For many years now academic publishers have been mining a (presumably) profitable seam of scholarly labour: mapping an academic field by commissioning essays for Readers, Companions and Handbooks. Such tomes are sold exclusively to university libraries and priced as works of reference. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Rock Music Research, for example, comes in at 630 pages. The bibliography alone takes up 105 pages, the index 23, and the book is priced accordingly: £120.60 for the print version, £96.48 for the e-book.
No one is expected to read books like this, and no one does, except, perhaps, their editors. Such books are, rather, consulted. Teachers go to the relevant chapters when planning a lecture, undergraduates when preparing an essay, postgraduates when choosing a research topic. Nor can such books really be reviewed. They must, rather, also be surveyed.
By my reckoning, then, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Rock Music Research has contributions from 14 European-based academics (10 in the UK), 12 North Americans (10 in the USA), 7 Australasians, an Israeli and a Peruvian. There are 8 female and 27 male scholars and both the topics chosen for coverage and the author profile would seem to support Jon Stratton's argument here that rock music is, in effect, a topic for the academic field of White Studies.
What is meant by ‘rock music’ (and by ‘research’, come to that) is a question for every contributor and is answered in various ways. For Sarah Hill, looking at the origins of “serious” writing about rock, it is best defined negatively: “if nothing else”, rock is “not pop” (p. 3), while in his chapter on global rock Jeremy Wallach writes straightforwardly that “by ‘rock’ I refer to electric-guitar-based bands who write and perform their own songs, imprinting them with a distinctive sonic signature” (p. 469). By contrast, both Ralf von Appen's survey of work on song forms and Olivier Julien's survey of work on sonic space and texture show that in such analyses ‘rock’ and ‘popular music’ are difficult to distinguish (‘rock’ can certainly not be confined to guitar bands). Not surprisingly, then, in their essay on “the definition of ‘rock’ and stylistic overlaps”, Taylor Myers and Brad Osborn conclude that the term “remains a powerful organizational force precisely because of its malleability, its ability to encompass a great diversity of unique music” (p. 56—my italics), which is to suggest, I think, that rock is a useful term because it can describe pretty well any kind of music.
The editors themselves argue that:
Probably the best approach to answering the question “What is Rock?” is to accept that the term operates discursively rather than definitionally … Thus each of our authors was asked to observe how the term was employed in relation to the topic they were asked to address and to accept this as the operative meaning of the term for the duration of their chapter (p. 7).
This is a sensibly pragmatic decision given the range of research the Reader covers, “including the musicological, historical, sociological, cultural, psychological, computational, technological, industrial, pedagogical, semiological, postcolonial and hermeneutical” (p. 11), but I was a little disappointed that the editors didn't consider this further once all the papers were in. It is striking for example that the scholars interested in musical institutions find it easier to define rock (and to distinguish it from other sorts of popular music) than scholars interested in musical texts; this is particularly the case for scholars examining institutions historically. Both Simon Zagorski-Thomas (writing on studio organisation) and Sergio Pisfil (writing on live performance) clearly identify the technological and aesthetic developments that shaped rock as a distinct kind of popular music practice. Laura Niebling, by contrast, opens her chapter on music and time-based visual media with reference to a Tony Wilson mantra: “Rock is Pop and Pop is Rock” (p. 345), which is to take us full circle from Sarah Hill's foundational rock crit dogma.
But this, I have to remind myself, is a handbook. The essays are not supposed to be in dialogue with each other. The authors’ brief was to survey a particular research topic and the book is organised (rather uneasily) not by reference to the contradictions of rock scholarship but according to the particular research fields and methods surveyed: rock historiography, rock analysis, rock theories, rock environments, rock politics. The question for a reviewer is whether these are good surveys. Do they cover the ground comprehensively? Are they fair to all the voices in a scholarly debate? Are they readable and engaging? Do they help readers understand why particular research questions were asked, why particular research methods were adopted and how evidence has been gathered and assessed?
