blackbird27's review
4.0
A minute or two after I came across this book yesterday, I sent an anguished tweet about having been scooped on the book I've been slowly, with lots of interruptions, been trying to write for the last five years. Then I gritted my teeth and bought the Kindle edition. I might as well know the worst.
And? Yeah, there's a lot here that was present, if only in shadowy, half-formed shape, in my head before reading it. It makes a stronger, more explicit, and more thoroughgoing political argument for the value and meaning of much of the music it discusses than any I'd be prepared to. It is the product of metric tons more research, reading, discussion, and nitty-gritty historian's work than I can realistically propose to engage in at this (or any foreseeable) point in my life, career, and resources. I'm deeply grateful for it, and I'm still rather jealous of it, and I'm slightly consoled by the knowledge that no, it's not quite the book I wanted (still want) to write. It's probably a better one politically and certainly a better one academically, but its center of focus is perhaps two inches from where I'd put it.
What the book actually is: Michael Denning, Professor of American Studies at Yale, looks at the short-lived boom in recorded vernacular music between the standardization of the electrical recording process in 1925 and the worldwide financial crash in 1930, which hit the recording industry harder than many others, and sees it as a primary locus of modernity, transforming the social spaces of the port cities where many vernacular musics came into being, transforming the experience and practice of music listening and making, presaging the anticolonial movements of the later twentieth century, and laying the foundation for all the musical revolutions and recapitulations of musical history that would come after. US jazz, blues, and country, Argentine tango, Brazilian samba, Cuban son, Trinidadian calypso, Martinican biguine, Portuguese fado, Spanish flamenco, Greek rebetika, Egyptian tarab, South African marabi, Ghanaian highlife, Nigerian jùjú, Indonesian kroncong, and Hawai'ian hula are the primary examples he draws from, though occasionally Mexican mariachi and bolero, pan-European tzigane, Turkish fasil, Algerian and Tunisian chaabi, Tanzanian taarab, Indian theater song, Chinese shidaiqu (or huangse yinyue), Vietnamese cai luong, and Filipino kundiman get a look-in.
What the book isn't: any kind of deep reading of the actual records. The most valuable part of the book, for me, is the playlist of 81 records in the back. Some I knew, some I didn't (though few of the performers' names were new to me), but aside from some generalized musicological descriptors and the occasional lyrical excerpt, none of them get any sustained analysis; they're used as supporting evidence in the various arguments about music-vernacular topoi, systems of capitalist exchange, and anticolonial struggle that Denning is making throughout. Which is fine. He's an academic writing a cultural studies book; if he tried to go all Lester Bangs swimming around in Astral Weeks, he'd be doing both himself and his readers a disservice.
But I, as a pop-trained listener (not to say poptimist), am primarily concerned with the immediate sensual experience of the records, and with the ways that individual, more than structural, personalities, identities, and social meanings are transmitted through their sounds. I am perhaps unusual as a pop listener for wanting to start pop history further back and with a wider scope than most pop listeners do, but I am also unusual as a listener of music released on 78s for caring as much about the common music of the period as I do about the rare, since both are now vanished; if anything, Paul Whiteman is now less heard than Robert Johnson, and more alien to the average music listener.
Which is to say that my theoretical book, while it would also take in all of the musics listed above (plus a few more, including Puerto Rican plena, French chanson réaliste and musette, German and Austrian kabarett, Russian romans, Turkish kanto, Iranian tasnif, Indian filmi, Malay stambul, Quebecois turlutte, Texan tejano, and Jewish-American klezmer), would be much more about the (well, my) experience of the music as pop, including the sensuous experience of it, the gossipy, scandalous, and possibly apocryphal stories about its makers, the imagery with which it was sold, and the escapist and utopian fantasies which it in turn sold its audience. My provisional title has always been Vernacular Pop, and while my claims for the importance of the music are more modest than Denning's (I am skeptical that any capitalist product contains the seeds of revolution), my basic premise, that the sophisticated glamour and modernist posturing which characterized the work of high-status imperial-power music stars of the period like the Gershwins, Noël Coward, Jean Sablon, or Marlene Dietrich, was not separate world, cloaked in a rarefied air, from that of global vernacular pop, but was a part of it, part of a reshaping of the world that had existed before World War I and would be transformed still further after World War II, is if anything a far more radical position to take among the shellac collectors and ethnomusicologists who dominate the discussion about the vast majority of this music.
Still, there's a lot here to chew on, and I haven't even properly started. Check in with me in a month, and we'll see where I've gotten to.
