From the start of this fascinating and elegantly written book on the politics of music, Barry Shank makes it clear where his interest does not lie. He is not concerned with the use to which music is put by states, parties and political activists, or indeed by celebrity politician musicians such as Bono, Sting, Chris Martin and their ilk. He is concerned with the political force that music itself exerts or releases; not music as an essentialised ‘thing’, but music as an experience and a moment, as a ‘force, creating shared senses of the world’ (p. 2). He believes in the capacity of music to change us and our worlds, and he sets out to explain both, using an argument from theory and examples provided by a diverse set of musicians and musical forms.
For Shank, it is music's ability to connect us – its listeners, its participants – by modelling ‘the experience of belonging to a community not of unity but of difference’ (p. 1). Key to this is the ‘beauty’ or ‘bliss’ of music, understood by Shank to be the rendering of ‘inarticulate voices’ within the communal exchange. His rejection of an essentialist account of music is a rejection of a politics in which group identity pre-exists the community and its expression in cultural form. For Shank, ‘the emergence of political community is, in part, an aesthetic experience’ (p. 18).
His complex and subtle argument is itself rendered eloquently. One of his key ideas – which he takes from Jacques Ranciere – is the ‘distribution of sensibile’ that music is able to realise, where we are lured toward (or ‘lean into’, as Shank has it) a shared meaning and a new experience. Here is what he writes (p. 180) about Washington, DC band Bad Brains: ‘The awareness, the sensibility distributed in and through the experience of musical beauty generated by Bad Brains, could not be reduced to an already existing understanding of the world shared by a community outside the field of musical production. Bad Brains had generated something new: a new common, a redistribution of the sensible.’
The Political Force of Musical Beauty is not just a work of theory. It contains vivid portraits of particular musical milieu: the Factory and the Velvet Underground; avant garde experimentalism and Yoko Ono; and of artists such as Patti Smith, Beat Happening, Alarm Will Sound and Tinariwen. He also evokes the passions and responses elicited by specific songs or pieces. ‘Listen to it’, he writes (p. 173) of Patti Smith's ‘Land’, ‘That rise and fall, that set of waves crashing, that penetrably full sound.’
For all its manifold pleasures and insights, there are, I think, weaknesses in the argument. These can be identified in some of Shank's key terms: ‘community’, ‘beauty’ and ‘politics’. Shank is clear that his notion of community is not one marked by utopian harmony and blissful consensus. It is a site of difference; it is a ‘polis’ in which – in the cliché – people ‘agree to disagree’. It is the politics of agonism. But what constitutes the various communities of difference to which he refers is never altogether clear. Early in the book he writes: ‘Music is the absolutely undeniable evidence of the sociality of human feeling. Music confirms the belief that we feel as collective beings’ (p. 19). But it is not evident – at least, not to me – what this means, or at least how this fits with Shank's other arguments. In his community of differences, presumably others might reasonably deny the ‘sociality of human feeling’, especially as it isn't obvious whether we are dealing with ‘beliefs’ or ‘feelings’. Nor is it apparent how this connects to the politics of inequality and conflict that, as Shank acknowledges, defines the wider world – where beauty is ‘shaped by power relations’ (p. 247). Also absent is the music industry itself, the system – the community? – that produces music and regulates the rights attaching to it.
His central term – ‘beauty’ – is left opaque. It is clear where he finds it and how he experiences it. His eloquent renderings of tracks and performances are evidence of this. But it is not transparent what the term beauty captures or describes. Of course, this is a tough ask, but in a book of this kind, with beauty as its central idea, readers might expect more.
These criticisms are born of frustration rather than motivated by condemnation. This is an important contribution to the debate about music's relationship to politics, one that takes seriously and treats subtly the contribution of musical sounds and experiences. It takes risks and issues challenges, and we are indebted to Barry Shank for this (and much more) in his fine book.