My (obviously subjective) assessment is that around half the essays meet these criteria rather well (a very good result for this kind of book). Besides the essays I have already mentioned I would particularly recommend to students Katherine Meizel on rock voices, Steve Waksman on rock instruments, Trevor De Clerq on computational musicology, Nick Braae on categorisation, Motti Regev on rock beyond the English-speaking world and Paul Carr on rock music pedagogy (his interesting and entertaining essay was also the one with which I most often disagreed). But here I will focus on the two chapters that I found most illuminating.
Andrew Blake's essay is on “rock in time-based events”. It is focused on the use of music in sports and shopping. By systematically surveying what is, by now, an extensive research literature, Blake is able to illustrate convincingly a significant shift in the way scholars think about the sports/music nexus, from analyses of rock and football fandom as expressive of male working-class youth culture to the concept of “the experience economy”. Blake suggests that this approach developed in the 1990s in response to the simultaneous musicalization of sport and ritualization of the annual rock festival and the spectacular rock concert (itself often staged in a sports venue). The specialist event manager Michael C. Mitchell thus moved from coordinating the worldwide TV coverage of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games to executive-producing Live Aid (from Wembley Stadium). Blake moves on to discuss Jonathan Sterne's work on the musicalization of the shopping mall and the emergence of so-called psychomusicology, as psychologists began to study scientifically rock music's motivational effects, whether for professionals training, amateurs’ fitness routines or geeing up players and crowds before a contest. He concludes with his own exhortation:
While debates about rock, identity and authenticity may remain popular, they are treading on very worn turf. With the 1990s shift toward technologically serviced and mass-mediated experiences, capitalism has, for good or ill, made the world we live in. This shift, and the changing place of rock music within in it, needs the kind of thinking attempted here. Let's do it (p. 377).
Wallach's essay is a well-organised survey of the history of rock music in the Global South, in countries in the “decolonized world” (p. 482). Wallach outlines both a stylistic chronology (troubadours from c.1965, independent music scenes from c.1980, rock hybrids from c.1996) and a model of how the music of one culture is taken up by musicians in another: from initial dissemination through precise replication to a rich variety of linguistic and musical hybridity. What makes Wallach's essay a must read, however, is not its survey of a fascinating field of ethnomusicology but his use of this material to critique rock studies orthodoxy: “Although rock from the decolonized world has been neglected as both politics and art, here I concentrate on the former, since it has been the main focus of extant scholarship” (p. 469).
Wallach argues that ideological debates about rock authenticity and rock commerce are of little interest in a decolonized setting, where rock has been politically “a source of irritation and consternation … over its entire sixty-odd years of existence” (p. 472). As for the idea that rock could only catch on in non-Western countries because of multinational corporations’ marketing efforts (the ‘cultural imperialism’ argument), “there is no reason to concede a priori that non-Western cultures are too alien to accept Western cultural products except as a result of coercion”. However effectively Western rock may have been absorbed by the experience economy, in decolonized countries rock is [still] ideologically incompatible with regimes of conformity and deprivation” (p. 471). Rock, from this perspective, is “just getting started”!
As in any good polemic, Wallach's argument can be overstated, an effect of his own kind of rock-centrism. He claims for example, that rock is “unusual in its decisive separation from its particular American origins”. Unlike all other popular music, he suggests, “rock music canons would be fundamentally incomplete without non-American artists” (his examples are, as it happens, bands from the UK and other English-speaking communities; it is not actually that easy to name non-Anglophone records in the rock canon). And surely his argument about “rock's inherent cosmopolitanism” is also true of jazz (and hip hop): “almost from its inception it has been a transnational music decoupled from its origins and appropriated for local uses” (p. 471).
I realise that few readers will, like me, read this handbook from beginning to end. The effect of reading it this way is certainly to be constantly reminded of the tangled variety of meanings (many contradicting each other) that the term ‘rock’ now has in the academy. But by bringing all these contrary voices together in this way, Allan Moore and Paul Carr also show, paradoxically, how productive for research such an unstable, vague and conflicted socio-musical concept has been. This was not the conclusion I expected to reach when I started out on this.
