toward understanding country music’s characteristics as a
commodity, but doesn’t go very far in understanding country music’s meanings as
a cultural form. Understanding country as a ‘vehicle for survival’, as well as
acknowledging the realities of a ‘struggle for respectability’ described in his book title,
requires analyses of lyrics and audiences, both of which are crucial absences in his
account.
The strength and value of this book is its weaving together of historical and
geographical details to frame the biographies of performers and the descriptions of
songs. Lange effectively traces key figures and moments as country music moved
from a regionally identified novelty genre to a nationally recognised and established
musical form. He connects this emergence to demographic changes, and describes
such developments as the rise of package tours, various radio barn dances, the
Hollywood western, recording industry challenges, as well as forces like urbanis-
ation, industrialisation, migration and modernisation. But Lange ends up ascribing
fluctuations in the generic mix of country music to changes in audience taste, some-
how linked to changes in society. This assumes that mass-mediated genres like
country music represent what people actually like and want, filtered through various
production processes. It leads to a post hoc ascription of cultural change reflecting
social change. But society and culture are produced by people, just as people are
produced by culture and society.
Explaining cultural change, in popular music as well as other cultural forms,
is, alas, much more complicated than connecting content with social forces. So is
explaining changing audience tastes. The book’s weakest sections are when Lange
tries to move from the ‘how’ to the ‘why’ of generic changes. He has made the

http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 19 Mar 2015 IP address: 169.230.243.252

 136 Reviews

surprising choice to avoid analysing lyrics, even while acknowledging in his intro-
duction the centrality of lyrics to country music’s perceived authenticity, as well as
meaning to the audience. He makes sweeping claims about the ways that country
music (anthropomorphised) and country music’s audiences (unanalysed) were
struggling to ‘adapt to cultural developments while retaining . . . authenticity’. Both
the music and the music’s fans sought respectability and acceptance, he says again
and again, without showing us how or why the struggle for legitimacy explains
changes in country music, or why those changes mattered to country music fans.
These are questions I have long struggled over, too. It is very difficult, but
fascinating, to find ways to explain generic boundaries and generic changes, as well as
the meanings of those changes to fans of particular styles. The key for all popular
music scholars may be for us to acknowledge the limits of what we can explain, from
what we’ve studied. In cultural analysis, study of the constraints of production, or the
traits of content, or the biographies of performers, or the sales of records, or the
demographics of the audience, can’t really explain why genres change, or why genre
changes matter.
Lange’s book is premised on country music’s long (and still-continuing)
struggle for legitimacy. This is an important premise, because the contradictory desire
to shed and valorise the hayseed stigma is key to understanding why country music
retains generic coherence. In spite of the variety and flux that Lange analyses in such
detail, somehow country stays country. Why? And why do subgenres continue to
develop and shift? Smile When You Call Me A Hillbilly offers an excellent descriptive
account of subgeneric variety, one that can inform subsequent explorations of generic
change that (I hope) will continue to interest music scholars for years to come.
Joli Jensen
University of Tulsa, USA

Madonna’s Drowned Worlds: New Approaches to her Cultural Transforma-

tions, 1983–2003. Edited by Santiago Fouz-Hernández and Freya Jarman-Ivens.
Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2004. 223 pp. ISBN 0754633713 (hard-
back), ISBN 0754633721 (paperback)
doi: 10.1017/S0261143006240777

Academic and media interest in Madonna, as highlighted in the introductory chapter

to this book, appear to have come together within three major resurgences over the
past decade; the post-Sex and Erotica ‘backlash’ of 1993/4, the cleaned-up ‘earth
mother’ period of Evita and Ray of Light and, most recently, the post-2000 transforma-
tion into ‘Veronica Electronica’, when two new albums and sell-out world tours again
returned her to our attention. Now twenty years into her career, any analysis of her
work is going to be a substantial undertaking, with the task of just reading everything
written about her described in one 1993 text as ‘mapping the vastness of the cosmos’.
The backgrounds of the contributors to this book serve to confirm this, including those
working in popular culture, musicology, media studies, marketing and Spanish
cinema. The editors have, however, managed to filter this vastness into themes which
have been consistent throughout her career; gender, sexuality and ethnicity, and have
brought analysis in these areas up to date, unpacking the layers of her work from
composition, instrumentation, lyrics and vocals to video images, stage production

http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 19 Mar 2015 IP address: 169.230.243.252

