The high analysis of low music

Music Analysis

Volumn 18, Issue 3, 1999, Pages 389-435

  Griffiths, Dai ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 60949195129     PISSN: 02625245     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1468-2249.00102     Document Type: Article

References (261)

1. Elvis Costello, sleevenotes to reissue CD King of America (1986, reissue, DPAM 11, 1995), no pagination
2. Ray Monk, review of Thomas Nagel, The Last Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), in Times Higher Education Supplement, 26 September 1997, p. 26
3. Thanks to Dave Hesmondhalgh and Richard Middleton for reading through; to Jonathan Stock for allowing me to see a manuscript ahead of publication; and especially to the Critical Musicology Forum. Since I submitted this piece, Richard Middleton's review of Allen Forte, The American Popular Ballad of the Golden Era 1924-1950 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995) has appeared (Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 122 (1997), pp. 303-20), singing from a hymnsheet similar to the one used here
4. Beck, 'Loser', Mellow Gold (Geffen, 1994)
5. Martin Amis, Money: A Suicide Note (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985)
6. The Information (London: Harper Collins, 1995)
7. References in text to this edition. On Money, see David Hawkes, Ideology (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 1-2
8. Clement Greenberg, 'Avant-Garde and Kitsch' (1939), in Francis Frascina (ed.), Pollock and After: The Critical Debate (London: Harper and Row, 1985), pp. 21-33
9. Adorno is sure to crop up in a musical discussion of this topic; the similarity between Greenberg and Adorno is examined in a reprinted article by Thomas Crow from the same volume: see his 'Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts', pp. 233-66, especially pp. 262-5
10. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), pp. 3-29
11. Jonathan Cross, 'Thoughts on First Hearing Sir Harrison Birtwistle's "Panic"...', Tempo, 195 (1996), p. 34. 'Anything' there evidently didn't quite extend to the idea of sharing this aperçu with the hundreds of thousands of listeners to Desert Island Discs
12. Letters of John Keats: A Selection, ed. Robert Gittings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 85
13. see Abrams, Mirror and the Lamp, p. 26
14. See also Alexander Goehr in his fifth BBC Reith Lecture, published in The Listener, 17/24 December 1987, p. 35
15. According to Cross, Birtwistle 'successfully taps into the popular symbolic codes of sax and drums without ever actually adopting the language of jazz' (See Cross, 'Thoughts', p. 35)
16. Not that it's of any great import, but I would exclude Elvis Costello's Juliet Letters, his collaboration with the Brodsky String Quartet (Warner, 1993)
17. At least that piece seemed like a genuine attempt at collaborative practice, not simply a reified idea of the string quartet as high-art plinth which Capital would help surmount. For art-historical perspectives, see Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik, High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture and the accompanying Modern Art and Popular Culture: Readings in High and Low (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1990)
18. Fans will note Amis's references to pop music: 'So what can a poor boy do?', on p. 168 of Money, is from The Rolling Stones's 'Street Fighting Man' (Beggars Banquet, London, 1968)
19. Aretha Franklin's 'Respect' (Atlantic, 1967) is explicitly mentioned at pp. 286 and 326 of The Information; on p. 132 of the same Amis's description of a novelist's life ('They get sick, they get well, they hang around the inkwell') is adapted from Bob Dylan's 'Subterranean Homesick Blues' (Columbia, 1965)
20. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), p. 18
21. Also see Dick Hebdige, 'Staking out the Posts', in Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 181-207
22. Neil Nehring's Popular Music, Gender, and Postmodernism: Anger is an Energy (London: Sage, 1997) is a sustained diatribe where 'postmodern' becomes part of a thesaurus list which can mean, adjectivally, pretty much anything bad. More measured opposition is found, classically, in Jürgen Habermas's 'Modernity versus Postmodernity', New German Critique, 22 (1981), pp. 3-14
23. and see also Robert C. Holub, Jürgen Habermas: Critic in the Public Sphere (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 133-61)
24. from British Marxism, Alex Callincos's Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique (Cambridge: Polity, 1989)
25. and, from a curious post-post-structuralist position, Christopher Norris's Uncritical Theory: Postmodernism, Intellectuals and the Gulf War (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1992)
26. Johan Fornas, Cultural Theory and Late Modernity (London: Sage, 1995), p. 81
27. Finnegan's Wake (London: Faber, 1975), p. 120
28. The 'dubious name of "commission"': Theodor W. Adorno, 'Culture and Administration', in J.M. Bernstein (ed.), The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 100
29. 'By the way, if anyone here's in marketing or advertising: kill yourself, Bill Hicks, 'Marketing and Advertising', Arizona Bay (Rykodisc, 1997)
