Books
Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. 312 pages.
"A significant contribution both to philosophy of music and to aesthetics more generally."
--The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
Like (1)I WANNA BE ME: Rock Music and The Politics of Identity
Temple University Press 2001
From early work in subcultural studies through more recent books such as Reynolds and Press's The Sex Revolts (1995) and Sheila Whiteley's Sexing The Groove (1998), discussions of rock music have emphasized its capacity to articulate identity, both in the musician’s persona and in the life of fans. The emerging consensus holds that, contrary to its early ideology of personal liberation, rock is actually a reactionary and hegemonic force in popular culture. Race and gender have emerged as the major categories for analysis.
Focusing on the ways that meanings and thus identities are constructed in a mass art context, my analysis begins with a foreword that analyzes the first Sex Pistols release, the "Anarchy in the UK" single and its flip side, "I Wanna Be Me." Where the Sex Pistols confronted issues of personal identity within an existing tradition of rock, the rock bands who generated this framework for discourse faced a more radical problem of articulating identity. The identity articulated by a popular musician is seldom stable, for mass distribution of the music continuously recontextualizes it into new contexts of popular use. As an example, the first chapter examines the formation of the Rolling Stones in 1961 before moving to a broader range of cases that cover the 1960s to the present.
Digging out the theoretical foundations of the key arguments employed when rock is viewed through the lens of cultural studies, I identify and challenge the prevailing assumptions in these debates. Part One begins by distinguishing rock's status as popular music from its status as mass art, leading to implications about intertextuality in a mass market that encourages decontextualized and recontextualized listening. Part Two examines arguments that rock has become just another tool in cultural imperialism, and explores the issue of cultural appropriation in popular music. Part Three examines charges of rock's essential misogyny. Both sets of charges are rejected as theoretically unsupported and empirically dubious. "Guilty" parties such as the Rolling Stones are defended as producing mass art that delivers its pleasure in ways consistent with ideals of both cultural and personal autonomy.
Listening to Popular Music
University of Michigan Press, 2007
Chapter 1 argues that we do not have to treat popular music as art in order to recognize its significant aesthetic value. Chapter 2 argues that popular music’s aesthetic value supports, rather than detracts from, the cultural work that the music accomplishes in everyday life. Chapter 3 shows how different musical backgrounds alter, for better or worse, a listener’s ability to recognize aesthetic value. Later chapters challenge the elite perspective that continues to dismiss popular culture as a second-rate domain of aesthetic value. The book concludes with an exploration of issues that arise at the intersection of aesthetic and communicative uses of popular music.
The argument weaves together recent work in aesthetics and popular music studies. In keeping with recent work on everyday aesthetics, I argue that aesthetic theory, which is often dismissed as a reactionary and elitist, has been redefined in the past four decades in a manner that permits us to recognize the considerable aesthetic value of popular music. Attending to the cultural location of music does not require a suspension of aesthetic discrimination, and aesthetic experience does not require transcending the socially and politically local dimensions of lived experience.
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