In my teaching, I have found it natural and intuitive to dialogically explore analysis of rap and metal, as the two genres share significant overlap in their potential to be sonically confronting, yet have divergent perspectives and social foundations. I see this happening less often in research (one example is Jonathan Pieslak's Reference Pieslak2009 Sound Targets: American Soldiers and Music in the Iraq War), and it is gratifying to see the analyses in Gamble's book further this dialogue between rap and metal. How Music Empowers draws on several interdisciplinary approaches to tease out how style-competent listeners can experience these genres as empowering, and how these experiences both overlap and diverge according to genre norms.
The book takes an intuition that I think many listeners have – that given the right set of circumstances, listening to music can make one feel powerful – and works to represent ways in which this process of empowerment might occur. To do this, Gamble draws on research in ecological perception and embodied cognition to develop what he calls the ‘ecological-embodied framework’ (p. 29) for exploring the possibilities afforded by listening experiences. In his view, this framework resolves problematic binaries prevalent in debates about music perception, because it easily encompasses both ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ aspects of perception and experience (p. 25). Combined with the style competence of individual listeners, this embodied-ecological framework provides the foundation for the analyses that follow, enabling Gamble to model how music listening can afford experiences of empowerment in a way that encompasses both individual and environmental factors. This approach, while intuitive and accessible, left me with a few questions about the positioning of the analyses themselves.
Early on, Gamble cautions that the musical analyses will ‘appear hypothetical by comparison to ethnography or experimentation’ (p. 10), because his analytical model focuses on affordances – possibilities – rather than his own or others’ actual hearings. The theoretical grounding for these analyses, presented primarily in Chapters 2 and 3, uses the ecological-embodied framework to examine how the exemplar tracks could provide experiences of personal or collective empowerment to the listener(s). The analytical vignettes typically feature a combination of observations about the sonic environment (some expressed in music-analytical terms, others in less specialised language), descriptions of the possible interpretations or experiences that these sounds may afford, and selections from online comments indicating how each song makes particular listeners feel – a component he refers to as ‘digital ethnography’ (p. 6). Given the centrality of affordances to the analytical approach, I was left with questions about the author's positionality within the analyses themselves. Although I can hear and often identify with the affordances Gamble points to, I wondered if he could have done more to openly situate or involve himself in the analyses. The music-theoretical observations bear the imprint of the analyst's academic training, which necessarily impacts some of the affordances mentioned. Whereas Gamble's hearing is present as an unmarked, ‘objective’ observer of the tracks’ sonic environment, the digital ethnography components that accompany the analyses present actual reported hearings that either confirm Gamble's perspective or point to alternative affordances – a valuable feature that reduces the apparent hypotheticality of the analyses. If applied more systematically, this ethnographic perspective could provide the opportunity to further this research toward exploring how these affordances actually play out for a variety of listeners. Personally, I found the concluding analysis of Enter Shikari's ‘Destabilise’ (pp. 160–61) to be the most satisfying, as the author's positioning of his own experience enables the reader to directly observe how the sonic environment afforded a specific empowering experience.
Beyond these questions, the analyses themselves are approachable, and although they occasionally contain notated transcriptions, they do not typically require advanced music theory knowledge to grasp. In their concision and readability, they could provide a useful model for undergraduate teaching on how to write analytically in a way that links concrete, hearable musical factors with an interpretive argument about listening.
The gender imbalance within the examples stood out to me as a preventable shortcoming. In the introduction, Gamble states that the book's chosen repertoire is ‘drawn from a range of artists and styles, informed by an aim to present musical and cultural diversity’ (p. 5), but that he is also ‘aware of an uneven gender distribution of artists in the sample … This by no means suggests that the capacity to produce empowering songs is reliant upon sex or gender’ (p. 14, fn. 11). This stated interest in diversity and forthright awareness of the imbalance suggests that more could have been done to improve it, or at least to provide justification for its existence. Although treatment of the complex and evolving relationships that traditionally masculinist genres such as rap and metal have with gender falls beyond the scope of the book, the fact that out of the book's 21 analytical vignettes, only three feature women (and only two feature women as the primary performing persona), indicates that important affordances of empowerment within the studied genres may have been overlooked.
Beyond its contributions to dialogic and comparative analysis of rap and metal music listening, the book's most important contribution comes in the latter chapters’ engagement with ideas of community empowerment and debates over whether empowerment through music can genuinely contribute to social change. Chapter 6 delves into the political entanglements that have grown up around the ‘empowerment’ concept, and how its relegation to the realm of personal responsibility has absolved governments and other institutions of the work of actually changing power structures. Gamble works to clarify how both power and empowerment are neither purely personal nor structural, but ‘experienced through social processes’ (p. 133), including listening: ‘music listening neither imbues characteristics of power nor unsettles social power relations directly, but creates feelings and bodily effects associated with power that can alter individuals’ behaviour and cognition’ (p. 133). Although the exact impacts of specific listening experiences remain untraceable, Gamble's weaving together of how individual listeners, musical communities, and genre conventions interact with each other marks an interesting intervention into sticky debates over the relationship between popular music and social change.
