Rating: 
Summary: Finally someone who agrees with me!
Review: Ms. Bayles book is a joy to read. She hits the pulsebeat of much of what is wrong about popular music today and why. It is refreshing to find someone who really examines the sixties counterculture and is honest about it. Her thoughtful insights into the positive influence of the Beatles and Motown are fresh and honest, lacking the usual gushing that tends to go with these subjects. She also has an insightful chapter on rap music, intelligently pointing out the problems with "gangsta rap". Ms. Bayles is not afraid to criticize such "icons" as Madonna, Jim Morrison and Frank Zappa. Her section on disco is very amusing. Fans of the group Chic beware! She also has one of the best sections about 1950's rock that I have ever read. She is not afraid to debunk many myths about rock music that have been maintained over the last few decades. She is also quick to point out that there are many talented artists out there (Paul Simon, Van Morrison, various jazz artists and others) who are still making meaningful music. A wonderful read for any music lover.
Rating: 
Summary: Academic who doesn't know a thing
Review: Really, really bad. Martha Bayles is no Adorno. There are somelegitmate criticisms to be made regarding popular music, but Baylesisn't making them. In reality she is an apologist for vacant popconstructions like Springsteen (read Meltzer for the real lowdown on him) or even Boys II Men (!) and an incoherent reactionary towards anything that may express true dissatifaction with the status quo (punk, early hip-hop). The worst example of how the hippy ethos has degenerated into the most simple-minded neoconservatism. END
Rating: 
Summary: Goldbrick Variations
Review: The most disgusting work of popular music criticism published to date, Martha Bayles' *Hole In Our Soul* is an extended "rip" of Albert King's "Cold Feet" (wherein it is discovered that Sam and Dave did not play the blues) by way of a transposition of Greil Marcus' *Lipstick Traces* (wherein it was discovered that many British youths had been to art school). Bayles has absolutely no time for fine-grained historical periodization, whereupon the "missing link" between Robert Johnson and the Replacements could be discovered, and practically no time for "thick description" of the few American cultural artifacts she venerates. This book would have you think that none of this stuff ever made it to the corner, much less into popular consciousness: and although John Lydon's "EMI" may have had a curiously strong effect upon Stateside youth culture, dollars-to-doughnuts there are still a few people waiting for a dance (that is to say, a retraction of these calumnies and patronizations delivered upon and unto major cultural figures) who didn't know her when. Alternate suggestions: *Please Kill Me*, Felix Hernandez' *Rhythm Review*, what you already knew about what you liked (this is a work *against* cultural memory, and they are one and all sad occasions).
Rating:
Summary: Goldbrick Variations
Review: The most disgusting work of popular music criticism published to date, Martha Bayles' *Hole In Our Soul* is an extended "rip" of Albert King's "Cold Feet" (wherein it is discovered that Sam and Dave did not play the blues) by way of a transposition of Greil Marcus' *Lipstick Traces* (wherein it was discovered that many British youths had been to art school). Bayles has absolutely no time for fine-grained historical periodization, whereupon the "missing link" between Robert Johnson and the Replacements could be discovered, and practically no time for "thick description" of the few American cultural artifacts she venerates. This book would have you think that none of this stuff ever made it to the corner, much less into popular consciousness: and although John Lydon's "EMI" may have had a curiously strong effect upon Stateside youth culture, dollars-to-doughnuts there are still a few people waiting for a dance (that is to say, a retraction of these calumnies and patronizations delivered upon and unto major cultural figures) who didn't know her when. Alternate suggestions: *Please Kill Me*, Felix Hernandez' *Rhythm Review*, what you already knew about what you liked (this is a work *against* cultural memory, and they are one and all sad occasions).