30. See Williams, 'The Future of Cultural Studies', in The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (London: Verso, 1989), pp. 160-61. Although the lecture may have been written within the cosy confines of Williams's post at Jesus College, Cambridge, it was nevertheless delivered to the NorthEast London Polytechnic, on 21 March 1986
31. I owe this point to Jonathan Stock, 'Old Musicology, New Musicologies: Ethnomusicology and the Study of Western Music', Current Musicology (forthcoming)
32. This sentence from the Musikblätter des Anbruch, 11 (1929) is referred to in Thomas Y. Levin, 'For the Record: Adorno on Music', October, 55 (1990), p. 47
33. See Jonathan Dunsby, 'Criteria of Correctness in Music Theory and Analysis', in Anthony Pople (ed.), Theory, Analysis and Meaning in Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 85
34. Alright, alright, as Simon Frith and Jon Savage have it, 'there is no sadder sight than the fortysomething ex-leftist, the thirtysomething ex-punk, the twentysomething ex-stylist, burying their disappointments in their search across the surface of popular culture for pure sensation'. See their 'Pearls and Swine: Intellectuals and the Mass Media', in Steve Redhead, Derek Wynne and Justin O'Connor (eds.), The Clubcultures Reader: Readings in Popular Cultural Studies (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), p. 16
35. For particular examples of post-punk sadness, see The Wire, 93 (1991)
36. also Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (London: Secker and Warburg, 1989)
37. and In the Fascist Bathroom: Writings on Punk 1977-1992 (Harmondsworth: Viking, 1993)
38. Simon Frith has some excellent articles on the topic, as reflected in the collection Music for Pleasure: Essays in the Sociology of Pop (Cambridge: Polity, 1988)
39. An alliance of hipness which peaked, perhaps, with Nicholas Kenyon (ed.), Authenticity and Early Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988)
40. After all, as Miles Davis has it, people 'who don't change will find themselves like folk musicians, playing in museums and local as a motherfucker.' Miles Davis (with Quincy Troupe), The Autobiography (London: Picador, 1990), p. 386
41. It was nothing like the upbringing Hans Keller describes - for example on pp. 17-18 of The Great Haydn Quartets: Their Interpretation (London: Dent, 1986)
42. I was presumably part of the first generation of musicologist, broadly-defined, to have been brought up with little other than pop music. Even the 'classical music' of South Wales was hymn-tunes and brass bands, a long way from the Haydn quartets. A lovely reflection on the mixed-up confusions of highs and lows involved here, from the point of view of another twisted British provincial also obsessed with pop music, is found in Philip Larkin's poem 'Reference Back' in The Whitsun Weddings (London: Faber, 1964), p. 40
43. Written, according to Andrew Motion (Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life (London: Faber, 1993), p. 264), in 1955, the poem finds Larkin listening to New Orleans jazz - King Oliver's 'Riverside Blues' - though, as he says elsewhere ('Introduction' to All What Jazz: A Record Diary (London: Faber, 1972), p. 15), 'whatever it happens to be, parents are suspicious of it and it has a bad reputation'
44. See Greil Marcus's sleeve-notes to the Gang of Four, A Brief History of the Twentieth entury (EMI, 1990)
45. and entries in In the Fascist Bathroom. Tom Paulin, Introduction to The Faber Book of Political Verse (London: Faber, 1986), p. 27, describes the conservative tradition through Ecclesiastes 1, 9: 'he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow'
46. From the perspective of critical theory, followers of Adorno suggest that, had he bothered, he could or would have appreciated any or all of the following: Frank Zappa, John Cale, Carla Bley, Henry Cow (Max Paddison, 'The Critique Criticized: Adorno and Popular Music', Popular Music, 2 (1982), p. 215)
47. The Cadillacs (Bernard Gendron, 'Adorno Meets the Cadillacs', in Tania Modelski (ed.), Studies in Entertainment: Critical Studies in Mass Culture (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 18-36
48. Mary Margaret O'Hara, My Bloody Valentine, Throwing Muses (Terry Bloomfield, 'Resisting Songs: Negative Dialectics in Pop', Popular Music, 12 (1993), pp. 13-31)
49. Frank Zappa (Ben Watson, The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play (London: Quartet, 1994))
50. Ornette Coleman (Theodor A. Gracyk, 'Adorno, Jazz, and the Aesthetics of Popular Music', Musical Quarterly, 76 (1992), p. 533)
51. The best single treatment of the subject I have come across is Harry Cooper's 'On Über Jazz: Playing Adorno against the Grain', October, 75 (1996), pp. 99-133
52. See also the debates between John Caughie ('Adorno's Reproach: Repetition, Difference and Television Genre', Screen, 32 (1991), pp. 127-53)
53. and Georgina Born ('Against Negation, for a Politics of Cultural Production: Adorno, Aesthetics and the Social', Screen, 34 (1993), pp. 223-42)
54. and between T.J. Clark ('In Defense of Abstract Expressionism', October, 69 (1994), pp. 23-48)
55. and Jay Bernstein ('The Death of Sensuous Particulars: Adorno and Abstract Expressionism', Radical Philosophy, 76 (1996), pp. 7-18)
56. See also Robert Hullot-Kentor's idiosyncratic pieces for Telos ('Popular Music and Adorno's "The Aging of the New Music", 77 (1988), pp. 79-94
