Seattle's Experience Music Project opened in 2000. Housed (along with the Science Fiction Museum) in Frank O. Gehry's startling construction close to the city's iconic Space Needle, it has held its annual EMP Pop Conference there since 2001. The 19 chapters in this volume have been selected from papers given at the 2002, 2003 and 2004 conferences, and are edited by conference organiser Eric Weisbard, who was also the EMP's curator and senior manager until 2005. In his introduction, Weisbard states that ‘pop music turns on moments more than movements’ (p. 1) and that the goal of the writers is to consider ‘dramatic instances where music was transformed in ways that we are still grappling with’ (p. 5).
However, the nature of such moments is not rigorously prescribed, and the authors present their arguments through a series of case studies that takes in performers, contributors, genres, ethnicities, technologies, locations and compositions. At one level, this variety is the book's strength; at another level, the range of topics is its weakness. Perhaps this is inevitable in a collection drawn from three separate conferences. Thus, readers searching for a succinct account of 20th century popular music will be frustrated, while those looking for an entertaining (if unrelated) collection of vignettes that illustrates pop's scattered history will be fascinated.
By way of illustration, two of the most interesting chapters focus on peripheral individuals whose importance is relatively unfamiliar (at least to me). Marybeth Hamilton's exploration of the life and work of New York record collector James McKune in the 1940s and 1950s reveals him as one of the pivotal figures in the later resurrection of the Delta Blues. Although ‘McKune wrote no liner notes, managed no artists, set up no record labels, opened no blues clubs’ (p. 45) he nevertheless emerges as ‘a tastemaker, a connoisseur [and] cultural arbiter’ (p. 30) whose influence only became public in the 1960s when white performers and audiences discovered the music he had helped to preserve. Similarly, David Thomas argues that the idiosyncratic blend of surrealism, absurdity and confrontation practised by mid-1960s Cleveland TV host Ernie Anderson (Ghoulardi) would be adopted, adapted and expressed in the work of third-generation rock bands such as Pere Ubu, the Cramps, Television and Talking Heads.
Of course, there are examinations of familiar names too. Holly George-Warren's re-assessment of Bobbie Gentry's international stardom in the late 1960s and early 1970s goes beyond the usual preoccupation with the lyrics of ‘Ode To Billie Joe’ to consider her unique ability to vividly bring the American South to life through song, before her 30-year self-imposed exile from public life. Steve Waksman's thoughtful analysis of Grand Funk Railroad as one of the first bands whose success rested on the size of its audiences, rather than its record sales, also illuminates the moment in the early 1970s when ‘the rock and roll industry was learning how to dramatically expand its reach, and when the larger-than-life aura of rock stardom became a way to reach the swelling audiences of arena rock’ (p. 170). And Jason King presents a persuasive argument for the recognition of Roberta Flack as an overlooked pioneer whose ‘spellbinding vibe’ (p. 174) as a performer sits alongside her political significance.
Franklin Bruno's essay on the cultural tensions and discrepancies that allowed Leiber and Stoller's ‘Is That All There Is’ to become an unlikely chart hit for Peggy Lee in 1969 – at a time when pop was apparently morphing into rock – is an apt reminder of the fluidity of popular music and its refusal to remain within convenient boundaries. So too, in a more fragmented way, is Michelangelo Matos's story of ‘Apache’, written by Jerry Lordan. Inspired by the 1954 movie of the same name, it was initially a chart-topping instrumental in the UK for Cliff Richard's backing group The Shadows, and in the US for guitarist Jorgen Ingmann. However, after a series of re-births and cover versions (most notably by Michael Viner's Incredible Bongo Band) it re-surfaced in the mid-1970s as a core track in the repertoire of Kool Herc: ‘a record written by a white Englishman imitating Native Americans as portrayed by white Americans and made famous by a Dane with a vaguely Hawaiian sound, newly arranged by a Canadian, and rhythmically defined by a Bahaman, became the biggest record in black New York’ (p. 204).
Less successful are those chapters that tend to incorporate elements of autobiography into their analyses. Lavinia Greenlaw's memories of her years as a teenage punk in Essex, Eric Weisbard's recollection of his reaction to the music of Bill Tate/Buddy Holocaust, and Drew Daniel's account of his feelings during and after a Germs reunion concert reveal much more about the authors than they do about their ostensible topics. While this form of diary-writing can undoubtedly be valuable, it does detract from the book's stated attempt to represent ‘the expanded pop past on display here’ (p. 5).
Crucially, of course, Listen Again – like any published set of conference proceedings – provides no space for the spontaneous exchange of views and comments that follows each paper at the time and place of its original delivery. In this respect, many of the contributions contain assertions, arguments and conclusions that might provoke vigorous and valuable discussion between participants, but which, in print, are impossible to clarify. This is not a criticism of their content, but a comment on their form. While the ‘momentary history of pop music’ promised in the title may be rather misleading, the book does supply a useful introduction to the range of approaches from which pop is presently being approached, and an indication of the unpredictability of its past (and future) development.
Editors' Note
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