 Reviews 137

and marketing. The questions which are perhaps those most often posed at the
Madonna enthusiast, academic and fan alike, are returned to often; is she ‘real’ or
‘fake’? Is there depth and meaning in her work? Does her changing of collaborators
and influences necessarily make her a ‘sub-cultural tourist’?
The first section of the book, entitled ‘The Girlie Show’, looks into gender
identities, an area recognised by the editors as the most covered in previous academic
writings on Madonna. What sets this apart, however (and this applies to the whole of
the book), is the emphasis on her music. Stan Hawkins’ opening chapter, for example,
looks in detail at her musical production and how it contributes to her ‘camp pop’,
focusing on a thorough analysis of the song Music. A following chapter then discusses
the imagery contained in her music videos, exploring aspects such as girlhood,
femininity and androgyny.
Section two, ‘Post-Virgin’, then examines sexual identities in her work, with
Keith E. Clifton’s discussion of her vocal ‘metamorphosis’ one of the most accessible
chapters of the book. With a background of her status as gay icon, Clifton charts the
development over her career of what Simon Frith has called a ‘thin instru-
ment’, concluding that, in answer to the ‘depth’ question, she is ‘anything but
one-dimensional’ (p. 56).
The most substantial section of the book is ‘Drowned Worlds’, looking
into ethnic identities and their influence on her work and image, covering the
India-inspired Ray of Light, the Japanese-themed Drowned World tour and her
relationship with Hispanic culture, perhaps the most consistent influence throughout
her career. A particularly enjoyable chapter here is Sean Albiez’s ‘The day the music
died laughing: Madonna and country’, which explores Madonna’s own ethnicity
through her relationship with American, Italian and, most recently, British culture.
The highlights of this chapter include an analysis of the cowboy imagery used in the
Music period and an interesting discussion of her version of American Pie, widely
acknowledged as a strange choice of song for her because of its ‘golden age of
America’ theme, and further complicated by a video containing what appear to be
mixed messages. The confusingly titled most recent album American Life is also
examined, Albiez’s view that it ‘promised a critique of contemporary America but
merely pronounced her misgivings with her (celebrity) life’ (p. 123) echoing that of
many of her followers.
The final section, ‘Blond Ambition’, focuses on the role of Madonna as a celebrity
in consumer culture, beginning with David Gauntlett’s ‘Madonna’s Daughters’,
which examines her influence on the following generation of female artists with
particular reference to popular feminism, sexuality and changing identities. The final
chapter ‘Consuming Madonna Then and Now’ gives an especially interesting case
analysis of how consumers have responded to Madonna. Based upon survey
responses of attitudes towards her videos and various website and conference
discussions, Lisa Peñaloza reveals what Madonna means to her consumers and how
the messages and themes of her work are used in their lives.
I have concentrated here on the chapters which, as a music psychologist, were of
most interest to myself. However, I would agree with the preface to the book that the
variety of issues discussed in the text should make it a valuable and up-to-date
resource with quite a wide audience.
Laura Mitchell
Glasgow Caledonian University

http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 19 Mar 2015 IP address: 169.230.243.252

 138 Reviews

Making Beats: the Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop. By Joseph G. Schloss.

Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004. 226 pp. ISBN 0819566950
(cloth), ISBN 0819566969 (paperback)
doi: 10.1017/S0261143006250773