57. and 'The Impossibility of Music: Adorno, Popular and Other Music', 87 (1991), pp. 97-117), the latter, which includes a hilarious reading of The Beatles' 'I Feel Fine', aptly described by Born as 'a classic piece of neo-Adornian cant' (Born, p. 223). Adornian views of pop music may offer lively vantage-points for critical theory but are, by and large, limited as arguments on pop music's behalf
58. Will Straw has written some fine articles on gender, records and shops. See ' "Organized Disorder": the Changing Space of the Record Shop' in Redhead, The Clubcultures Reader, pp. 57-65
59. and 'Sizing Up Record Collections: Gender and Connoisseurship in Rock Music Culture', in Sheila Whiteley (ed.), Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 3-16
60. More on radio as culture can be traced in Radiotext(e) (Semiotext(e)), 16 (1993)
61. See Larkin's hopeful description of the combined effect of Kingsley Amis's anthology of light verse and his own idiosyncratic anthology of twentieth-century verse: 'We shall have stamped our taste on the age between us in the end' (Motion, Philip Larkin, p. 434)
62. T.S. Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (London: Faber, 1948), p. 31
63. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780-1950 (London: Chatto, 1958), p. 230
64. T.S. Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, p. 16
65. The many devotees of Schoenberg, who have so graced Music Analysis over the years, will not wish to pass up the opportunity of noting the similarity between Eliot in 1939 and Schoenberg's letter to Prince Egon von Furstenberg of 1924: art, a matter for princes, is beyond the judgement of common people. And only the authority of personages, in that it permits the artist to participate in the distinctive position bestowed by a higher power, is able to demonstrate this demarcation in a sensuously tangible manner to all those who are merely educated, who have worked their way up, and to make manifest the difference between those who have become what they are and those who were born what they are. See Arnold Schoenberg, Letters, trans. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser, ed. Erwin Stein (London: Faber 1964), p. 108
66. Williams, Culture and Society, p. 228
67. See also Alan O'Connor, Raymond Williams: Writing, Culture, Politics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), pp. 57-9
68. Peter Scott, 'Man of the Border Country', Times Higher Education Supplement, 15 March 1985, p. 13
69. and Tony Pinkney's introduction to Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism, pp. 1-27
70. Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (London: Verso, 1983), p. 14
71. Randy Newman, 'Political Science', on Sail Away (Warner, 1972)
72. Randy Newman orchestrated Leiber and Stoller's 'Is That All There Is?' (1969) for the Peggy Lee recording, an impressive merging-together of Newman's own Coplandesque mode (see 'I Think It's Going to Rain Today' (1968))
73. and Kurt Weill, himself such a central reference in popular music through the 1950s and into the 1960s. The soundtrack of Barry Levinson's film adaptation of Bernard Malamud's The Natural (Warner, 1984) is the best example I know of Randy Newman without words
74. Judging by the comment on p. XX of Alec Wilder, American Popular Songs: The Great Innovators 1900-1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), and its example-free chapter on Berlin, Newman was lucky to have got so far
75. Following his visit there in 1909, Freud is supposed famously to have said, 'America is a mistake; a gigantic mistake, it is true, but none the less a mistake'. See Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, edited and abridged by Lionel Trilling and Steven Marcus (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1964), p. 348
76. Jameson, Postmodernism, pp. 21-5
77. Pop music's direct engagement with modernism is a rare thing; a song by Paul Simon called 'Rene and Georgette Magritte with their Dog After the War' (on Hearts and Bones (Warner, 1983)), wonderfully confuses imagery from the world of the surrealist painter with the names of 1950s doo-wop bands, all mediated through Simon himself. See Paul Simon in Bill Flanagan, Written in My Soul: Candid Interviews with Rock's Great Songwriters (London: Omnibus, 1990), pp. 321-5
78. See, however, Peter Winkler's excellent 'Randy Newman's Americana', Popular Music, 7 (1988), pp. 1-26
79. Milton Babbitt, 'Responses: A First Approximation', Perspectives of New Music, 14/ii and 15/i (1976), pp. 3-4
80. John Covach is a good example here, suggesting pragmatically that 'theorists should pay more attention to rock music because it is interesting'; but - knowing politically that 'interesting' is hardly enough - is forced immediately to sharpen it to mean 'challenging disciplinary assumptions about what music is' ('We Won't Get Fooled Again: Rock Music and Musical Analysis', In Theory Only, 13 (1997), p. 133). It's an expressive shift: rarely can thinking about Keith Moon drumming and Roger Daltrey screaming have led to a statement which in its short space mentions the word 'discipline' and its derivatives twenty-four times
81. Milton Babbitt, in Cole Gague and Tracy Caras (eds.), Soundpieces: Interviews with American Composers (New York: Methuen, 1982), p. 36
82. Milton Babbitt, 'Who Cares if you Listen', in Gilbert Chase (ed.), The American Composer Speaks (Louisiana, 1966), p. 238
83. Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Continuum, 1989), pp. 1-20
84. Thomas Crow, 'Modernism and Mass Culture', pp. 263-4
85. Mott the Hoople, 'Honaloochie Boogie', on Mott (Columbia, 1973)
86. Charles T. Brown, The Art of Rock and Roll, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1987), p. 15
87. Even the titles are earnest onlooker classics: Twilight of the Gods: The Beatles in Retrospect (London: Faber, 1973)
88. A Darker Shade of Pale: A Backdrop to Bob Dylan (London: Faber, 1984)
89. and Angels of the Night: Popular Female Singers of Our Time (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986)
90. '[Poetry] imitates only as a means to the proximate end of pleasing; and pleases, it turns out, only as a means to the ultimate end of teaching', Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, p. 14
91. A good example is Piers Spencer's 'Reggae', in Graham Vulliamy and Ed Lee (eds.), Pop, Rock and Ethnic Music in School (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 154-70
92. See also Lucy Green's two books, Music on Deaf Ears (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988)
93. and Music, Gender, Education (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)
94. John Paynter and Peter Aston, Sound and Silence: Classroom Projects in Creative Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). Both Richard Middleton and John Shepherd passed under Mellers's wing
95. A locus classicus: Dave Harker, 'Taking Fun Seriously', Popular Music, 15 (1996), pp. 108-21
96. Allan F. Moore, Rock: The Primary Text (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1993), p. 27
97. Richard Middleton, Studying Popular Music (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1990), p. 247
98. Nehring, Popular Music, Gender, and Postmodernism, p. 163. Nehring's self-flagellation is characteristic - at another point (p. 168) he 'cheats' by looking at a lyric sheet. Further reference in text to these editions of Moore and Middleton
99. Pierre Bourdieu, trans. Richard Nice, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (London: Routledge, 1984), pp. 84-5
100. Several anthologies of rock journalism exist: general selections can be found both in Clinton Heylin (ed.), The Penguin Book of Rock n Roll Writing (London: Viking, 1992)
101. and Evelyn McDonnell and Ann Powers (eds.), Rock She Wrote: Women Write about Rock, Pop, and Rap (London: Plexus, 1995). Lester Bangs, Greil Marcus, Nik Cohn, Nick Kent and Charles Shaar Murray all have 'greatest hits' anthologies
102. Moore, Rock: The Primary Text, pp. 186-7
103. On pp. 47-53 of Rock: The Primary Text, and separately in two articles for Popular Music: 'Patterns of Harmony', 11 (1992), pp. 73-106
104. and 'The So-Called "Flattened Seventh" in Rock', 14 (1995), pp. 185-201
105. David Brackett, Interpreting Popular Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 274 pp., £35.00, ISBN 0-521-47337-3. The quotation appears on p. 201. This review-article arose initially as a response to Brackett's book, which is considered more fully later
106. Moore, Rock: The Primary Text, p. 185
107. Or, to put it another way, 'the question ... is not where might art go from here: who cares? But where might we go from this desolate place, and how on earth are we to get there?', Jay Bernstein, 'Death of Sensuous Particulars', p. 17
108. Stuart Hall, 'Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies', in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler (eds.), Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 278
109. Nehring, Popular Music, Gender, and Postmodernism, p. xxiii
110. Rolling Stones, 'Street Fighting Man', Beggars Banquet
111. See also the chapter on Beggars Banquet by Simon Frith in Greil Marcus (ed.), Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island, 2nd ed. (New York: Da Capo, 1996), pp. 29-39
112. Tom Paulin, Introduction to The Faber Book of Political Verse, p. 29, describes the puritan-republican tradition through John 8, 32: 'And ye shall know the truth and the truth will make you free'
113. Philip Tagg, Fernando the Flute: Musical Meaning in an Abba Mega-Hit (Liverpool: Institute of Popular Music, 1991), pp. 5-10
114. Dave Hesmondhalgh, 'Rethinking Popular Music after Rock and Soul', in James Curran, David Morley and Valerie Walkerdine (eds.), Cultural Studies and Communications (London: Arnold, 1996), p. 202
115. Simon Frith, Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 1920s
116. Peter Wicke, Rock Music: Culture, Aesthetics, Sociology, trans. Rachel Fogg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 183
117. See Simon Frith, 'Why Do Songs Have Words?', in Music for Pleasure, pp. 105-128
118. and Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin (eds.), On Record: Rock, Pop and the Written Word (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 1-3
119. Charles Hamm, 'Rock and the Facts of Life', in Putting Popular Music in its Place (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 41-54, especially pp. 41-4
120. Charles Hamm, Yesterdays: Popular Song in America (New York: Norton, 1979), p. 377
121. Mel Brooks' pastiche 'Springtime for Hitler', from the film The Producers (1968), might give a rather uncomfortable vision of what a Tin Pan Alley version might have sounded like!
