In this monograph, Motti Regev expands on his notion of the ‘pop-rockization’ of popular music worldwide (drawing on his previously published articles), in an effort to show how global popular music fits into his view of a single, all-encompassing world culture that he calls, following Urry Reference Urry1995 and others, ‘aesthetic cosmopolitanism’. The basic idea, which is probably uncontroversial at this point (if not universally accepted), is that ‘late modern world culture is, in effect, one cultural space’, wherein the older idea of ‘distinct, separate cultural units – be they national, ethnic, local or indigenous’ (p. 7) – is replaced by one of mere subunits within one complex cultural entity, subunits that share ‘large proportions of aesthetic common ground’ and through which national, ethnic, local and indigenous groups ‘signify and perform their sense of [cultural] uniqueness’ (p. 3). This aesthetic common ground, when it comes to popular music and its environs, is pop-rock, by which Regev means everything from doo wop to disco to heavy metal to hip hop. Pop-Rock Music offers a ‘sociological theorization’ of the ‘emergence, legitimation, and consolidation of world pop-rock music’, a repertory that in turn serves as ‘a perfect empirical case through which aesthetic cosmopolitanism can be characterized, elucidated, and explicated’ (p. 3). (In these last two quotations, and elsewhere, the writing is weighed down by clunky rule-of-three lists.)
After an introduction, the book proceeds in Chapter 2 to describe in detail the way in which pop-rock music became ubiquitous. Through a process Regev calls ‘expressive isomorphism’, the sonic signs of pop-rock, although developed by Anglo-American musicians, have been adopted and adapted by musicians around the globe, initially as exoticist markers of the Anglo-American West but eventually as geographically neutralised elements that blend with indigenous features to collectively signify, among other things, unique late-modern non-Anglo-American cultural identities. This chapter devotes most of its space to proving simply that global pop-rockisation is real and well underway (having begun in the early 1960s), by proffering evidence of pop-rock's presence in international recordings and their journalistic and scholarly discourse.
Chapter 3 treats global pop-rock as a ‘field of cultural production’. As such, pop-rock represents a space of hierarchical relations, whose dominant positions consist of consecrated canonic musicians and works, and of the corresponding production of meaning positions that maintain the successfully imposed criteria of evaluation [of pop-rock as autonomous art] and who [sic] monitor the entrance into the canon of new (or old) musicians (pp. 59–60).
Regev here dives into the familiar territory of the Anglo-American pop-rock canon to demonstrate how the repertory's characteristic sounds have changed over the decades through contentious expansion, resulting today in five major stylistic subfields of cultural production: metal, electronica, alternative/indie, hip hop and R&B (one subfield), and the central subfield, the last being the hierarchically dominant category normally called the ‘mainstream’.
In Chapter 4, global pop-rockisation is theorised as a ‘long-term event’, by which the author means, confusingly, not an event in the normal sense of the word, but rather a ‘longue durée’ (p. 25), a ‘sequence of occurrences’ spanning several years or even decades, which has had ‘long-lasting effects on … [the] field, and therefore on the practices and experiences in the corresponding realm of culture for the larger social unit in which the field is set’ (p. 94). The long-term event of global pop-rockisation is depicted as a battle between musicians, the music industry, critics and media professionals over the acceptance of foreign Anglo-American sounds (and their values) versus the maintenance of more locally based musical traditions.
While Chapter 4 examines the production side of pop-rock, Chapter 5 looks at its consumption, particularly fandom, which is described, somewhat mundanely, as comprising membership in assorted ‘aesthetic cultures’ individuated according to distinct pop-rock genres within the ‘aesthetic meta-culture’ of pop-rock as a whole. These aesthetic cultures of fans are ‘cluster[s] of practices, arrangements, and mechanisms … [that] make up how we experience, evaluate, and sense the world (p. 129). (Notice again the rule of three.) Regev devotes particular attention to the importance fans and critics have placed on knowledge of the repertory, a value only intensified since the proliferation of relevant information online.
In the final, sixth chapter, the book turns to the listening body, to the physical effects the sounds of pop-rock actually and necessarily have on their audience. Pop-rock is here taken out of the world of the mere intellectual and auditory, and theorised as having ‘a certain transformative effect on reality’ (p. 177); our corporeal responses to the auditory stream constitute the creation of storage facilities within our own bodies for memories of associated places, and in this sense pop-rock has become ineludibly inscribed in the very flesh of late-modern listeners worldwide. To commemorate this literal metamorphosis, the author posits the science-fiction-worthy concept of the ‘aesthetic cosmopolitan body’, a body ‘not just … capable of recognizing, accepting, and adapting itself to [aural] otherness, … but rather a body that articulates its own local identity by incorporating elements from alien cultures’ (p. 176). (The rule of three arises again.)
The general argument about pop-rock music, about its global proliferation and creative appropriation by non-Anglo-American communities, is spot on. The essential definition of pop-rock as a broad continuum ranging from hard to soft styles is also convincing (more on this in a moment), as is the claim that aesthetic cosmopolitanism is fundamentally a process of ‘mutation’ that entails cultural otherness transforming ‘into something always familiar, never fully alien or strange’ (p. 179). This said, I would question the need at all for such heavy-duty sociological machinery in explaining our fairly obvious state of pop-rockisation and aesthetic cosmopolitanism, a state that even the author admits is ‘routine, ordinary, and trivial’ (p. 136). (Need I point out the rule of three yet again?)
More troubling, considering that the book's main title is simply Pop-Rock Music, are its claims about the repertory. The discussions of specific musicians are fine as far as they go, if seemingly arbitrary in their choice of featured artists, but the musical generalisations range from imperfect to downright baffling. For a repertory as broad as the author claims, including, by his own admission, Elvis, Phil Spector, Bob Marley, Madonna, Joni Mitchell, and all manner of electronica and hip hop artists, I find it odd that he repeatedly claims that the principal position in pop-rock's sonic hierarchy is occupied by the electric guitar: we are told that the ‘tones and timbres of the electric guitar are probably the definitive sonic metonyms for pop-rock music’ (p. 164), and that ‘[s]ome, if not most of the emblematic museme strings and stacks of pop-rock are associated with the sounds of electric guitars’ (p. 166). Indeed, some. But drums (acoustic and electronic) would seem to offer a much more obvious auditory connection between, and thus a clearer marker of, all these disparate artists and styles. More problematic still is the utter neglect of that most maligned of the commercial giants of pop-rock genres, country music: the book barely even acknowledges country exists, let alone properly theorises country as a major stylistic subfield. Instead, we get a field theory with a gaping hole. This dereliction of discussion goes hand in hand with the overemphasis on electric guitars; in any case, an exploration of how country music, with its intense associations with the American South, has been appropriated and made locale neutral by global musicians would have been both fascinating and, I think, completely in sync with the spirit of the book.