Joseph Schloss’s Making Beats is the first scholarly study to explain, in great
detail, how the beats that make up the sonic backdrops for hip-hop music are
conceived and put together. It is not the scope of his book to explain the lyrics, sung or
rapped, that so often accompany these beats. Instead, he focuses on ‘beats’ as ‘musical
collages composed of brief segments of recorded sound’ (p. 2). Based on ten years of
work in the field, Making Beats is a strong contribution to the field of hip-hop
scholarship.
Making Beats is, first and foremost, an ethnography. It is largely based on
interviews the author conducted with deejays, emcees, and producers of hip-hop
beats between 1998 and 2003, as well as on his own personal experiences moving
within the hip-hop community. In the Introduction, Schloss lists the benefits of the
ethnographic aspects of his work, among which is exploiting the vast scholarly
developments in the field of anthropology over the past thirty years. He says:
‘Critiques of reflexivity, the abstraction of human activity, and the idea of a discrete
and bounded ‘‘field’’ are largely absent from writings on popular music because they
are simply not relevant to the theoretical approach of most popular music scholars.
Ethnography can bring these issues into the discourse’ (p. 7). He also details potential
shortcomings in his research: on the one hand he is observing the hip-hop community
in the field, collecting data for an academic study, while on the other he is an active
participant within that same hip-hop community. For example, he once found himself
in a club at which members of his dissertation committee, interviewees, and DJs were
all in attendance, blurring the line between academia and the field. Insofar as these
two worlds often occupied one and the same space in this study, Schloss rightly points
out that this is problematic in trying to maintain a separation between the two. He
mentions how, because the distinction is obfuscated, the separation can only be
described as an ‘ideological’ one, clearly creating problems of objectivity.
Schloss also discusses his own ethnicity (Jewish) in relation to the all-pervasive
African-American element of this music. Though one cannot help but be sympathetic
to his situation as a non-African-American researching an African-American music,
one also wonders if much of this material justifying this position could perhaps have
been left out altogether. In all likelihood, nothing would have been lost in doing so.
The following simple point sums up succinctly his prolix discussion on the ethnic
aspect of making beats: ‘[T]he rules of hip-hop are African American, but one need not
be African American to understand or follow them’ (p. 10). Nevertheless, one cannot
help but admire the academic rigour and perseverance that are at the foundation of his
work.
There are no musical transcriptions in Making Beats. Schloss defends this by
emphasising the ethnographic as opposed to the musicological purpose of the book.
In addition he cites the three major works in rap scholarship that deal with this latter
aspect and adds that his audience is different, that is, not one trained in Western
musicology.1
Aside from the level of specificity of musical transcriptions, the general value
of these transcriptions, and the specific deficiencies therein, he discusses ethical
implications for musical transcriptions of hip-hop. This touches on one of the larger

http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 19 Mar 2015 IP address: 169.230.243.252

 Reviews 139

issues for Schloss in Making Beats: ethics within the hip-hop community. The theme of
ethics is ubiquitous in this book, and it is clear that there is an unwritten code of ethics
by which all hip-hop practitioners live that is binding and of paramount significance.
The bulk of this book is about the producers of hip-hop soundtracks, that is, the
studio artists who compile the beats. But before Schloss deals with them in depth (in
chapters 4–6), he attends to a few other matters, namely, the history of making beats
(chapter 2) and ‘live instruments versus samples’ (chapter 3). These two themes are
closely related in that the history of hip-hop sampling grew out of a tradition of funk
that was based in performances on live instruments. The early songs of the Sugar Hill
Gang exemplify such performances. However, Schloss argues that there was a crucial
moment when sampling became the norm and the producers who made the beats at
the studio began to shun live instruments. Of course, what is more important to the
history of sampling is the emergence of the deejay or turntablist. Schloss shows a
logical and exhaustive chronology of how early deejays became the first producers.
He makes the important point that all producers are deejays, but not all deejays are
producers.
All good producers must have material from which to sample their beats. This
material is obtained from old LPs, that is, vinyl records. The process of obtaining these
records is called ‘digging in the crates’ (since so many of these old LPs are literally
contained in crates). Schloss claims that this is a rite of passage for all producers, and
that in many ways it defines what kind of musician they will be. Again, his treatment
of this topic is thorough, incorporating many quotations from interviews on this
theme. He defines four reasons for digging: ‘to feel or display a commitment to
hip-hop tradition through the conscious or unconscious reinscription of the value of
deejaying . . .; ‘‘paying dues’’ in a general sense; to educate oneself about different
forms of music, . . .; and as a form of socialisation’ (p. 92).
One gets a true sense of Schloss’s sensitive writing style from his discussion of
sampling ethics (chapter 5). This is, of course, a completely uncodified subject, and he
is able to convey to the reader how this unwritten code of ethics is of the utmost
importance to the hip-hop producer, while revealing the underlying reasons with
clarity and precision. One feels, after reading this, that hip-hop producers are part of
a sacred society, and by virtue of the ineffability of their art they are bound by this
unwritten code of ethics. It is only through the author’s intimate knowledge and keen
writing that this aspect of producing samples comes to light. Among the rules he sets
forth are: no biting (i.e. no stealing of others’ samples); no CD sampling; and no
sampling from other hip-hop records (which would be exploiting the producer who
originally dug in the crates for the sound).
In chapter 6, on the aesthetic element of making beats, Schloss identifies four
levels at which beauty manifests itself in the sounds of hip-hop: ‘the underlying
structure of hip-hop beat; the internal characteristics of individual samples; the
relationships that samples take on when juxtaposed; and shared assumptions and
contextual cues that imbue any given choice with significance’ (p. 136). A most crucial
issue in his discussion of the aesthetic in sampling is looping, which takes what was
once a linear instance of sound and makes it cyclic. He further connects looping to
African-American culture and the concept of ‘signifying’: by allowing producers to
use other people’s music to express their own feelings, looping is an ideal form of
signifying. Lastly, he makes the point that by taking away the inevitability of an end,
looping creates a sort of managed unpredictability. A sampled loop is a ‘controlling of
the unpredictability of random musical gestures’ (p. 139), that is, the loop replaces the

http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 19 Mar 2015 IP address: 169.230.243.252

 140 Reviews

beginning, middle, and end that is inherent in much of Western art music with a
continuous flow of sounds that, in turn, is overseen by the producer. In chapter 7, the
last chapter of the body of the work, Schloss broadens the focus of those who make
these beats to include the influences of others, namely, emcees and legal representa-
tives (who are necessary to deal with the numerous copyright issues inherent in
hip-hop). He ends this chapter with the four elements that influence a deejay’s choice
of music to play at clubs: tempo, rhythmic flow, segue opportunities, and the physical
quality of the record.
The best thing about Making Beats is its assiduous in-depth coverage of the topic.
The breadth of Schloss’s work is remarkable. He has consulted numerous works in
cultural anthropology, literary theory, and ethnomusicology, among other fields, to
buttress his arguments. He has also compiled a huge amount of data from the field, of
which the bulk of his writing consists. Most important, he is able to lucidly state his
objectives and follow them through with compelling arguments.
If there is a problem with this book, it lies in the overabundance of detail.
Schloss’s arguments, at times, become difficult to follow, and even abstruse. Some-
times I wondered whether the ‘less is more’ strategy might have served him better.
Furthermore, there is much about hip-hop sampling that Schloss expects his readers
to know. For example, he does not discuss the process of getting a certain sound from
a procured vinyl record onto a soundtrack, and therefore how one makes the beat
itself remains something of a mystery for the uninitiated. A detailed explanation of the
process of sampling would have added much to the broader understanding of this
book. These limitations aside, Schloss is to be commended not only for his attention to
detail, but also for his research integrity. Making Beats is a wonderful addition to the
ever-growing literature on hip-hop music and, in the field of sampling, it is undoubt-
edly the most significant contribution available to date.
Philip Ewell
The University of Tennessee-Knoxville

Endnote
1. These three works are: Kyra D. Gaunt, ‘The Adam Krims, Rap Music and the Poetics of Iden-
veneration of James Brown and George Clinton tity (New York, Cambridge University Press,
in hip-hop music: Is it live! Or is it re-memory?’, 2000); and Robert Walser, ‘Rhythm, rhyme,
in Popular Music: Style and Identity (Montreal, and rhetoric in the music of Public Enemy’, Eth-
Quebec, Centre for Research on Canadian nomusicology, 39/2, pp. 193–218.
Cultural Industries and Institutions, 1995);

Bob Dylan, Performing Artist, 1986–1990 and beyond, Mind Out of Time. By
Paul Williams. London: Omnibus Press, 2004. 384 pp. ISBN: 184449831X
doi: 10.1017/S026114300626077X

This is the third instalment in Paul Williams’ fascinating never-ending quest to follow
the tracks of Bob Dylan as a performing artist. The Dylan tracks that interest Williams
are not found on official studio recordings, but for the most part in the performances
surreptitiously recorded and acquired by the collectors and connoisseurs who follow
Dylan from gig to gig. Williams’s assumption and guiding principle, as argued in his
previous book, is that Dylan’s ‘finest work has been done . . . outside of the confines of
the recording studio’ (Williams 1992, p. xiv; see also Williams 1990). Of course, an

http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 19 Mar 2015 IP address: 169.230.243.252

