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ly urban blues from Chicago. Valdez wove colorful anecdotes, his
torical snippets, and demographics around musical analysis. He
played various parts of songs on piano and on CO to characterize a
style and asked the students to participate in the descriptive task.
In discussing Muddy Waters' "Got My Mcjo Workin'," one curious
student asked, “Does it have something to do with sex?,“ eliciting
snickers from the class.
Valdez's good-natured response: “It always has something to do
with sex."
"I try to let the class know that even though many of the
songs are party songs, it's not party time and that's not our reason
for listening to them or studying them," ^ ays. “Most people like
[a song] but don't know why. What my class is trying to do is
teach students to listen carefully and take it apart by listening to
it, by listening to the rhythms, the lyrics, the overall sound."
Valdez says he wants his students to "try to find out what it is
that's attracting them. Sometimes a melody is going to work,
sometimes the guitar solo really works, and other times its not so
murh the melodic shape of it as it is the tone of a guitar, how it
sounds — the feedback may hit you."
TODAY’S MUSIC AINT GOT THE
SAME SOUL
For Larry GrossDerg, professor of communication studies at the
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and a teading authority in
the held, the "artistic" value and souna of rock is not at issue,
'’he distinction oetween authentic rock and mere entertain
ment... is not of ; nterest to me. For me as a fan, and for others
who grew up in the '60s, rock was more tnan either of those. It
mattered in different ways.
"As an academic," Grossberg says, he s "interested in the music
and its effects, tne way the audience responds" — and how they
use it. Grossberg was originally a history and philosophy major
who ended up teaching a course on popular music in a media stud
ies class. He's been teaching courses on youth culture and popular
music for 20 years. Even though Grossberg's work is exemplary,
he's taking a hiatus from rock.
"I m disappointed in the field of pop music studies for two
main reasons. It's not that we don't really learn more about it. I
think we have gained more knowledge about what was goirg on in
the industry, but I don't think we've gained better theoretical
insight into how it works." While Grossberg says that some of the
scholarship is very good, he's concerned that the literature
expands "without any real discussion" — without a framework for
organizing and expounding upon ideas.
The second reason for his disenchantment is a shift in historical
context that has fundamentally changed the ground rules. Most pop
music writing, he argues, is based on ideas about the world formed
in the '50s, '60s, and 70s. "But somewhere in the '80s, things
began to change," Grossberg says, "not because the music changed,
but because the historical context changed." For one, he says, as
baby boomers grew up, the notion of youth as a universally posi
tive trait has been discarded. "I don't think being young is treated
as good anymore. The post war optimism died," he says. "We can
no longer assume that the assumptions made about rock and cul
ture that were based on the '50s and '60s are the same anymore.
T Hs means that a lot of theoretical and cultural-historical work has
to be questioned when you talk about the '80s and '90s."
So it follows that Grossberg's reevaluation of what are becom
ing foundational tenets of the field would mean a massive untan
gling of concepts. Td have to start over and think about what
parts of my work are still true or relevant and what isn't," says
Grossberg. "But I'm 50 years old. I'm too old to do that I was this
weird adult in the 70s. Young people trusted me. I could hang out
and go to bars with them and get reliable insight into what was
happening and the music. I don't have that kind of relationship
with kids anymore."
“The field is still rather fragmented today," Grossberg contin
ues. “And it's not clear if this fragmentation is the cause or effect
of the lack of critical exchange within the field." Whichever it is,
the increasing consolidation of the scholarship on pop music
should help deepen and broaden the discourse by making the work
done more accessible for interdisciplinary comment There are at
least 22 departments/research centers around the world where
rock studies is at least a major departmental subfield. And several
journals — like the UK's Popular Music and the IASPM's Journal of
Popular Music Studies — are devoted exclusively to or predomi
nantly to scholarship on popular music.