Rating:
Summary: The Deploring Industry Goes Pop
Review: This is another of those tsk-tsk surveys of popular culture, intended to prove that the world is going to hell in a handbasketfull of CDs. There's always a market in America for neoconservative scarebooks, but this one is even more smug and thoughtless than the norm. Bayles truly doesn't seem to know the violent, nihilistic stance of pop's folk roots--or perhaps she simply feels that acknowledging this aspect of the tradition would make her Chicken-Little reading of current pop too obviously untenable.
Rating:
Summary: Best appreciation of American Pop tradition--free of Jargon
Review: This is the best appreciation available of American pop music and what has become of it in our time--indeed it is the best one imaginable. It is written in the tradition of the great classics on American pop culture by Henry Pleasants, Constance Rourke, Gilbert Seldes, and Albert Murray. Rich in the detailed knowledge that only the most refined and loving sensibility can gather, it is free of jargon and cant. Bayles writes with greater erudition and sophistication than anybody, but no one who reads her will confuse her with the snooty elitists who write about culture on the right or left. Nor does she steer away from controversy into a mushy center. Rather, she writes with invigorating independence and originality. Bayles complains that the "popular" music of our day has lost beauty and meaning. But she does not turn her nose up at popular tastes--she avoids the errors of Allan Bloom, whose embarrassing ignorance of the culture of his fellow Americans is still widely shared among "conservatives," and helps explain why he and they cannot reach the masses they claim to want to save. With a greater knowledge of the history of both classical and popular music, Bayles insists that popularity is compatible with refinement and innovative genius. (The popularity of Shakespeare and Duke Ellington, among others, ought to make this immediately clear.) Bayles clearly loves the best of jazz, pop, R&B, rock 'n roll, soul, and other parts of what she (following Henry Pleasants) calls the Afro-American tradition. She recognizes that snobbery cannot cure the tendency of our culture to substitute outrageousness for genuine innovation. Highbrow disdain only encourages bad musicians to think that their shock-tactics really challenge bourgeois morality. Bayles finds hope in the abundant historical evidence that "ordinary" listeners often demand--and feel they have a right to expect--tasteful, sensitive, truly challenging music. Surprsingly, she does not blame commercialization for their failure to get much of it lately: not only has our greatest music often been popular, it has also been commercially successful. (She parts company with a number of self-described leftist critics here, as well as conservatives.) As a rule, commerce does debase art, Bayles says, yet the greatest music can survive mass-production, mass-marketing, and mass-consumption. More damaging than commercial exploitation of artists, Bayles thinks, is the insincere pose of rebellion that artists and their promoters feel they have to strike in order to get noticed. She holds out hope that audiences will get better popular music when they (and the critics who claim to speak for them) show that they care about it--when they condemn meaningless noise (on musical rather than moralistic grounds), and when they encourage and reward those who work hard to distinguish themselves by making new and beautiful sounds. The best thing about Bayles is not her scrappy attitude toward whatever commercial or critical goliath comes along, but her wry humor and detachment. Her vision is not simply more accurate and original than the politicized drivel that passes for criticism of pop music today. It is more fun.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent, Detailed Overview of American Pop Music
Review: This would easily have risen to the level of five stars if the author would have confined the sometimes long-winded writing of historic ties and examples to the endnotes for the serious reader who wants to delve deep, and highlighted her main views in the text. Thus, the four stars. She makes excellent points. The heritage of American popular music is jazz, blues, country and gospel. These had serious musical abilities and a sensibility which ungirded and monitored them. Then came art school and the perverse modernism's entry. It again took away what the African-American slice of the American pie had contributed so wonderfully and turned it into something which severely disconnected it from its past. That's where the debate must center. Do we want and need to disconnect? And the hope for our future of popular music, can we reconnect? There seems to be hope. What with all the interest in jazz and big band sound, etc. This is well written, well argued and well documented. It suffers from being at moments high browish, written by a big-city critic. However, if doggedly pursued as this reader did (took me over six months to finish), there is much to be gained. Those serious in pursuing historic roads of popular music and its possible myths, will find no better source than here.
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