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 Hole
in Our Soul : The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American
Popular Music by Martha Bayles
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 though, 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."
Hole
in Our Soul is a penetrating new look at popular music from
the early days of jazz, blues, country, and gospel through
the rise of rock 'n' roll and the excesses of the MTV era.
Bayles defends the affirmative spirit of Afro-American music
against the anti-social impulses of the European avante-garde,
which she argues have led to the brutality and obscenity
of many current musical genres. (Amazon.com)
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