Music Books
Music Books
By William Shea
"Rock and Roll: A Social History"
"America on Record: A History of Recorded Sound" by Andre Millard
As a child, I remember my older sister playing her recorded music so loud that my mother would scream "turn that noise down." Somehow mother just didn't understand that the infectious beat, the sentimental lyrics and the jolting melody of my sister's rock'n'roll wasn't much different from the raucous music of her jitterbugging days. For my sister, poor mother just didn't get it. Mother had reduced the great power of rock'n'roll to mere noise. Only years later did I realize that mother's inherent criticism was right. The true power of rock'n'roll is its sound.
Recorded music is a composite of musical, lyrical, sociological and technological elements. And to a large extent rock'n'roll in the 50s--a mixture of African-American musical sensibility, rurual white lyrical sentiment and urban structures of manufacturing and distribution--defined the music distinctively different from the mainstream dominant popular music as performed on such radio and TV shows as "Your Hit Parade." Similarly, today's grunge and rap music genuinely mix sociological concerns (social anomie in grunge, disintegrating social power relations in rap) with both musical and lyrical elements that have long histories in recorded music. But I'm convinced that what really distinguishes these distinctive genres of music from each other--from the sentiments, conventions, and admixtures that define 50s rock'n'roll from 60s rock, soul from rap, country and western music from New Country--is the way technology fits into the composite of recorded music.
The power of recorded popular music--how it grabs people's attention and sets the stage for social and political action--comes from the distinctive "sound" of the recording. And the particular "sound" of a recording or genre depends on how the musical performance is altered and mixed in the recording studio, how technology is used to alter and manipulate the aural quality of the performance. Likewise, what defines one genre of recorded music from another, depends on how technology reveals and accents the sociological, musical and lyrical elements associated with the performance. Thus the power of recording technology can be seen in action in the "Disco Sucks" phenomenon of the 70s. It wasn't the march tempo of disco that the hard-rockers disliked. It was the disco "sound"--that damned amplified, mechanical beat which they couldn't stand. Similarly the censorship employed by many black radio stations against rap music has little to do with the sentiment of the lyrics--social injustice, urban realism, and interpersonal relationship (although the way the lyrics are expressed might be a concern)--it is the scratching and sampling sounds used in the production of rap that the dominant gatekeepers rebel against (and to a greater extent, not having any say in what is important and popular to the audience). Indeed, for a more accurate picture of the power of pop, any satisfactory analysis of recorded popular music must take into account the role of technology.
Two new books to varying degrees examine the role of technology in the power of popular music. Paul Friedlander, in his "Rock and Roll: A Social History," develops an interesting theoretical framework for his work. Using the concept of a "Rock Window," where information on rock'n'roll's music, lyrics, artistic history, societal context, and the artistic stance is systematically collected and organized so the reader will be able to compare apples to apples within the wide range of information about rock'n'roll over time. This would be wonderful if Friedlander would have pulled this comparison off. Unfortunately he did not.
The difficulty with Friedlander's work is threefold: 1) He never actively compares anything in this book. We do get some hint of the social conditions of the early 50s--pre-rock'n'roll--but he never adequately contextualizes the conditions so we see how they had an impact on changing musical styles. Likewise to argue that Elvis, The Beatles, Disco, and Punk were all important without a detailed explanation of the social conditions that support this assertion, is just plain bad social history. 2) Needless to say the entire text is too reductionist and incomplete. For instance, Friedlander says the impact of Phil Spector, the father of modern recording techniques, was "tremendous"--period. There is no elaboration on who Spector was supposed to have had an impact on. We don't even get a hint of what Spector actually did in the studio other than making a "Wall of Sound" whatever that might be.
This leads to a third difficulty. Although Friedlander talks about the "sound" of rock'n'roll, and the "sound" of heavy metal, punk, disco, etc., there is no discussion of the role of technology played in defining these sounds. Of course, this work is not a history of technology, but technology has played such a tremendous social role in popular culture particularly in the 1950's through the 1990's that a discussion of social history without mentioning technology is woefully inadequate.
On the other hand, Andre Millard's America on Record: A History of Recorded Sound is a book worth
(see page 23)