Meanwhile, scholars who study other subjects are testing out
rock as an object of inquiry. This past February, the Center for
Studies in Social Sciences in Calcutta, India, held its first confer
ence on pop music, “Tne Impact of
Globalization on Music Culture," and is plan
ning to print a selection of the 17 papers pre
sented at the conference in book form. The
very topic of this conference may make a
strong case for rock and pop studies: the fact
that political, cultural, economic, and environ
mental factors can have an effect on pop
means that it is necessarily bound in some
way by current events and social issues.
DON’T MEAN
NOTHIN’?
But is the scholarship worth the effort?
Recently, I waded through some of the work
that's been done in search of the bogus and
the good. The bogus was characterized by a
shallow glibness and clumsy use of concepts
— throwing terms around without any real
analysis or deep probing into the subject mat
ter. Former UCLA graduate student Durrell
Bowman's dissertation, "Permanent Change:
Difference Formations in the Music and
Cultural Work of Rush," is the ultimate fanzine
made legitimate. Bowman slobbers over his
favorite band while hurriedly and almost reluc
tantly applying the tools of the trade. In Duke
graduate student Ted Freidman's "Milli Vanilli
and the Scapegoating of the Inauthentic," the
author at times seems more concerned with
clever quipping than with substance: “Ru Paul... in 'Supermodel'
asks us to reimagine image-modeling and gender-construction as
the archetypical [sic] form of postmodern labor: 700 better work
it, girl.'" (Though Freidman's jargon-heavy comments may pass as
legitimate cultural studies theory, whether his use of these terms
serves to elucidate Ru Paul and his/her music is another thing.)
Or. the other hand, there’s Philip Tagg's “Subjectivity and
Soundscape, Motorbikes and Music," a look at the relationship
between the sound of heavy metal and biker culture. Tagg begins
by looking at crying babies and at their use of nonverbal commu
nication, staking out his thesis that nonverbal sound is an essen
tial form of communication by grounding it in psychology. He then
goes into music and the part it plays in socialization across cul
tures. Next he lays out a "sign typology of music" in which he
examines how the stylization of sound is used to refer to nonmusi
cal things; for example, the "claps of thunder" in Beethoven's
Pastoral Symphony or the cry of hyenas in Masai music
Finally we get to metal, in which the idea of socialization and
stylization come together the distorted guitar has an analogous
sound and meaning to the roar of a motorcycle engine to rebel
biker culture.Jagg quotes Steppenwolfs "Born to Be Wild" to
illustrate his theme: “Get your motor running/Head out on the
highway/Looking for adventure/whatever comes our way.../I like
smoke and lightning/Heavy metal thunder..." According to Tagg,
this is the first generally acknowledged use of the expression
"heavy metal" and "clearly refers to the low-pitched, loud growl of
a four-stroke motorbike, such as the Harley Davidson V-twin cus
tom choppers driven by Fonda and Hopper in Easy Rider."
Tagg's paper is a thorough, thoughtful analysis of his subject.
For the most part, the flimsier work seems to be produced by those
who approach it as a novelty from related fields rather than those
who are working in it as a primary area of research.
Still, whether or not pop studies is a passing fad is yet to be
seen. But with the increasing number of academics devoted to the
field, it seems that the lack of engagement that Grossberg
bemoans won't last long.
And if, as Joel Schalit, a graduate student at York University,
Toronto's Programme in Social and Political Thought, claims, "Rock
is the quintessential feature of modern mass culture," how could
those cataloguers and analysts of society, the academics, afford to
ignore it? As Brian Cosgray, UGA freshman and student in Valdez's
class says, "America is rock and roll." ©
“We can no longer assume that the assumptions made
about rock and culture that were based on the ‘50s and
‘60s are the same anymore.” —Larry Grossberg, professornf
communication studies. UNC-Chapel Hill
IAN McFARLANE
FIN£ PHOTOGRAPHY
Portraits • Fk Art • Head 5hots
Bawj . Model Porttouos. U/V Printing
706.543-6804
SEPTEMBER 16, 1998