Scholars working between the fields of music and philosophy were once largely confined to the philosophy of music, a conservative sub-discipline of analytic aesthetics that typically took Western classical music as its topic of study. In recent years, communities of scholars interested in music and philosophy have considerably expanded their reach. Those in music studies are increasingly engaged with philosophy and intellectual history, many scholars in philosophy departments are writing about music and philosophies beyond the Western canon, and others working across the broader interdisciplinary terrain of sound studies, media studies and cultural studies are debating pressing philosophical questions relevant to the study of music and sound.

Alison Stone's The Value of Popular Music: An Approach from Post-Kantian Aesthetics is a promising sign of this new generation of research. Over seven chapters of lucid and synoptic prose, Stone draws together a great deal of thinking about the meaning and significance of popular music into a single, coherent, philosophical framework. In opposition to any lingering hierarchies between high and low culture, Stone argues that popular music should be accorded considerable aesthetic value. Key to its valuation is an understanding of the way the elements of popular music are assembled contingently. Eschewing any sense of “logically necessary” development associated with the Western classical canon, in her view, the elements of popular music generate possibilities and combinations that emerge from their material properties. Stone argues that this guiding principle allows us to appreciate popular music's stylistic pluralism, its implicit and affective meanings, its intricate plays of rhythm and texture, and above all, its material sense of immediacy, which is exemplified by its close relationship to dance. Ultimately, she contends that aesthetic value emerges most saliently in the final product: a great song that forms a cohesive whole and produces “higher-level structures of meaning.” (p. 173)

Much of Stone's book is taken up with the analysis and interpretation of musical examples rather than philosophical argumentation or exegesis. And in this regard Stone is an attentive and remarkably insightful listener. She has an ear for the ways the forms of popular music work; she convincingly discerns what elements and properties of the songs matter to their aesthetic success. This is no minor point; there is a tragic history of philosophers applying anachronistic criteria from classical music to popular music, and then finding the latter wanting. Adorno was infamously prejudiced about the regressive powers of tonality and rhythm in his dismissal of popular music and jazz. More recently, James O. Young, in defending the expressive supremacy of classical music, rested his case on judgements such as “the fact that chords in popular music are almost always in root position limits musical expressiveness” (Young Reference Young2016, p. 531). In contrast, Stone's competence with the repertory is never in doubt; when listening to her chosen songs, I found the details she pulled out to be salient and well chosen. Indeed, the simple observation that combinations of materials are contingently arranged allows one to put a philosophical framework around songwriting processes that are, in practice, built upon a great deal of trial and error.

Stone's expertise is in modern European philosophy, and for this book, she chose Hegel, Adorno and Kristeva to structure the book's larger claims. Her rendering of Kristeva's theory of the semiotic bolsters the idea that popular music produces inconsistent and embodied meanings that are not reducible to the work of semantic reference. In contrast to the Hegelian conception of an artwork as a sensuous presentation of the truth of Geist, Stone shows how Adorno regards music as materially grounded, and as such, in being presented, is in some sense resistant to understanding. Although she does not mention Marx or the question of alienation, Stone repeatedly reminds us that Adorno's conception of musical material is grounded in his critique of the governing powers of the intellect with respect to its effects on modern society.

I kept wanting Stone to do more with the paradoxes that Adorno then twists from this observation about the powers of the intellect. For as Stone certainly knows, for Adorno philosophy is inescapably the work of intellectual reflection and critique, even as one must sustain attention to material and social conditions. In this way, Adorno remained cautious about imagining that we could simply orient ourselves towards materiality while turning away from the powers of the governing intellect. As it was for philosophy, so was it true for the work of art as well; Adorno states in Aesthetic Theory “art is knowledge, though not the knowledge of objects” (Adorno Reference Adorno and Hullot-Kentor1997, p. 262). That is, art is not knowledge of the object itself, but a sensory means of knowing – and thus critiquing and negating – social conditions. Adorno's cantankerous negativity may have led him to categorical judgements against popular music, jazz, and primitivism as naïve affirmations of materiality, but it has also been central to others’ efforts to reconstruct Adorno in a more inclusive direction, as in the writings of Fred Moten (Reference Moten2017) and Fumi Okiji (Reference Okiji2018).

So I wondered how it would have affected Stone's book to have a greater emphasis on the negative and inconsumable qualities of these songs. More sustained attention to Adornian negativity might have kept alive the paradoxical entwinement of materiality and intellect from resolving into an affirmation of materiality against the intellect – something of a mind/body dualism – which occasionally seemed to guide the book's thinking. It also might, productively, provide a stronger Adornian framework around the question of meaning, since for Adorno, an ethical artwork supports not merely higher level structures of meaning, but a utopian truth that bears the powers of social critique. Among her examples – from punk rock to The Sugarhill Gang – there was certainly no shortage of discontent. However, there is no doubt that for the project Stone set to accomplish – that of calling attention to the poetry and value of what the practitioners do – this book stands as a powerful, and articulate, rejoinder to any lingering suspicion among philosophers that popular music lacks sophistication, beauty, or expressive power.