 Reviews 141

immediate response might be that Greil Marcus’s (2005) recent study of ‘Like A
Rolling Stone’ would tend to refute such a claim – Marcus’ argument being that this
lone, officially available, studio recorded take on a classic song resonates with a legacy
and influence as profound as any song that Dylan or any one else has performed, in or
out of the studio, in the last fifty years.
Whether or not you agree with Marcus, while it is easy to get hold of a recording
of ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, there is no way most of us can verify Williams’ bold claim as
it is unlikely that we have access to the material he is dealing with. His argument rests
therefore on the persuasiveness of his prose. Williams is an avowed Dylan fan and this
book, conversational in tone, is written for fellow Dylan followers in a charac-
teristically direct and chatty style. It’s as if Williams is addressing an assembly of
aficionados, gathered together before or after a concert. This style makes it highly
readable so that even if you don’t like Dylan’s music you can eavesdrop on what one
imagines are the sort of passionate verging on the obsessive conversations that take
place in bars close to the venues where Dylan performs. Refreshingly, there is none of
the anally retentive, sublimated fandom that represses much academic writing. As a
fan, Williams is both enthralled and overwhelmed: the term genius litters page after
page, this quality detected in the most mundane and ordinary musical gesture or
verbal phrase. Not only is Williams a fan, he is a collector, a cataloguer, a classifier and
a critic grading Dylan’s work. In an appendix he lists the 148 Dylan performances that
he’s attended. Much of the book is based on descriptions of these shows, supple-
mented with summary accounts and impressions of songs performed at concerts that
Williams has gained access to via bootleg recordings.
By now it’s something of a commonplace that Dylan treats his songs as open to
change and re-interpretation in concert performance, just as many musicians have
done and still do. There are various officially released albums that illustrate this,
for example, the transition of a ‘Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’ from a swinging 6/8
apocalyptic, acoustic lament to a defiant, galloping 4/4 boogie driven by Mick
Ronson’s barely disguised glam-rock riffing’ (on recordings of the Rolling Thunder
Tour in the mid-1970s). Such changes provide all manner of clues about the way
Dylan is responding to musical trends and social changes when re-interpreting his
own repertoire. But this book takes things much further in its fascination with
variations in lyrics, fluctuations in song arrangements and modifications to set lists.
Williams gets excited by the set list itself and questions such as what songs have been
included this time? When was the last time that song was performed in concert? What
does the running order mean? What appear to me to be trivial and minor changes in
a song’s performance (sometimes comparing two consecutive nights) are subject to
excited scrutiny. As Williams trawls through his tape collection, listening intently,
making copious notes for the reader, the welter of detail often threatens to submerge
the entire exercise. I am someone who has seen quite a few Dylan shows over recent
years and I too have been inspired by new, unanticipated song arrangements and
have listened intrigued to a few bootleg recordings. But, on many occasions when
reading this book I found myself retorting ‘yes, but, come on, the performances are not
that different’. Like certain types of formal musicological analysis, attention to the
variable detailed minutiae sometimes seems to obscure the more enduring aspects of
song structures and musical forms, and the social dynamics that are informing this
branch of pop hermeneutics.
Yet, this intense immersion also provides some fascinating insights. Unlike
many writers (Dylan critics Christopher Ricks and Michael Gray spring to mind),

http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 19 Mar 2015 IP address: 169.230.243.252

 142 Reviews

Williams is not mainly concerned with the meaning of lyrics as poetry. He is far more
interested in the way words work sonically in performance. Perhaps it helps that some
of the lyrics he’s trying to hear are almost unintelligible on the audience-produced
recordings that he’s been listening to. This means that he picks up on aspects that the
semantic lyric sifters ignore when scrutinising the stanzas on the page.
Williams listens to the riff (that short melodic, rhythmic, repeated phrase that is
a staple of popular music practice), and hears this as the key to how Dylan’s music
works in performance. He writes: ‘It’s all in the riff. That’s the secret of Bob Dylan’s
music . . . the riff calls forth the great vocal performances’. Of concert performances he
writes: ‘when . . . the band is directed to vamp on the riff for long non-vocal passages,
the riff itself starts speaking to the song’s listeners as though these were whole new
verses of evocative, mind-blowing, Bob-Dylan-in-his-prime lyrics’ (Williams 2004,
p. xiii). Acknowledging how Dylan has been able to achieve a similar effect through
the distinct voices that he gives to harmonica solos, Williams stresses how, on good
nights, Dylan is able to achieve this through the riff.
Now, I’m sure that those of us who have seen Dylan over the years are aware
that the instrumental doodling and riffing is sometimes about as inspiring as an
average bar band jamming on basic blues sequences for hours on end, at least to me.
Indeed, this is a characteristic that Williams himself acknowledges in places. But, I
think Williams has heard something significant here: it’s a sound that refutes the
assumption (pervasive in much lit-crit Dylanology) that the music is subordinate to
the words.
Not all Dylan’s songs are riff-based by any means. But many are, and it is in
these that the riff drives the selection of words. It’s that cyclical, non-goal directed,
repetition of musical and verbal sounds that draws us into a very particular sonic
experience, allowing us to enter the song. The riff becomes the song, and words and
vocal melody are held in tension to the riff, implied by and implicated in the riff. In
many of Bob Dylan’s performances, the riff-based character of the song has become
ever more emphasised in live performance (this would include ‘Subterranean Home
Sick Blues’, ‘Maggie’s Farm’, ‘All Along The Watchtower’, ‘Solid Rock’, ‘Everything
is Broken’, ‘Cold Irons Bound’ and ‘Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum’, to cite just a few).
Williams’ observations here reminded me of Simon Frith’s thought in Performing
Rites where he remarks that ‘a song does not exist to convey the meaning of the
words – rather, words exist to convey the meaning of the song’ (Frith 1996, p. 166).
The riff shapes the song, and the words are chosen to convey the meaning of the song
as it arises from the interplay between vocal and riff – which is why Williams hears
patterns of unformed words in the riffs. Elsewhere Williams is sensitively attuned to
those moments when ‘the vocals are a rhythm instrument’ and when the ‘vocalist
seems to take a solo, just as the guitarists do’ (p. 287).
With its passion and flashes of insight, this book swept me along with it. I also
have to say that parts of it nearly bored the pants off me, with its repetitive details and
pedantic descriptions of gigs that I’ve never been to, nor wish that I ever attended.
Then suddenly, near the end of 1990 (about page 300), as if aware that the reader has
less stamina than the author, Williams stops listening to the live performances, a full
fourteen years before this book was to be published. There’s a huge sense of an
anticlimax as if Bob Dylan has left the building early. As an encore there are two
tagged-on chapters that are essay reviews: one focuses on Time Out of Mind (1997) and
the other deals with Love and Theft (2001). Perhaps the picture of the smiling young
son who sits with Williams, his Dylanologist dad, on the book’s back sleeve is a clue to

