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|vory |ower j^ock
Academia is headbanging its way into the
moshpit. But is this real scholarship or five
minutes of Macarena for the intellectual hip?
by Funke Sangodeyi
it | think 'Losing My Religion' is one of the best poems I've ever
. I read," says Professor Ann Cheney. "I usually teach it together
I with Eliot's "The Lovesong of J. Alfred P^'frock."
Cheney, a member of Virginia Tech University's English
Department, teaches a class called "The Literature of Rock and
Roll." "We start out with T.S. Eliot to give the students an under
standing of what good poetry is," she says. "Then on to Dylan, the
Dead, the Doors. Then a heavy section on R.E.M., and a heavy sec
tion on the Indigo Girls, and finally on to Pearl Jam and Nirvana."
Though Cheney has taught the class five
times, i* - still has experimental status.
"I'm seeking permanent status," she
says. "Let's just say I have met w W.
some resistance. The students love it; the
administration doesn't. But I think rock
is important artistically and I think it's
important from a historical viewpoint."
Rock studies, and, more broadly, pop
ular music studies, combine two unlikely
ingredients — popular music and acade
mic analysis. The result is a rapidly grow
ing number of essays, books, disserta
tions, and conferences with titles like
"Maximum False Consciousness. The
Political Economy of American Punk,"
"Rave Culture: The Light Orbit of a
Discontinued History," and "'Just Like
Eddie' or as far as a boy can go: Vedder,
Barthes, and Handke Dismember Mama."
The burgeoning field has received flak
from academics who find it spurious and
irresponsible, and from non-academics
who find the notion of rock and roll as
an academic subject laughable and even
flat out ridiculous.
Some may think that the combina
tion is strange because pop music is not
w hit is normally conceived of as schol
arly, As one UGA student put it, "It's not
snooty enough." Admittedly, there is
something amusing about the notion of
"unpacking" Van Halen's "Hot For
Teacher" for homework. Regardless of
whether most people hang on to a static
picture of the humanities as a bulwark of
musty old white men studying equally musty, esoteric, super-seri
ous subjects, many would probably agree with Jan Wenner, founder
of Rolling Stone Magazine, on the topic of rock in academia: "You
can intellectualize about a lot of rock and roll music but it's pri
marily not an intellectual thing. It's music, that's all."
Philip Tagg, professor of musicology at the Institute of Popular
Music and the University of Liverpool, would disagree. "The aver
age Westerner's brain probably spends around 25 percent of its
lifetime registering, monitoring, and decoding [popular music],"
writes the internationally renowned scholar of pop. "The need for
serious study of popular music is obvious."
The International Association for the Study of Popular Music
was founded in 1981 "to promote inquiry, scholarship, and analy
sis in the area of Popular Music" and has over 600 members world
wide. Rock studies is not a cohesive discipline, but rather includes
all sorts of methodological approaches to its topic. Anthropology,
sociology, cultural studies, and history all approach rock music pri
marily as a cultural and social phenomenon. Literary theorists and
philosophers are concerned with the semiotics of popular music,
-Stephen Valdez, assistant professor of music at UGA
philosophies of entertainment, musical appreciation, and rock aes
thetics. From cognitive science we get insight into how pop music
works at the interface of biological behavior and culture. English
scholars analyze rock lyrics as literary works. Add musicology (the
study of musical form and structure) and ethnomusicology (anthro
pological and musicological study of indigenous folk musics), and
you get the interdisciplinary hodge-podge of scholarship that is
the field of rock music studies.
THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT
"I think [studying rock music] is as valuable as studying
Shakespeare or Mozart," says Stephen Valdez, assistant professor
of music at UGA. "There's a lot to be learned, I think, about our
society from the music of the times." Valdez says pop "is just now
becoming an accepted area of study in music departments. But
there are still a lot of music departments that don't accept it or
study it
"Musicologists have traced the stylistic development of musi
cians like Beethoven or Mozart for 200 years now, and have uncov
ered musical characteristics that define the classical music period
or the essence of Mozart's compositional
style. That's what I'm doing, but I'm
doing it with The Beatles and The
Rolling Stones.
"What's interesting is that this music
is still alive. A lot of classical music is
museum music It's dead and gone. We
very often don't stop to think about
social context when we study art music
history. I do that with rock. I keep it
within the context of society but not so
much as a sociologist would do. I talk
about the rhyme scheme and lyrical con
tent too, but not as much as an English
professo r wojld. I talk about the music
itself a lot more — the guitar chords, the
chord progression, certain melodic riffs
and rhythms that are being played, and
the musical components of the song."
Valdez began his academic career in
musical education, then went on to get
a masters in music history with a con
centration in baroque studies and the
lute. As a doctoral student in music his
tory at University of Oregon in the mid-
1980s, Valdez decided that he really
wanted to study the development of the
classi: rock guitar solo. The only rock
studies dissertations at the time, he
says, were in English, sociology and
journalism. There were a couple of mas
ter's theses in music — on topics like
folk songs as learning tools — but noth
ing on the history of the music itself.
After completing his dissertation, he
joined the University of Oregon's music faculty. Though he taught
traditional courses, he also started teaching graduate studies
courses on the history of The Beatles and The Who.
At UGA, Valdez teaches a history of rock music course in the
music department. The class is popular and large — there are 301
students from various departments. The uass I attended was a les
son on the blues, starting with Texas style and moving on to the
Mississippi Delta blues (with a focus on Robert Johnson) and final-
Pholographs of Stephen Valdez's UGA history of rock course by Christine Harness. Alterations by L. Tenner.
“What’s interesting is that this music is still alive. A lot of classical music is
museum music.’
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