I recently had the pleasure of hearing Mitchell Morris deliver one of the keynote lectures for the EZ Music Conference at the University of California, Berkeley. Pleasure is the key word here. Morris's keynote roamed ambitiously and persuasively across the music of Enya, immersing the audience in virtuosic and seductive descriptions of sonic experience. I start here not only because of the connections between Enya's soft and easy music and the music discussed in his book project, but because Morris's deep appreciation for—and his pleasure in—Enya's music was palpable. This is also the case with his discussions of music in The Persistence of Sentiment: Display and Feeling in Popular Music of the 1970s; it is refreshing to hear a writer so invested in the music they write about.

The Persistence of Sentiment focuses on music that is loved by many but discounted by scholars and critics; in other words, this is a book about what some consider to be “bad” music. “The music I have in mind is in a sense too popular to be impressive,” Morris writes. “But what happens if we are impressed and we begin to say why?” (2). The book comprises an introductory chapter in which Morris provides what he calls a “conceptual brush clearing” (3) and an additional six chapters, each of which focuses on a particular 1970s popular artist or genre. Moving admirably and adeptly between rich cultural and historical contexts and thick descriptions of sound, Morris analyzes the music of some of the decade's most successful performers, including Barry White, Marvin Gaye, the Stylistics, Minnie Ripperton, Barry Manilow, Karen Carpenter, Cher, and Dolly Parton. Navigating the intersecting terrains of race, gender, class, and sexuality, Morris argues that this music is important because it narrated the experiences of increasingly empowered but previously marginalized groups, such as gay men, lesbians, women in general, African Americans, and poor, rural Southerners. These communities, he argues, “lived lives in which there was perhaps greater need of consolation” (25). His analyses not only help us to better understand the significance of this immensely popular music in the 1970s United States, but also help us to better understand the fragmentary nature of the decade.

Morris's collection of essays contributes significantly to the relatively scant—but growing—literature on 1970s popular music of the non-rock variety. His account echoes the revisionist refrains of the essays included in Laurie Stras's edited collection She's So Fine: Reflections on Whiteness, Femininity, Adolescence and Class in 1960s Music, Elijah Wald in How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ’n’ Roll, and Carl Wilson in Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, who address the aporia whereby the most popular of popular musics have been excluded from popular music studies.Footnote ¹

In the introduction, Morris applies the concept of generational consciousness to music, arguing that music serves as an important generational object because it has the ability to mediate community. Morris situates his discussion within the problem of the 1970s and of decade-based periodization, namely, that any appearance of unity falls apart under closer scrutiny. Extending this theme, each subsequent chapter opens with a short vignette that situates the music under consideration within a 1990s or 2000s revival context. These snapshots serve to illustrate just how these musics have persisted and what the circumstances of their revival might point up about the music's significance and utility—from opulence and wealth for black masculinities to erotic desire for female fandom.

In fact, this is a book more about the persistence of seventies music than about the persistence of sentiment. Rather than building on the extant discourse of sentimentality, Morris boldly charts a new path. This approach results in some exciting new interpretive maneuvers. But the novelty comes at the expense of precision about, for example, the distinction between sentiment and sentimentality. For instance, Morris refers to sentimentality late in his introduction, but it's almost in passing, as an aside about kitsch. A “brush clearing” may indeed be needed in order to bring these under-studied objects into view, but Morris does not fully outline the concepts of sentimentality that could have leant support to his masterful case studies.Footnote ²

Similarly, Morris's apparent reticence about popular music studies means that we don't hear about how he relates his project to some of the most exciting new scholarship in the field such as Stras's, Wald's, and Wilson's studies. In particular, Morris's study could have been situated in relation to the now familiar rockist and poptimist paradigms of popular music scholarship and criticism. Rockism, as defined by critic Kelefa Sanneh, is the ideology and bias that continues to fuel backlash against pop stars and pop music: “Rockism means idolizing the authentic old legend (or underground hero) while mocking the latest pop star; lionizing punk while barely tolerating disco; loving the live show and hating the music video; extolling the growling performer while hating the lip-syncher.”Footnote ³ Poptimism, on the other hand, acknowledges and celebrates the value of pop music, just as Morris's project does, even if he doesn't use those terms. For instance, he describes his musical representations “as fundamentally optimistic … they hope for something better,” and he takes seriously the task of “articulating the nature of those hopes” (30). A poptimist framework could have offered further context for why so much of this glorious music has not only been left out of popular music scholarship, but of popular music discourse more broadly. I will refer more specifically to Morris's chapter on the Carpenters to illustrate some analytic high points as well as some areas that might open onto future discussion.

I admire that Morris's analyses invite us to revel in the ambiguity of popular songs—in their ability to occupy multiple positions and complex contradictions. For example, Morris frames his discussion of Karen Carpenter's voice in relation to the singer's struggle with—and ultimate demise from—anorexia nervosa. He provides this apt description: “The songs seemed to embody a split between a virtuosically smooth exterior—Richard's brilliant arrangements and the expert sidemen in the band, including Karen on drums—and an abject interiority just under the sheen of that voice” (120). Morris uses the term “glossy sentimentality” (118) to describe the Carpenters’ music, but at this point these terms have not been laid out for the reader. A few pages into the essay, he goes further, explaining that sentimental styles are “desperately eager to please” and are “self-conscious about effects” (120). The reader senses that the discourse and history of these terms goes deeper, but it is not explored here.

Morris then offers an exciting theorization of singing along as a mode of embodied listening and an erotic way of occupying and getting to know a singer's voice. Via recording technology, and particularly close-miking techniques exemplified by certain Karen Carpenter tracks, the listener enters into a sensuous physical experience of trying to occupy another person's vocal apparatus. Here is one place in particular where it would have been useful to have a framework of the long history of sentimentality—indeed, its persistence—including its more positive values in the eighteenth-century cult of sentiment. Given Morris's optimistic orientation to the songs he discusses, a reminder that eighteenth-century sentimentalism was understood as a means of identifying compassionately and teaching people how to feel would have proved especially productive. With this connection, Morris's technologically mediated sing-along, in which the listener physically identifies with the singer—through the analogy of making out no less!—begins to sound a lot like the eighteenth-century cult of sentiment with its embodied emphasis on sighs and tears, a physical erotics constructed through literary and performative means. We get hints towards the idea that Morris means persistence in this longer historical sense, particularly in the final two chapters on Cher and Dolly Parton respectively, but the connections could have been made much more explicit from the outset.

Morris's book is an admirable achievement. Throughout, he insists that the music he explores is of the everyday; ironically, however, the terms of his discussion seem at odds with everyday aesthetics. Morris owns his identity as a musicologist, arguing that this perspective affords him the ability to comment on the affective and structural details of songs. He claims that he has a “tendency to forget to distinguish between the musicological canon and American popular music” (17); however, he imports the musicologist's apparatus of musical analysis somewhat uncritically. This debate is familiar and well-worn terrain within popular music studies. The descriptions of music are rich and rewarding to be sure, but they rely on a firm grasp of pitch, harmony, and orchestration, sometimes to the detriment of lyrical analysis. Many listeners for whom this music is so deeply meaningful might feel excluded by such lengthy passages that rely on elite specialist knowledge. One of Morris's points—and an important one at that—is that this music speaks to and for marginalized identities in significant ways, but his support for this point is developed using vocabulary that carries its own class biases and modes of distinction. This music is the sounding out of aspiration and fitting in. If that sounding out does reach across social boundaries in meaningful ways, perhaps our discourse might strive to echo that sense of inclusivity. Ultimately, Morris persuades us to listen closer to the 1970s, reminding us to give ourselves up to the pleasures of popular music. For this he deserves our thanks.