122. Philip Furia, The Poets of Tin Pan Alley: A History of America's Great Lyricists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 203
123. Hamm, Yesterdays, p. 377
124. Hamm, 'Graceland Revisited', in Putting Popular Music in its Place, pp. 336-43
125. The Graceland dispute is a fine debating-point for the issues discussed here. Useful starting-points with bibliographic directions: Tony Mitchell, Popular Music and Local Identity: Rock, Pop and Rap in Europe and Oceania (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1996), pp. 80-84
126. Steven Feld, 'Notes on "World Beat"', in Charles Keil and Steven Feld, Music Grooves: Essays and Dialogues (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994), pp. 238-46
127. and Stacey Luftig (ed.), The Paul Simon Companion: Four Decades of Commentary (London: Omnibus, 1997), pp. 149-88
128. As well as producing the theoretical and analytical studies discussed here, Laing is also one of pop's most committed codifiers - see Phil Hardy and Dave Laing (eds.), The Faber Companion to Twentieth-Century Popular Music (London: Faber, 1992)
129. Compare in this latter respect Donald Clarke, who remains wedded to journalistic positivism, and has particularly nasty things to say about the Hardy and Laing volume, refusing even to footnote it, on p. 572 of The Rise and Fall of Popular Music (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995). Despite this, Clarke's book is a fine sweep through the history of popular music
130. Dave Laing, The Marxist Theory of Art (Brighton: Harvester, 1978), p. 141
131. Dave Laing, Buddy Holly (London: Studio Vista, 1971), and One Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in Punk Rock (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1985)
132. Laing, One Chord Wonders, especially pp. 53-81
133. Since then Laing has moved into issues around public policy and the music industry: see for instance The Value of Music: A National Music Council Report into the Value of the UK Music Industry (London: National Music Council, 1996)
134. See Storey (ed.), What is Cultural Studies?, and Lawrence Grossberg, Bringing it All Back Home: Essays on Cultural Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997)
135. Richard Johnson, 'What is Cultural Studies Anyway', in Storey, What is Cultural Studies?, pp. 75-114
136. A consistent line in the work of Russell Jacoby. See his The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (New York: Basic Books, 1987)
137. and Dogmatic Wisdom: How the Culture Wars Divert Education and Distract America (New York: Doubleday, 1994)
138. Johnson, 'What is Cultural Studies Anyway', pp. 86-8
139. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 12-20 and 128-35
140. See also Martin Jay, Adorno (London: Fontana, 1984), p. 112
141. Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music, trans. Carolyn Abbate (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990)
142. See also the discussion on pp. 223-5 of Jonathan Stock, 'The Application of Schenkerian Analysis to Ethnomusicology: Problems and Possibilities', Music Analysis, 12 (1993)
143. John Shepherd and Peter Wicke, Music and Cultural Theory (Cambridge: Polity, 1997), pp. 149 and 159-68
144. [See also Kenneth Gloag's review in this issue - Ed.] Compare too in this respect Covach's charge that Middleton writes 'not as a professional theorist, but as someone who has explored theoretical approaches to popular music', 'We Won't Get Fooled Again', p. 130
145. Raymond Williams, 'The Future of Cultural Studies', p. 154
146. See Simon Frith, Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock 'n' Roll (London: Constable, 1983), pp. 41-3
147. and Dave Laing, 'Scrutiny to Subcultures: Notes on Literary Criticism and Popular Music', Popular Music, 13 (1994), pp. 179-90
148. Anthologies of extracts are like a minor manufacturing industry in cultural studies (reflecting the subject's evidently insatiable popularity on campus), but The Subcultures Reader, Ken Gelder and Sarah Thornton (eds.), (London: Routledge, 1997) is especially good. The best summary introduction to pop music literature from the perspective of cultural and media study is Hesmondhalgh, 'Rethinking Popular Music'
149. Elliott Carter: 'unless the restricted audience for serious music, whether live or recorded, is made up mainly of wealthy people - which nowadays it certainly is not - serious music will either have to be subsidized by the government or else be allowed to shrink to a tiny level of activity', in Allen Edwards, Flawed Words and Stubborn Sounds: A Conversation with Elliott Carter (New York: Norton, 1971), p. 26
150. See also Terry Eagleton's description of modernist art being for Adorno a '"solution" parachuted in from some ontological outer space' (Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso, 1991), p. 131)
151. or Raymond Williams's coruscating attack at the 'two faces of modernism', on pp. 140-43 of Towards 2000 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993)
152. Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', Illuminations, trans. Hannah Arendt (London: Fontana, 1973, originally 1936), p. 226
153. Clement Greenberg, 'Avant-Garde and Kitsch', p. 32
154. Theodor W. Adorno, 'Vers une musique informelle', in Quasi una fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso, 1994), pp. 269-322
155. Newcomers to Studying Popular Music would do well to keep at their side Charles Hamm's excellent summary, in his review published in the Journal of Musicology, 9 (1991), pp. 376-98, especially up until p. 385