And? Yeah, there's a lot here that was present, if only in shadowy, half-formed shape, in my head before reading it. It makes a stronger, more explicit, and more thoroughgoing political argument for the value and meaning of much of the music it discusses than any I'd be prepared to. It is the product of metric tons more research, reading, discussion, and nitty-gritty historian's work than I can realistically propose to engage in at this (or any foreseeable) point in my life, career, and resources. I'm deeply grateful for it, and I'm still rather jealous of it, and I'm slightly consoled by the knowledge that no, it's not quite the book I wanted (still want) to write. It's probably a better one politically and certainly a better one academically, but its center of focus is perhaps two inches from where I'd put it.
What the book actually is: Michael Denning, Professor of American Studies at Yale, looks at the short-lived boom in recorded vernacular music between the standardization of the electrical recording process in 1925 and the worldwide financial crash in 1930, which hit the recording industry harder than many others, and sees it as a primary locus of modernity, transforming the social spaces of the port cities where many vernacular musics came into being, transforming the experience and practice of music listening and making, presaging the anticolonial movements of the later twentieth century, and laying the foundation for all the musical revolutions and recapitulations of musical history that would come after. US jazz, blues, and country, Argentine tango, Brazilian samba, Cuban son, Trinidadian calypso, Martinican biguine, Portuguese fado, Spanish flamenco, Greek rebetika, Egyptian tarab, South African marabi, Ghanaian highlife, Nigerian jùjú, Indonesian kroncong, and Hawai'ian hula are the primary examples he draws from, though occasionally Mexican mariachi and bolero, pan-European tzigane, Turkish fasil, Algerian and Tunisian chaabi, Tanzanian taarab, Indian theater song, Chinese shidaiqu (or huangse yinyue), Vietnamese cai luong, and Filipino kundiman get a look-in.
What the book isn't: any kind of deep reading of the actual records. The most valuable part of the book, for me, is the playlist of 81 records in the back. Some I knew, some I didn't (though few of the performers' names were new to me), but aside from some generalized musicological descriptors and the occasional lyrical excerpt, none of them get any sustained analysis; they're used as supporting evidence in the various arguments about music-vernacular topoi, systems of capitalist exchange, and anticolonial struggle that Denning is making throughout. Which is fine. He's an academic writing a cultural studies book; if he tried to go all Lester Bangs swimming around in Astral Weeks, he'd be doing both himself and his readers a disservice.
But I, as a pop-trained listener (not to say poptimist), am primarily concerned with the immediate sensual experience of the records, and with the ways that individual, more than structural, personalities, identities, and social meanings are transmitted through their sounds. I am perhaps unusual as a pop listener for wanting to start pop history further back and with a wider scope than most pop listeners do, but I am also unusual as a listener of music released on 78s for caring as much about the common music of the period as I do about the rare, since both are now vanished; if anything, Paul Whiteman is now less heard than Robert Johnson, and more alien to the average music listener.
Which is to say that my theoretical book, while it would also take in all of the musics listed above (plus a few more, including Puerto Rican plena, French chanson réaliste and musette, German and Austrian kabarett, Russian romans, Turkish kanto, Iranian tasnif, Indian filmi, Malay stambul, Quebecois turlutte, Texan tejano, and Jewish-American klezmer), would be much more about the (well, my) experience of the music as pop, including the sensuous experience of it, the gossipy, scandalous, and possibly apocryphal stories about its makers, the imagery with which it was sold, and the escapist and utopian fantasies which it in turn sold its audience. My provisional title has always been Vernacular Pop, and while my claims for the importance of the music are more modest than Denning's (I am skeptical that any capitalist product contains the seeds of revolution), my basic premise, that the sophisticated glamour and modernist posturing which characterized the work of high-status imperial-power music stars of the period like the Gershwins, Noël Coward, Jean Sablon, or Marlene Dietrich, was not separate world, cloaked in a rarefied air, from that of global vernacular pop, but was a part of it, part of a reshaping of the world that had existed before World War I and would be transformed still further after World War II, is if anything a far more radical position to take among the shellac collectors and ethnomusicologists who dominate the discussion about the vast majority of this music.
Still, there's a lot here to chew on, and I haven't even properly started. Check in with me in a month, and we'll see where I've gotten to.
carolynf's review
3.0
This book concentrates on the technological revolution of the 1920s and 1930s, and how the advent of shellac records helped local and ethnic music be preserved. It is a very dry and academic read - I wish that someone would make a pop history version. But it is a well-sourced look at an era in music history that is often overlooked.
atsundarsingh's review
4.0
Denning writes a brilliant book on the politics of recording sound in the 1920s. It's not simply a history of popular music around the world, or the types of music that were politicized during struggles for independence from colonial rulership. Instead, this is a book about the ways in which sound itself is political; its classification, its marketing, its performance are all aspects of the ways in which people came to think of common publics and nations, as well as their own place in a newly ordered global system just before the Depression.
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