Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music

Rating:
Summary: A Brain-Expanding Eye-Opener
Review: Joy to the world! Martha Bayles has agreed to be an advisor to the National Jazz Museum in Harlem (of which I am acting chairman). Martha's book, HOLE IN OUR SOUL, was one of the brain-expanding eye-openers in my lifelong reading and education about American jazz, its assorted progeny, and the protean capacities of the American culture. It's a great book and a reflection of Martha Bayles's terrific intelligence, wit, aesthetic cunning, originality, and best of all for present purposes: the ability to get all this "stuff" into her writing. I'm prepared to bet all of Chevy Chase (my home town) that OFF WHITE, her evocatively titled book-to-come, will open eyes everywhere. Stay alert for its appearance.

Rating:
Summary: A Brain-Expanding Eye-Opener
Review: Joy to the world! Martha Bayles has agreed to be an advisor to the National Jazz Museum in Harlem (of which I am acting chairman). Martha's book, HOLE IN OUR SOUL, was one of the brain-expanding eye-openers in my lifelong reading and education about American jazz, its assorted progeny, and the protean capacities of the American culture. It's a great book and a reflection of Martha Bayles's terrific intelligence, wit, aesthetic cunning, originality, and best of all for present purposes: the ability to get all this "stuff" into her writing. I'm prepared to bet all of Chevy Chase (my home town) that OFF WHITE, her evocatively titled book-to-come, will open eyes everywhere. Stay alert for its appearance.

Rating:
Summary: Score: Martha Bayles 1, Arnold Schoenberg 0....
Review: Martha Bayles doesn't care much for the twelve-tone scale or the 20th-century European composers (and she's not very fond of amplification either -- watch out, Leo Fender, you're next!). In the best tradition of American Bandstand, it's gotta have a beat or Martha's not dancin' to it. While most readers of "Hole In Our Soul" would probably agree with Martha's basic premise that art trumps artifice for authenticity, her argument that popular culture has been ruined by the artist's need to shock us is less secure. (Artists have been trying to shock people since -- well, Martha takes it back to Apollo vs. Dionysus). And people still create great art and music regardless of an audience, or whether someone's there to market it, and the flaying of corporations as a culprit is a too-easy target (after all, Euripides did eventually create the theater for that play he had laying about...). Conservative theories like Bayles's always presume some other golden era when things were more balanced, more "correct," but those ages never really existed. (It does seem miraculous, though, when you hear a "great" song on the radio, no matter what your standard -- it makes every song around it sound like junk). The best you can hope for is that Bob Dylan -- or, in Martha's case, Robert Johnson -- is your next door neighbor and can pop in to sing you a song. Everything else -- the record, the grooming, the marketing, the sales chart -- that's the artificial part.

Rating:
Summary: martha bayles loves soul music
Review: Martha Bayles is a conservative. I am not, at least as the term has been perverted in the contemporary USA (but if conserving the natural environment is the most conservative position of all, then I'm a radical conservative!). Despite this ideological difference, I find her aesthetic position on American popular music quite compelling. Her saving grace is her love of African-American music! The core of her analysis is her distinction among three types of modernism: introverted, extroverted, and perverse. The book is motivated by her outrage at such recent youth music genres as gangsta rap, heavy metal and punk, which she sees as the outcomes of perverse modernism. (I tend to agree with her that much of heavy metal and rap are reactionary, but part ways with her on punk.) She tours the 20th century, though, only dealing with these contemporary forms toward the end, and her treatment of blues, rhythm and blues, and soul is excellent, showing her love of and respect for the music and the musicians. Her analysis of Chuck Berry and Elvis is one of the highlights. Don't expect much coverage of jazz. She respects it (putting it in the category of extroverted modernism), but doesn't seem to listen to it much. Without agreeing with all her judgements, I strongly recommend "Hole In Our Soul" to anyone interested in popular American music, and the African-American tradition in particular.

Rating:
Summary: a welcome addition to the dialog
Review: Martha Bayles may not like what she hears in today's contemporary music, but she knows, and can explain, why. While I personally like much of the dark music she dislikes, Bayles makes a good argument for WHY that music is the way it is. The destructive, anti-social elements of much metal, punk and rap are hugely influencial in our culture, and it's important to understand why and how they developed, rather than reflexively defend them, which is what most fans do. After all, the people who made the music Bayles favors, the blues and R&B that gave birth to rock 'n' roll, rock and post-rock, suffered every bit as much alienation and pain as any Orange County or London punk. Yet they responded with an entirely different aesthetic, which emphasized sorrow over anger, and hope over cynicism. Why? This is the question that Bayles, virtually alone among rock writers, has asked and convincingly answered. I still like my Pink Floyd, Sex Pistols and Nine Inch Nails, but it is often in SPITE of their pessimism, not because of it. Bayles desplays the bravery and risk-taking in her writing that her critics laud in their favorite (cynical) artists. More power to her.