156. Of direct relevance is Middleton's own 'Popular Music Analysis and Musicology: Bridging the Gap', Popular Music, 12 (1993), pp. 177-90
157. Hall, 'Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies', p. 280
158. Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), p. 210, by way of Fornas, Cultural Theory and Late Modernity, p. 79
159. See also Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 1990), pp. 154-63
160. Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukacs to Habermas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) presents a good contextualising of this line
161. See also Max Paddison, Adorno's Aesthetics of Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
162. On the problems not so much of 'doing' as of 'music', see Philip V. Bohlman, 'Musicology as a Political Act', Journal of Musicology, 11 (1993), pp. 411-36, especially 422-3 and 435-6
163. The two constituencies did not always see eye to eye. See Stuart Hall, 'Recent Developments in Theories of Language and Ideology: A Critical Note', and Dave Morley, 'Texts, Readers, Subjects', in Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe and Paul Willis (eds.), Culture, Media, Language (London: Hutchinson, 1980), pp. 157-62, and 163-73, respectively
164. Surprising, then, to find Shepherd and Wicke reheating a passage from p. 145 of Shepherd's Music as Social Text (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), itself reproduced from an article for Popular Music in 1982 (see Shepherd, 'Sociomusical Analysis of Popular Musics', 2 (1982), p. 170), in their Music and Cultural Theory, p. 38, without reference to pp. 155-66 of Middleton
165. Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Methuen, 1979) is the only book to emerge from Middleton with (almost) unhindered praise (p. 164)
166. Cross too describes how a 'powerfully erotic aspect of much modern music', apparently 'so often' causes 'the repressed middle classes' to panic ('Thoughts on First Hearing "Panic" ', p. 35). Believe me, in real life these are nice people, and even though their minds might be veritable Eisensteins of class war, they remain, economically at least, as middle-class as they come!
167. Paul Piccone, 'The Actuality of Traditions', Telos, 94 (1993-4), p. 98
168. See also Cooper, 'Über Jazz'. A kinder view is contained in J. Bradford Robinson, 'The Jazz Essays of Theodor Adorno: Some Thoughts on Jazz Reception in Weimar Germany', Popular Music, 13 (1994), pp. 1-25
169. These I think owe something to Stuart Hall. See Hall, 'Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies': 'displacement' and 'lose hold of the tension' are both on p. 284
170. Stuart Hall, 'Notes on Deconstructing "the Popular'", in Raphael Samuel (ed.), People's History and Socialist Theory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 239. 1972 was when Middleton published his first book on pop, Pop Music and the Blues, and 1981 the first appearance of the yearbook/journal, Popular Music from Cambridge. The yearbook
171. Nicholas Cook, 'Music Minus One: Rock, Theory, and Performance', New Formations, 27 (1995-6), p. 23. I should perhaps explain, egotistically and neurotically, my presence on the same page: sent the article, naturally I raised these objections with the author. However, it appears that the article was already in press at the point I was offered it to read
172. See also my review of Anne C. Shreffler, Webern and the Lyric Impulse: Songs and Fragments on Poems of Georg Trakl (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), in Music Analysis, 16/i (1997), p. 147
173. Contrast Nattiez's complaint that 'the neutral level is dirty', quoted in Jonathan Dunsby, 'Music and Semiotics: The Nattiez Phase', Musical Quarterly, 69 (1983), p. 31
174. with Stuart Hall's insistence upon the 'dirtiness of the semiotic game', in Stuart Hall, 'Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies', p. 278
175. Ian Bent and William Drabkin, Analysis (London: Macmillan, 1987), pp. 143-76. The bibliography had, by 1987, been 'updated, expanded and corrected' (p. viii)
176. On the difficulty of really engaging with ethnomusicology, see the delicious paragraph juxtaposition of Derrick Puffett's 'Editorial', Music Analysis, 12/ii (1993), p. 126: So in a curious way, the three fields come together: history, analysis, and the study of distant or neglected cultures. Volume 12 no. 3 of Music Analysis will contain articles on the three main composers of the Second Viennese School
177. In a moving passage Raymond Williams describes the Open University as 'an extraordinary attempt in the tradition of that movement towards an open-access democratic culture of an educational kind', The Politics of Modernism, p. 156
178. See Theodor W. Adorno, 'Music and Technique' (1958), trans. Wes Blomster, Telos, 32 (1977), pp. 79-94
179. and 'Opera and the Long-Playing Record' (1969), trans. Thomas Y. Levin, October, 55 (1990), pp. 62-6
180. Compare, for more than the fecundity of their titles, William Rothstein's 'The Americanization of Heinrich Schenker', in Hedi Siegel (ed.), Schenker Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 193-203
181. with Joel Pfister's 'The Americanization of Cultural Studies', in Storey (ed.), What is Cultural Studies?, pp. 287-99
182. See also Alan O'Connor, 'The Problem of American Cultural Studies', in the same volume, pp. 187-196