http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 19 Mar 2015 IP address: 169.230.243.252

 Reviews 143

why the gig ends so abruptly: if it is, then Williams has indeed followed Dylan in
taking time out from the road to be with his family. Yet, there are a lot of later gigs
listed in the ‘appendix’ of concerts attended, and as Dylan’s tours continue to roll on,
there may be another book or two in there somewhere.
Although Williams refers to himself as a Professor, in a self-deprecating way and
only with a modicum of defensiveness, this is not a conventionally scholarly book.
Yet, its contribution to popular music scholarship is clear and comes from the energy
of the passionate and judgemental fan that the scholar so routinely represses (even
when studying fans). The book has some obvious flaws but the author knows about
these anyway. For example, he’s well aware of a strand of connoisseurship and elitism
that pervades such a project. He is part of a select group who have access to the
performances, who have the time to listen to all these recordings and who possess the
cultural capital or faith to recognise those profound moments. Or, as Williams himself
confesses ‘. . . for connoisseurs of Bob Dylan’s ‘‘accidental’’ art, good entertainment is
not satisfying. We prefer moments of transcendent awakeness . . .’ (p. 152). Williams
is also well aware of some of the other criticisms that might be directed at his
approach, such as the problem of interpreting and analysing the performance from an
audio recording. He knows that we are not seeing the performance or feeling the vibe
at the event and the book refers to the different impressions that can be gained from
the ‘same’ concert recorded at different locations within the same hall (with no
obvious way to resolve this limitation).
Ultimately, Williams is prepared to be wrong and exposes his doubts: ‘I’m
uncomfortable with the role of judge, especially when honesty and sincerity require me
to be negative about certain works of the artist whom I came here to praise. I could be
wrong, of course. Or I could change my view at some future time of re-listening, as I’ve
changed my view years later about certain excellent Dylan albums and songs that I
failed to appreciate on first encounter’ (p. 161). So, in the end, Williams ain’t the judge,
you don’t have to be nice to him. But, there is something refreshing in this openness.
His doubts are exposed, not concealed behind disciplinary jargon or the veneer of
academic certainty. Critical fans and critics as fans have much to contribute to the study
of popular music. This book is a great resource for anyone wishing to study Bob
Dylan’s music – or for anyone who might wish to study Bob Dylan’s audience.

References
Frith, S. 1996. Performing Rites, On the Value of Popular Music (Oxford, Oxford University Press)
Marcus, G. 2005. Like a Rolling Stone, Bob Dylan at the Crossroads (New York, Public Affairs)
Williams, P. 1990. Bob Dylan, Performing Artist 1960–1973 (London, Xanadu Publications)
1992. Bob Dylan, Performing Artist 1974–1986, The Middle Years (London, Omnibus Press)

Keith Negus
Goldsmiths College, University of London

http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 19 Mar 2015 IP address: 169.230.243.252