Edward Comentale's Sweet Air: Modernism, Regionalism, and American Popular Song offers a radical reinterpretation of popular music between 1910 and 1960 by arguing for the inherent modernist aesthetics of genres from blues to rock'n'roll. If modernism has historically augured the greatest distance between art and popular, Comentale instead views luminaries such as Charlie Patton, Fiddlin’ John Carson, the Carter Family, Woody Guthrie, Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly as modernists sounding the traumas, pleasures and reconfigurations of modern life as powerfully as T.S. Eliot, John Cage or Richard Wright. Through a virtuosic understanding of modernist history and impassioned readings of individual songs, Sweet Air seeks to theorise how song powerfully and popularly expressed modernity.

Comentale claims that popular music provided a ‘new modernity’ (p. 12) through direct exploration and abstraction of what he calls its own specific ‘form’. Form, the theoretical linchpin of this book, is used to access the unique characteristics of popular song as song, which he views as ‘its liveliness and immediacy, but [also] its very immateriality, its very detachment’ (p. 83). Influenced by Josh Kun's Audiotopia, Comentale views popular song as an affective, abstract space for performers and listeners to enact the overwhelming sensations wrought by industrialisation, estrangement and deterritorialisation. The poles of familiarity and ineffability encapsulated in form, reflected in the double sense of ‘air’ and ‘airiness’ in the book's title, ground Comentale's theory of modernist popular music. This formal turn allows Comentale to uncover strategies of aesthetic experimentation and expression, providing a way of countering what he perceives as an undercurrent of romanticisation in studies by Greil Marcus, Richard Peterson and others. The five case studies that comprise Sweet Air, covering Delta blues, early country music, folk and rock'n'roll, examine how the formal experiments of modernist popular song index the experiences of everyday American modernity.

Comentale's trajectory is anchored by the relationship between region, specifically the South, and sound. Places such as Atlanta, the Delta, Lubbock County, and even ‘The South’ itself, prove incessantly mutable and fleeting under the progress of modern industrialisation. Comentale suggests that the air of song, expressing the interaction of technology and nostalgia in Fiddlin’ John Carson's repertoire or the silences of Buddy Holly's Lubbock studio, aesthetically reflects the inexorable progress of modern de- and re-territorialisation. The exploration and abstraction of pop's repetitive patterns also serve as a refrain throughout the text. For example, the unusual structures of Woody Guthrie's refrains, from the apostrophes in ‘Reuben James’ to the empty sonic pleasures of ‘I Just Want to Sing Your Name’, create a political space through an ‘affective and transformative … dimension … that is neither simply committed nor entirely detached’ (p. 144). Likewise, the diverse topics in Charley Patton's songs enable the blues to serve as ‘variously a feeling, a mood, a nameless threat, a person, a lover, a bossman, a mob, and of course, the Devil himself’ through formal and topical abstraction borne of the ‘displaced and disaffected’ nature of the industrialising Delta (p. 49).

Other analyses take a more holistic approach to their subjects, viewing lyrics, performance styles, broadcast media and fan culture alongside modernist literature, poststructuralism and psychoanalysis. Chapter 4 provocatively reads Elvis through Marcel Duchamp, finding in the former the pleasures of ‘mechanical standardization, mass production, consumer desire, cheapness, [and] indifference’ (p. 161) central to the latter's famous Dadaist experimentation. This articulation prompts four theories for resituating Elvis's songs, personae and fans outside of Marcus's ‘Dead Elvis’: ‘Readymade Elvis’, based on commodified emptiness and the pleasures of resignification; ‘Dirty Elvis’, the silly pleasure of ‘Baby Let's Play House’ read through Lacanian drives and Barthesian jouissance; ‘Mother Elvis’, audience reception understood in Kleinian psychoanalysis; and ‘Third Elvis’, the exhilaration of commercial mediation theorised through Barthes' ‘third meaning’ from his essays on photography. Similar juxtapositions ground the argumentative threads of other chapters. The detached singing styles and melancholic lyrics of the Carter Family are theorised through Eliot, Stein and Freud (pp. 93, 100), while the final, untitled chapter locates in Buddy Holly's recordings an exploration of sound, silence and chamber similar to John Cage's compositions and Jacques Derrida's 1967 monograph Speech and Phenomena.

Comentale's readings are intended to be challenging, disruptive and even admittedly ‘absurd’ (p. 213). They demonstrate remarkably inventive and largely convincing resonances between two often separate cultural and intellectual spaces. If Sweet Air is intended to critique a strain of scholarly romanticism, though, Comentale ironically draws on a deeply romanticised conception of music itself through claims that ‘sound becomes a means of both claiming and dissolving the restrictions of … environment, a fluid material that simultaneously upholds and upends predetermined structures’ (p. 52). While proposing a unique form of song enables Comentale to distinguish it from, say, art or literature, the danger of this move is that songs, artists and genres become affective sites rather than historical subjects. Unfortunately, his experimentations with the formal resonances of song lead to a fast and loose relationship with history throughout the book. Too often, Comentale makes unnecessarily broad proclamations, such as that meaning in 19th-century popular music is somehow characterised solely by ‘the lyrical expression of identity’ (p. 9), or that Buddy Holly marks the point ‘when popular music became ‘pop music’, when the ad hoc and mostly local musical traditions in American became a formal aesthetic’ (p. 216), statements that ignore the histories and aesthetics of minstrelsy, Tin Pan Alley and jazz. Most startlingly, his focus on affect leads at times to insensitive claims, where the Delta work shack (pp. 42–43), the Dust Bowl work camp (p. 129) and even the crash of the American Pie (p. 242) are read as sites of affective mobility and social fluidity with little consideration for their delimitations and tragedies. Part of this stems from Comentale's passionate, curious and relentlessly exploratory writing style, but it also arises from allowing the mobility of theoretical fancy to breeze past the very real immobilities wrought by racial inequality, labour exploitation and untimely death.

Such reservations aside, Comentale's text is to be commended for ably demonstrating how popular music participated in broader modernist aesthetic projects in its own unique way, and for seeking a methodology that accesses the specific means by which popular song sounded modernity. Scholars of early 20th century popular music would be remiss not to take his text's call for a new and specifically modernist vantage point for addressing the relationship of sonic form and cultural politics between Delta blues and early rock'n'roll.