183. 'Fantastic Remembrance in John Lennon's "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Julia"', Musical Quarterly, 72 (1986), pp. 360-85
184. Milton Babbitt, review of Felix Salzer, Structural Hearing (1952), in Journal of the American Musicological Society, 5 (1952), p. 265
185. A tougher, but still germane critique is found at pp. 56 and 60-61 of Jonathan Dunsby and Arnold Whittall, Music Analysis in Theory and Practice (London: Faber, 1988)
186. Richard Johnson, 'What is Cultural Studies Anyway?', p. 100
187. Perry Anderson, 'Structure and Subject', in In the Tracks of Historical Materialism, p. 44
188. See also the excellent discussion of the term 'Structure' by John Carlos Rowe in Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (eds.), Critical Terms for Literary Study (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990), pp. 23-38
189. V.N. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I.R. Titunik (Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986, originally 1929)
190. Carlos Rowe, 'Structure', p. 26
191. See also Francis Frascina, 'Realism and Ideology: An Introduction to Semiotics and Cubism', in Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction: The Early Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), especially pp. 122-7 and 178-80
192. Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism, p. 45
193. Anthony O'Hear's entry for 'History of the Philosophy of Education', in Ted Honderich (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 213-14, suggests a consistent historical strand of including both music and sport in the curriculum
194. Nicholas Cook, Music, Imagination and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 58-9
195. Frith, Performing Rites, pp. 26 and 64
196. I take this not to be an argument endorsed by Peter J. Martin's Sounds and Society: Themes in the Sociology of Music (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), a fine critique of music sociology from the point of view of sociological method. Sociology, argues Martin, ought to focus solely on context (p. 12); however, there is no case for concluding that music should be regarded as autonomous (p. 162) - the mistake to date has arisen from the nature of the theory brought to bear on sociological evidence
197. Theodore Gracyk, Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock (London: LB. Tauris, 1996)
198. and Neil Nehring, Popular Music, Gender, and Postmodernism
199. Or place. 'Rock 'n' roll was music for car radios, that's obvious', Chuck Eddy, The Accidental Evolution of Rock 'n' Roll: A Misguided Tour Through Popular Music (New York: Da Capo, 1997), p. 271. Musical modernism isn't for concert halls, that's obvious. So where?; and when?
200. Simon Frith, Performing Rites, p. 20
201. Henri Matisse, 'Notes of a Painter' (1908), in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (eds.), Art in Theory 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 76
202. Karl Marx, 'Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: Introduction' (1844), in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, 3 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975), p. 175
203. Dai Griffiths, review of Anthony Pople (ed.), Theory, Analysis and Meaning in Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), in Music Analysis, 15/iii (1996), p. 392
204. Allan Moore, Rock: The Primary Text, pp. 176-7
205. David Brackett, Interpreting Popular Music, pp. 127-56
206. Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock n Roll Music (London: Omnibus 1977), p. 254
207. Marcus was observing the 'open-fourth' piano figuration in the verse; Winkler, 'Randy Newman's Americana', transcribes the precisely relevant points in the songs on p. 7
208. There is perhaps a case for suggesting that their great lacuna, 'groove', has in fact received quite assiduous attention, albeit in the jazz literature on swing. See J. A. Progler, 'Searching for Swing: Participatory Discrepancies in the Jazz Rhythm Section', Ethnomusicology, 39 (1995)
209. and Charles Keil, 'Participatory Discrepancies and the Power of Music' in Keil and Feld, Music Grooves: Essays and Dialogues (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994), pp. 96-108, and passim
210. Thanks are due to my colleague Michael Young for drawing this literature to my attention. If you're bothered by 'thang', it's high time you read Rickey Vincent, Funk: The Music, the People, and the Rhythm of the One (New York: St Martin's Griffin, 1996)
211. Susan McClary and Robert Walser, 'Start Making Sense! Musicology Wrestles with Rock', in Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin (eds.), On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 289-90
212. As in The Country and the City (London: Paladin, 1975), pp. 202-20
213. or Television: Technology and Cultural Form (London: Fontana, 1974), p. 61
214. Charles Hamm, Yesterdays
215. Robert Walser, Running with the Devil: Power, Gender and Madness in Heavy Metal Music (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1993)
216. Hamm concludes his review of Middleton, Studying Popular Music, with an upbeat announcement of McClary's Feminine Endings, pp. 397-8
217. I used this story in 'Talking about Licence to Kill', in Elizabeth Thomson and David Gutman, The Dylan Companion (London: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 260-61
218. Milton Babbitt, Words about Music: The Madison Lectures, ed. Stephen Dembski and Joseph N. Straus (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), p. 181
219. Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1991)
220. Richard Poirier, The Performing Self: Compositions and Decompositions in the Language of Contemporary Life (London: Chatto and Windus, 1971)
221. Robert Pattison, On Literacy: The Politics of the Word from Homer to the Age of Rock (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982)
222. and The Triumph of Vulgarity: Rock Music in the Mirror of Romanticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987)
223. Alan Durant, Conditions of Music (London: Macmillan, 1984)
224. H. Wiley Hitchcock, Music in the United States: A Historical Introduction, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1974)
225. There is a plethora of books on women and pop music, many of them based on interviews. For historical background, see Gillian G. Gaar, She's a Rebel: The History of Women in Rock n Roll (London: Blandford, 1993)
226. also Lucy O'Brien, She Bop: The Definitive History of Women in Rock, Pop and Soul (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995)
227. Theoretical substance is more evident in Mavis Bayton, Frock Rock: Women Performing Popular Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)
228. while Simon Reynolds and Joy Press, The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion and Rock n Roll (London: Serpent's Tail, 1995) is a daring survey
229. Black music has a huge literature: one starting point might be Nelson George, The Death of Rhythm and Blues (London: Omnibus, 1988)
230. Paul Gilroy's chapter on music in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993), pp. 72-110, is highly suggestive
231. while Mark Costello and David Foster Wallace, Signifying Rappers (Hopewell, NJ: Ecco, 1997) is a splendid theoretical essay from 'two white Boston males' (p. 20)
232. For a sense of where this paragraph is coming from, see Frank Lentricchia, Ariel and the Police: Michel Foucault, William James, Wallace Stevens (Brighton: Harvester, 1988), pp. 135-95
233. also Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 69-92
234. It is worth mentioning Juliet Mitchell's Psychoanalysis and Feminism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974) which brought together psychoanalysis, socialism and feminism together in a happy synthesis
235. also the contributions of Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, 1986)
236. and Toril Moi, Sexuality / Textuality (London: Methuen, 1985)
237. A fine and instructive perspective on these issues is contained in Dick Hebdige's 'The Impossible Object: Towards a Sociology of the Sublime', New Formations, 1 (1987), pp. 47-76
238. Roland Barthes, 'The Grain of the Voice', Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), p. 189
239. See variously Roland Barthes, 'The Grain of the Voice'
240. (published originally in Popular Music, 3 (1983), pp. 235-70)
241. and John Shepherd and Peter Wicke, Music and Cultural Theory
242. Mention should be made too of Georgina Born's reference to the work of Melanie Klein in Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995)
243. and of Born's important earlier article, 'On Modern Music Culture: Shock, Pop, and Synthesis', New Formations, 2 (1987), pp. 51-78, a breakthrough article in containing pop music literature and musical modernism in the one context
244. Mention should be made of this undervalued aspect of the work of Christopher Wintle, who gets there presumably via Wagner and Hans Keller. See 'Rigoletto's Bottle: Psychoanalysis and Opera', New Formations, 26 (1995), pp. 108-19
245. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Reference in text to this edition
246. Janet Wolff, Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1993), p. 107
247. John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880-1939 (London: Faber, 1992) presents a good exploration of this theme
248. David Hesmondhalgh, review of Allan Moore, Rock: The Primary Text, in Cultural Studies, p. 362
249. Shawn Colvin, Cover Girl (Columbia, 1994)
250. Bob Dylan, Blood on the Tracks (Columbia, 1975)
251. Charles Rosen, The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, rev. ed. (London: Faber, 1976), p. 325
252. As ever, David Lewin is ahead of the game: see 'Women's Voices and the Fundamental Bass', Journal of Musicology, 10 (1992), pp. 464-82, especially p. 473
253. Dylan covers are legion, both male and female, a remarkable recent case being Judy Collins, Judy Sings Dylan: Just Like a Woman (Geffen, 1993)
254. On this, see Michael Roos and Don O'Meara, 'Is Your Love in Vain? Dialectical Dilemmas in Bob Dylan's Recent Love-Songs', Popular Music, 7 (1987), pp. 36-49
255. On the Rolling Thunder Review Dylan would appear, as Allen Ginsberg put it in the greatest of sleevenotes, 'big grey hat stuck with November leaves and flowers' (Desire, Columbia, 1976)
256. Derek Mahon, 'Poetry in Northern Ireland', Twentieth-Century Studies, 4 (1970), p. 93
257. by way of Edna Longley, Poetry in the Wars (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1986), p. 173
258. Fornas, Cultural Theory and Late Modernity, pp. 19-20
259. Middleton, Studying Popular Music, pp. 122 and 117-22
260. Arnold Schoenberg, Style and Idea: Selected Writings, ed. Leonard Stein, trans. Leo Black (London: Faber, 1975), pp. 144 and 217
261. Fredric Jameson, 'Reflections in Conclusion', afterword to Aesthetics and Politics, trans. and ed. Ronald Taylor (London: Verso, 1977), p. 211