![]() ![]() 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. With sharp historical insight, she tracks the decline of value in popular music and diagnoses its causes in the misappropriation of the African American cultural roots of rock, jazz, soul, and rhythm 'n' blues. ![]() Bayles is as critical of mindless nihilism as she is of sentimentality. She argues that culture shapes the market and not the other way around. Hole in Our Soul brings demanding aesthetic criteria to pop music. ![]() Unlike other recent critics of popular music, Bayles does not blame the problem on commerce. 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.īayles 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. 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. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |