I will start with the fact that The Sound of Nonsense is an engaging and wide-ranging little book. In under 150 pages author Richard Elliott takes works from many different genres of text and musical art, shuffles them all together, and then discusses the results. I believe folks from some quite disparate fields of endeavor, from doo-wop music, to experimental sound art, from readers of Lear to those of Joyce, and even Schwitters or Cobbing will find Elliott's positioning together in close proximity bits of art from these areas and authors (and many others) has much to offer its readers.
In many ways, the wide-ranging nature of Elliott's work is both its strength and its biggest problem. Interesting things can happen by discussing Finnegans Wake and Bob Dylan's Another Side Of in the same breath, then moving on from those to ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic and then Louis Zukovsky.
In his efforts to connect pop music and experimental works of poetry or sound art, Elliott sometimes strays from the book's purported focus. While it's interesting that Chumbawamba's song ‘Ratatatay’ recounts George Melly's story of using Kurt Schwitters's Ursonate to discourage some would-be muggers, the song itself does not engage in nonsense in a particularly deep or interesting way. Similarly, Elliott's discussion of the albums of Robert Wyatt shows that Wyatt himself has been drawn to nonsense literature of various sorts, but does not demonstrate what the reader should learn from engaging with Wyatt's work. Elliott ends that section by suggesting that Wyatt's whistling rendition of ‘Round Midnight’ and hummed version of ‘In a Sentimental Mood’ are extensions of an engagement with words and sense, whereas lots of jazz (and other) musicians choose to hum or whistle lines rather than to sing words. There's just not enough material here to justify reading as nonsense these essentially instrumental renditions of two jazz standards.
This misunderstanding of humming and whistling as conveying words or nonsense vocables leads Elliott to another unconvincing premise: that most scat singing is nonsense. There are certainly performances of songs with lyrics that also include scat, and it is natural that many listeners will hear such scat as approaching language (and the performer may very well transform words from the lyrics into the nonsense of some of the scat syllables, thereby creating a scale from sense to nonsense). However, most scat syllables do not toy with sense and nonsense at all, and are instead a wordless way of using the voice to mimic the sound of musical instruments. Much scat and even a good bit of doo-wop syllables do not work like the neologisms in Carroll's ‘Jabberwocky’ or like the thunder-words in Finnegans Wake, not because they are different kinds of engagement with nonsense, but because the sung syllables are the onomatopoeic attempts by the vocalist to sound most like a trumpet, or a double bass, or a hi-hat.
The book is also messy. In several places, the author's discussion of a song lyric features description of the song, without ever presenting much of the lyrics to aid the reader in following the argument. On the other hand, when discussing the 1960s pop song ‘Surfin’ Bird’, Elliott devotes more than half a page (including a large block quote) to the television show Family Guy and one character's obsession with the song, a diversion that only takes the reader away from Elliott's argument rather than advancing it. The author acknowledges this messiness in a few places, saying in his conclusion for instance that ‘this book has modeled a tendency to deviation’ (p. 102), and continues explaining that ‘this is all part of the nonsense trail’ (p. 102). The book ends with the author's justification for its wide-ranging nature: ‘The roping-off of nonsense into categories hides important connections’ (p. 104). Elliott is persuasive on this front. I also find quite appealing his omnivorous listening and reading – he's invested great energy in bouncing from avant-garde works to pop ones, and from musical works to written text ones, and some of the juxtapositions are enlivening – after reading The Sound of Nonsense I was immediately inspired to go listen to several of the albums mentioned. I wanted to explore Timothy Wise's typology of yodeling, and to listen to Bob Cobbing's sound poetry, and to ‘dust off’ my John Oswald CDs, and explore some of the classic doo-wop that I have only ever been a passive listener to.
If you seek an academic book on nonsense, jazz, experimental music, pop or any of the other fields touched on here, this book may well leave you frustrated and seeking more in-depth or more tightly focused sources. But, if you're looking for a text that draws several fields together, or would like some help teleporting from one subfield to another with ‘nonsense’ as the conduit, The Sound of Nonsense might just be a fun read that will veer you toward something you have never before listened to or considered.
