Gerd Bayer
Heavy Metal Music in Britain
(Surrey: Ashgate 2009)
Review by Michelle Phillipov

Heavy metal is one of popular music’s most enduring and commercially successful genres. Emerging in the late 1960s, metal has since undergone numerous transformations, from massive arena spectacles to obscure underground subgenres. Despite its longevity and sustained popularity over the past four decades, metal has enjoyed only limited scholarly attention. It was not until the early 1990s — over 20 years after the genre’s inception — that a significant body of scholarship began to emerge. But even then, the critical literature on metal has remained noticeably less than for other major musical genres and, significantly, it has also remained noticeably less favourable. Metal has been too often dismissed as conservative and reactionary; its apparent substitution of escapism for political commitment has contributed to a dominant stereotype of the genre as less empowering, less culturally significant and less worthy of study than other more straightforwardly ‘progressive’ alternatives. Continue reading →

Sean Stroud
The Defence of Tradition in Brazilian Popular Music
(Hampshire: Ashgate, 2008)
Review by Alvaro Neder

Stroud’s study “examines how notions of what constitutes Brazilian popular music have been constructed over a period of forty years or so since the mid 1960s” (p. 1). Under the “distinct impression” that “the influence of an essentially conservative group of writers and journalists . . . continues to exert a particular influence on public perceptions of a tradition of national popular music” (ibid.), the author aims to consider the role of these and other actors (the record industry, the broadcasting industry, the state, academics and individual researchers) who have shaped current notions of what is understood as Brazilian popular music, and what isn’t. One of his primary intentions is “to identify the influence of those actors in delineating the parameters of Brazilian popular music, and more particularly the construction of a tradition within the wider sphere of popular music as a whole, that is, Música Popular Brasileira (MPB), the socio/cultural/musical movement that has dominated the artistic scene in Brazil since the mid 1960s” (pp.1-2). Continue reading →

Bruce Johnson and Martin Cloonan
Dark Side of the Tune: Popular Music and Violence
(Adlershot: Ashgate 2008)
Review by Carlo Nardi

In his book The ragas of North India, Walter Kaufmann reports a conversation he had in 1934 with an eminent classical musician in then Bombay. On the basis that a rāga performed at a wrong time is inauspicious, the old man expressed his sense of frustration in these terms: “Do you know that you people in the West will soon experience a most terrible disaster? And do you know why? […] Because you people in the West abuse music and perform it at wrong times and occasions! You play funeral marches and sing dirges when there is no funeral and no cause for sadness, you sing love songs and spring songs when there is neither love nor spring, you play nocturnes during the day, wedding music when there is no wedding. How long – he roared – will the universe tolerate this abuse of music, music, mind you, a most sacred thing?” (Kaufmann 1968, p. 18). Continue reading →

Michael W. Morse
Twenty Years After: A Review Essay of Musicological Identities (1)

Steven Baur, Raymond Knapp, and Jacqueline C. Warwick (eds)
Musicological Identities: Essays in Honor of Susan McClary
(Aldershot, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009) (2)

i

It has been nearly twenty years since the publication of Susan McClary’s provocative Feminine Endings. The appearance of a festschrift, with contributions from her most reliable students and acolytes, presents a suitable occasion to rethink the contribution to musicology of McClary and her school. I believe, first of all, that we can speak straightforwardly of a ‘school’. There are a number of important orientations, principles if you will, that unite these authors in their diversity, marking them together ideologically, and apart methodologically from other versions of musicology; they form a major strand of the so-called New Musicology® (3). Historically, perhaps first among these principles were regular and fervent proclamations of ideological distance from (and hence disinterest in) ‘traditional’ musicology and its outmoded scholarly paradigms; such edicts often took the form of tabular lists of the virtues of ‘us’ and the flaws of ‘them’ (4). Musicology’s paradigm—the singular is deliberate—is considered methodologically superseded because it ignored social context in favour of a chimerical abstract called ‘the music itself’, and morally outdated because it espoused elitist canons of white male privilege, intellectually as well as musically. Continue reading →