Rating:
Summary: Original thoughts on pop, rock and rap
Review: Martha Bayles sees a decline in popular music because much of it has deviated from its vitalising Afro-American roots.She makes some very perceptive comments on various artists.For example: "the young Dylan was more interesting than a lot of 1960s rock stars because he was genuinely torn between the musical tradition he loved and the counterculture that loved him.""Heavy metal offers ritual death, but at the end of the ordeal, there is no rebirth."After commercial success, Nirvana "quickly retreated back into thrash, noise, and an emotional gamut running from A (for angst) to B (for blitzkrieg)." Van Morrison "at his best sounds like exactly what he is: a sorrowful amateur poet who's been dunked in the life-giving waters.""Prince's goatishness is preferable to the icy decadence purveyed by Madonna."And "Springsteen's best songs have a melodic force capable of defying gravity, in effect lifting the dinosaur off the ground and making it fly-albeit heavily, like an overfed pterodactyl."The author's forthright opinions will step on many toes, but it is refreshing to read someone who can write intelligently about popular music.She has a lot of challenging things to say, and she says them well.

Rating:
Summary: Original thoughts on pop, rock and rap
Review: Martha Bayles sees a decline in popular music because much of it has deviated from its vitalising Afro-American roots.She makes some very perceptive comments on various artists.For example: "the young Dylan was more interesting than a lot of 1960s rock stars because he was genuinely torn between the musical tradition he loved and the counterculture that loved him.""Heavy metal offers ritual death, but at the end of the ordeal, there is no rebirth."After commercial success, Nirvana "quickly retreated back into thrash, noise, and an emotional gamut running from A (for angst) to B (for blitzkrieg)." Van Morrison "at his best sounds like exactly what he is: a sorrowful amateur poet who's been dunked in the life-giving waters.""Prince's goatishness is preferable to the icy decadence purveyed by Madonna."And "Springsteen's best songs have a melodic force capable of defying gravity, in effect lifting the dinosaur off the ground and making it fly-albeit heavily, like an overfed pterodactyl."The author's forthright opinions will step on many toes, but it is refreshing to read someone who can write intelligently about popular music.She has a lot of challenging things to say, and she says them well.

Rating:
Summary: At last an intelligent--and intelligible--treatment
Review: Martha Bayles's highly accessible study of popular music is a fine read, intelligently controversial, pandering to no crowd, deeply and broadly informed. It's not only important for those of us who care about her subject and enjoy a well-crafted argument, it's also a fine tonic for those--especially academics--who are put off by the barbed-wire prose of culture studies professors and their Marxist progenitors Benjamin, Adorno, et al. If you can't get through more than a cryptic, knowing page of Greil Marcus, try Bayles. You'll learn a lot, you'll be challenged, and you'll make a friend.

Rating:
Summary: Cultural Criticism at its Best
Review: Martha Bayles's Hole in our Soul is cultural criticism at its best. In the past many writers condemned pop culture because it wasn't high art; today many academic critics, especially those associated with cultural studies, refuse to make any judgments at all--except political ones. Martha Bayles, on the other hand, makes convincing judgments according to standards appropriate to the music she is discussing. She conveys both her genuine delight in the best of pop and her rejection of the worst. Without jargon and without relying on an all-encompassing theory, she makes a persuasive case about "the loss of beauty and meaning in American popular music." Hole in our Soul should be on anybody's short list of the best books on American popular culture in the last fifty years.

Rating:
Summary: A Gust of Fresh Air
Review: Most writing about popular culture is deeply flawed, ruined by one or more of several bad things: flackery, philistinism, highbrow condescension, smirking transgressivism, or, worst of all, pretentious and self-absorbed pseudo-academicism. Martha Bayles avoids all these pitfalls in this passionate, knowledgeable, opinionated book. It's a gust of fresh air. Not only is it fabulously well-written and unfailingly intelligent, but it is animated throughout by the author's genuine love of her subject. She really believes in the possibilities of popular culture, and knows what she's talking about. Anyone who wants to think more clearly about what it means to have a vibrant democratic culture, and why we don't have one today, ought to begin here.