Dorothea Gail's Weird American Music uses music, in Gail's words, ‘as a means to investigate cultural changes in recent American society’ (p. 9). These changes mostly relate to the neoliberal marketisation and commodification of identity that commentators such as Gail believe have so heavily shaped life over the last few decades. Using music – and a wide array of music, as we'll see – to explore such cultural change grounds what is rather overworked conceptual terrain in a character and specificity that is much to the book's credit.
Gail's broad cultural scope is reflected in her ‘interdisciplinary cultural studies’ method, which ‘draws from fields as varied as American studies, history, anthropology, sociology and … musicology and ethnomusicology’ (p. 20). Her chapters accordingly vary cultural-theoretical analysis with quasi-ethnographic reflection drawn from fieldwork and interviews with relevant subjects. These anthropological elements are somewhat limited, however, and do not tend to add much to the analysis. This is even as some interesting angles emerge from them at times; a chapter on the ‘Mexican-Anglo-Native’ group Jackalope is a good example, with rich interpretative ambiguity emerging from its discursive entanglements in shifting market sands around ethnicity and identity. Adapting to the varying character of her subjects, Gail blends technical musical description into the default cultural-theoretical analysis in other chapters. This is most winning in the chapter exploring Charles Ives’ late-century assimilation into a ‘stable’, non-‘weird’ position anchored in Europeanised Romanticism, an assimilation that both resolved Ives’ earlier ‘weirdness’ and also competed with other projects to stabilise Ives and his music, notably as a typically ‘maverick’ American figure. Gail's methods are largely apropos, then, aligning broadness of topic with broadness of approach.
As I have already started to indicate, Weird American Music focuses on ‘conflicted’ and ‘weird’ music and musicians from the period 1980 to the late 2010s, where ‘the weirdness’ manifests primarily as a kind of cultural ‘in-betweenness’ distinctive in the period: ‘a tense, unstable field lying between the concept of authenticity and the concept of the market’ (p. 3). This unstable field, this ‘grey area’ between a less mediated, supposedly more ‘authentic’ form of musical expression (embodied in Greil Marcus’ ‘old, weird America’) on the one hand, and majoritarian, ‘official’, market-orientated forms of music and culture on the other, is the book's central frame and focus (p. 3).
This focus is both a pro and a con: Gail's authentic/market frame is undoubtedly reductive, since it organises culture into an unsustainable (and rather old-fashioned) false dichotomy; as Gail herself acknowledges, ‘authentic’ expression is always mediated and constructed, and as she largely doesn't, market-driven music can feel just as ‘authentic’ in its own context as other music. Yet whilst reductive and, as a result, occasionally overly simplified or dichotomised, Gail's overarching frame gets us to some interesting places. Above all, it provides a broad, productive context in which to gather and tell five very different, disparate musical stories in a unified way. This is one of the book's great strengths: it draws together a motley crew of music and musicians and shows how similar cultural dynamics shape each of them. To wit, Gail's five core chapters range widely and broadly across American music and culture from 1980 onwards, going from the (often fascinating) negotiation of race and ethnicity in Detroit's techno collective Underground Resistance to the conflicted commercialism and conservativism of chastity-pushing Christian rock group BarlowGirl, to the aforementioned multi-ethnic, multi-cultured band Jackalope, to the conflicting attempts to stabilise Charles Ives, and finally to the collision of place and market in Waffle House music. Yet despite this wide range, and despite the book having quite a bit of bloat and drift – every chapter contains superfluous material, while the Conclusion alone could stand to lose 18 or 19 of its 25 pages – the chapters hew closely to the book's overarching frame, deepening its implications as they go.
The Waffle House chapter provides a good illustration of the book's strengths and its weaknesses. It analyses music written especially for the jukeboxes in Waffle House outlets, which music, for Gail, embodies an interesting admixture of the local and the national, of folk and mass culture, in its blend of highly commercial pop parody and more localised ‘Southern’ references and codes. Gail's analysis here is typical of the book in that it both provides much interpretative nuance whilst at the same time occasionally being reductive in its characterisations and also containing a fair bit of disjointed or superfluous material, whether as a result of repetition or of an unclear analytical through line. An example of the latter point can be seen in the long passage on the song ‘Raisins on My Toast’, which delves in some detail into its similarities with Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons’ ‘Sherry’ and its broader self-referentiality without adding much to the chapter's argument (pp. 299–303). We also get a lot of background detail on various figures throughout the chapter, which again delays and disjoints the flow of the argument (for example pp. 307–311).
In terms of nuance, Gail draws various subtle distinctions. For example, noting the ‘quality and care put into the production of these songs’, Gail rightly suggests that ‘condemning the culture industry or consumer capitalism for a particularly cynical instance of appropriating the act of eating at a restaurant … might not be a productive approach to understanding this phenomenon’ (p. 288). Moreover, in speaking about typical responses to the supposed decline of the United States, Gail sets herself against the kind of polarisation that would focus either on ‘simplistically positive’ or ‘simplistically negative’ stories, instead focusing on the ‘interaction’ of such poles (p. 289). This is also right, and leads her analysis to valuable places; for example, Gail makes the point a number of times that commercialised, mass-market chains such as Waffle House perhaps counterintuitively often work to boost local pride, signalling affluence through participation in national and international chains of commerce whilst also, in the case of Waffle House and the identity work done in part by the chain's self-mythologising music, shoring up a comforting sense of regional belonging and community (see pp. 291 and 294). ‘Commercialisation’, argues Gail, ‘becomes part of authenticity’ (p. 328).
On the other hand, as in other chapters, Gail doesn't always follow through on such interpretative nuance. For example, she tends to dichotomise the market and the humans within that market, a dichotomy that obviously echoes the overarching false dichotomy around which the book is framed. Moreover, Gail arrives at a conclusion that is both tantalising and in need of more thinking through, where the weird ‘in-betweenness’ of earlier Waffle House music supposedly gives way across the 2010s to a more nakedly commercial emphasis devoid of the kind of rich ‘symbolic and spiritual meaning’ found in that earlier work. For Gail, Waffle House customers and workers no longer emotionally relate to the imaginary Southern community symbolised in the jukebox music, which in turn transforms their experiences into purely instrumental ones (pp. 334–335).
The arc of this conclusion, where a tense, conflicted, ‘in-between’ blend of market and meaning gives way to a purely commercial, inhuman profit motive, echoes similarly in some other chapters, and directly anticipates that of the book as a whole. It is nuanced at various points – most crucially in the final few pages, where Gail underlies the subtleties of some of her case studies, for example drawing attention to the understandable fear expressed by BarlowGirls in response to a loss of identity, and to the complex desires of Underground Resistance for unlimited cosmopolitanism. Yet it ultimately relies on a binary sense of what it is to be authentic and what is represented by ‘neoliberal’ profit motives, as well as implying an unrealistic ‘watershedding’ of American society into (effectively) pre- and post-weirdness. I can see where Gail is coming from on these points, but I wonder what deeper levels of nuance and insight might have been gained from analytically sticking with the weirdness that undoubtedly persists in American culture. There is, after all, always a weird, new America to be uncovered if we look hard enough.
