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

She certainly is no apologist for Springsteen; she states more than once in her short (less than a full page) passage on him that she considers his musical abilities "limited." What must have annoyed Gelling was Bayles' acknowledgment that many, many people enjoy Springsteen's music. I agree with the point she somewhat obliquely makes in that acknowledgment: if he's been pleasing both a loyal fan base and new, young ears for three decades, that's good enough, as far as such things go. Why the heck do we need to read a "lowdown" on the political implications of his discography?

I haven't listened to enough BoyzIIMen to see if Bayles might be right in that they're a cut above New Kids on the Block or other vapid boy bands. Gelling's exclamation point after the band's name seems to say, "What a ridiculous idea! They're a popular, mass-culture group, so OBVIOUSLY they must suck."

Which is just the attitude that Bayles tried to combat by writing "Hole in our Soul": that if your music pleases the ear and you treat your audience with respect, you're a "sell-out;" and that the uglier and more inaccessible your sound is to the average person, the more "sophisticated" it is, and behaving obnoxiously on- and offstage only adds to your "mystique."

In my opinion, it's a GOOD thing Bayles is "no Adorno." Popular music has most definitely suffered from all the tone-deaf and talentless people who took it up in the recently departed century because they had a "point" to make, usually a left-wing one but often, and especially in the case of Brit art-school types who fancied themselves "bad" boys and girls, an aggressively anti-social one. Not to mention that crowd's compulsion to "deconstruct" everything and anything, especially things that are "too" popular and "insufficiently" radical � an attitude that's poisoned the atmosphere of U.S. college campuses for at least the last decade.

Sure, Bayles quotes conservative social critics like Stanley Crouch and Allan Bloom, and sure, she decries the hate, violence, and mechanical sex that characterize lyrics in much of punk and rap. But what she decries the most is violence done to music itself. The central point of "Hole in Our Soul" is that the most important thing about music is how it *sounds*: whether it moves people to laugh, cry, dance, or sing along... and it's a point Gelling seems to have missed entirely.

I'm only giving "Hole in Our Soul" four stars, however, because there is a bit of tunnel vision in it. Bayles seems to think that a "funky" sound -- polyrhythms and other musical elements integral to the blues -- is the only source of magic and wonder in music, especially American music. Sure, a bluesy sound is a terrific thing and tremendously important to the nation's music, but there are certainly musical traditions in this country that stem more from Europe than Africa, and they're as vital and lively as anything that came out of the Mississippi Delta or Chicago's South Side.

Traditional English and Celtic music has enjoyed a renaissance in recent years on the coattails of the folk resurgence, and it's as much a part of this country as it is of the United Kingdom, given how many of our forefathers and -mothers came from the British Isles. While so much of "Celtic" music is indeed overly precious -- "airy-fairy," as the more hard-bitten pub players might put it -- a virtuoso blazing away on the fiddle has no trouble bringing an audience to its feet.

Then there's Mexican and Mexican-influenced music. While Tex-Mex is part country, and country owes a huge debt to the blues, I don't hear that big of an African-American influence in it. And the further south you go into Mexico, of course, the truer that is. Then there Jewish influences that aren't particular admixed with black ones. And polkas brought over by Central and Eastern Europeans. And so on, and so forth. Perhaps Bayles merely categorizes these genres under "world music," but it's a world within our borders, not without.
August 28, 2003