From Queen Latifa to Count Basie, Madonna to Monk, Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music traces popular music back to its roots in jazz, blues, country, and gospel through the rise in rock 'n' roll and the emergence of heavy metal, punk, and rap. Yet despite the vigor and balance of these musical origins, Martha Bayles argues, something has gone seriously wrong, both with the sound of popular music and the sensibility it expresses.
Bayles defends the tough, affirmative spirit of Afro-American music against the strain of artistic modernism she calls 'perverse.' She describes how perverse modernism was grafted onto popular music in the late 1960s, and argues that the result has been a cult of brutality and obscenity that is profoundly anti-musical.
Unlike other recent critics of popular music, Bayles does not blame the problem on commerce. She argues that culture shapes the market and not the other way around. Finding censorship of popular music "both a practical and a constitutional impossibility," Bayles insists that "an informed shift in public tastes may be our only hope of reversing the current malignant mood."
From Queen Latifa to Count Basie, Madonna to Monk, Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music traces popular music back to its roots in jazz, blues, country, and gospel through the rise in rock 'n' roll and the emergence of heavy metal, punk, and rap. Yet despite the vigor and balance of these musical origins, Martha Bayles argues, something has gone seriously wrong, both with the sound of popular music and the sensibility it expresses.
Bayles defends the tough, affirmative spirit of Afro-American music against the strain of artistic modernism she calls 'perverse.' She describes how perverse modernism was grafted onto popular music in the late 1960s, and argues that the result has been a cult of brutality and obscenity that is profoundly anti-musical.
Unlike other recent critics of popular music, Bayles does not blame the problem on commerce. She argues that culture shapes the market and not the other way around. Finding censorship of popular music "both a practical and a constitutional impossibility," Bayles insists that "an informed shift in public tastes may be our only hope of reversing the current malignant mood."
Acknowledgments Pt. 1: The Weird Music of the New World 1: Introduction 2: Why Music Is the Wild Card 3: The Three Strains of Modernism 4: The Obstacle of Race 5: The Taint of Commerce 6: Cubists and Squares: Jazz as Modernism Pt. 2: From Rock 'n' Roll to Rock 7: The Strange Career of 1950s Rock 'n' Roll 8: Rock 'n' Rollers or Holy Rollers? 9: Reaction and Revitalization 10: Another Country Heard From 11: Blues, Blacks, and Brits Pt. 3: Inspiration and Polarization 12: Words and Music: The Rise of the Counterculture 13: Art and Religion, 1960s Style 14: Hard Rock Becomes a Hard Place 15: Soul Loses Its Soul Pt. 4: The Triumph of Perversity 16: Their Art Belongs to Dada 17: Punk: The Great Avant-Garde Swindle 18: High on High Tech 19: Rap: Trying to Make it Real (Compared to What?) 20: You Don't Miss Your Water (Till Your Well Runs Dry) 21: Coda: Escape from Postmodernism Notes Index
Bayles, former TV and arts columnist for the Wall Street Journal , takes the title for her book from the old saying, ``If you don't like the blues, you've got a hole in your soul.'' The author of this wide-ranging study of American popular music maintains that the African American tradition--blues, jazz, gospel--is this country's ``distinctive musical idiom . . . truer to civilized values'' than punk, heavy metal, rap and other antisocial impulses descended from the late-19th century European avant-garde trends in art that led to futurism, surrealism, dada and ultimately to music whose aim is to shock. It is a powerful thesis, but Bayles obfuscates her arguments by forcing all types of music and art into such rigid categories as ``introverted modernism'' and ``extroverted modernism.'' She calls the tendency to shock, for example, ``perverse modernism'' and claims that this antiart, together with racial stereotypes, has kept African American music, which should be a humanizing antidote to the brutal and the obscene, out of the mainstream. (Apr.)
Impressively researched and organized, this work explores historical, cultural, and sociological factors that figure in the evolution of American popular music. Bayles, an educator and arts critic, leaves few stones unturned in her effort to shed light on the current state of pop music. She begins by contrasting European and African American musical influences and defining musical modernism. She then factors in race, politics, sex, radicalism, religion, and commerce while evaluating the relative importance of each to the musical scene. Her approach is richly complex: a mixture of in-depth reflection, history, quotes, and analyses of styles and performers within the idioms of jazz, blues, rock, country, punk, rap, and the like. For large music collections with a scholarly readership.-- Carol J. Binkowski, Bloomfield, N.J.
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