Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music

Most writing about popular culture is deeply flawed, ruined by one or more of several bad things: flackery, philistinism, highbrow condescension, smirking transgressivism, or, worst of all, pretentious and self-absorbed pseudo-academicism. Martha Bayles avoids all these pitfalls in this passionate, knowledgeable, opinionated book. It's a gust of fresh air. Not only is it fabulously well-written and unfailingly intelligent, but it is animated throughout by the author's genuine love of her subject. She really believes in the possibilities of popular culture, and knows what she's talking about. Anyone who wants to think more clearly about what it means to have a vibrant democratic culture, and why we don't have one today, ought to begin here.

I love this book. Reading it was a series of epiphanies for me. As a "classical" composer who has always had a love of jazz and popular music, I have long puzzled over the extreme gulf between classical music and jazz, folk, and popular music that is peculiar to the 20th century. I have also been eternally frustrated by the overwhelming weight that is given to weirdness for weirdness' sake by music and other art critics, as well as by their general dismissal of art that has overt beauty as one of its priorities.Bayles's explanation of modernism and its various branches is priceless, and it, among many other aspects of the book, helped me to solve some of these puzzles, as well as to take a more activist attitude about my own artistic aesthetics.

Martha Bayles's highly accessible study of popular music is a fine read, intelligently controversial, pandering to no crowd, deeply and broadly informed. It's not only important for those of us who care about her subject and enjoy a well-crafted argument, it's also a fine tonic for those--especially academics--who are put off by the barbed-wire prose of culture studies professors and their Marxist progenitors Benjamin, Adorno, et al. If you can't get through more than a cryptic, knowing page of Greil Marcus, try Bayles. You'll learn a lot, you'll be challenged, and you'll make a friend.

It's great to see such critical intelligence brought to a subject that's all too often treated only with emotion. Bayles knows her subject and enlightens her readers, unlike many other writers on the subject who pepper their monographs with paens to jazz greats and their music or who stoop condescendingly to their readers with pretentiousness. The author obvioulsy loves the music but maintains a keen perspective throughout.

Martha Bayles is a conservative. I am not, at least as the term has been perverted in the contemporary USA (but if conserving the natural environment is the most conservative position of all, then I'm a radical conservative!). Despite this ideological difference, I find her aesthetic position on American popular music quite compelling. Her saving grace is her love of African-American music! The core of her analysis is her distinction among three types of modernism: introverted, extroverted, and perverse. The book is motivated by her outrage at such recent youth music genres as gangsta rap, heavy metal and punk, which she sees as the outcomes of perverse modernism. (I tend to agree with her that much of heavy metal and rap are reactionary, but part ways with her on punk.) She tours the 20th century, though, only dealing with these contemporary forms toward the end, and her treatment of blues, rhythm and blues, and soul is excellent, showing her love of and respect for the music and the musicians. Her analysis of Chuck Berry and Elvis is one of the highlights. Don't expect much coverage of jazz. She respects it (putting it in the category of extroverted modernism), but doesn't seem to listen to it much. Without agreeing with all her judgements, I strongly recommend "Hole In Our Soul" to anyone interested in popular American music, and the African-American tradition in particular.