The Bloomsbury Handbook of Rock Music Research

Allan Moore, Paul Carr, Allan Moore, Paul Carr

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501330476
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Rock Music

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Rock Music Research is the first comprehensive academic survey of the field of rock music as it stands today. More than 50 years into its life and we still ask - what is rock music, why is it studied, and how does it work, both as music and as cultural activity? This volume draws together 37 of the leading academics working on rock to provide answers to these questions and many more. The text is divided into four major sections: practice of rock (analysis, performance, and recording); theories; business of rock; and social and culture issues. Each chapter combines two approaches, providing a summary of current knowledge of the area concerned as well as the consequences of that research and suggesting profitable subsequent directions to take. This text investigates and presents the field at a level of depth worthy of something which has had such a pervasive influence on the lives of millions.

1

Introduction: Rock Music’s Emergence, Censorship, and Perceived Death

Paul Carr and Allan Moore

In the life of the academic, there are few better experiences than the excitement of receiving the first draft of chapters for an edited collection you have, with some trepidation, agreed to take on. Not only is there so much you can learn from chapters with as wide a disciplinary base as gathered here, but there’s the immense respect owed to authors who have agreed to fall in with your plan for the volume. Indeed, the sheer number of authors willing to participate in this extensive collection in many respects reflects the strength in depth of the academic community now surrounding rock music—which has grown significantly since the early attempts of authors such as Laing (1969), Gillett (1970), Hamm (1971), Belz (1971), Mellers (1973), and Frith (1978),¹ who of course stood on the shoulders of rock-focused magazines such as Crawdaddy!, Rolling Stone, International Times, and New Musical Express.

Focusing broadly on musicological, historical, aesthetic, sociological, industrial, and cultural perspectives, in many respects these authors set the foundations for the approaches that were to follow, with Hamm’s essay being a particularly noteworthy example of the then perceived (lack of) academic importance placed on the serious study of “vernacular” music in the early 1970s. After publishing his concern that artists such as Jimi Hendrix were not considered in American Music Society publications and how the society’s methods and aesthetics needed to be broadened in order to engage with this “more varied body of material,”² Hamm received the following response from noted early music expert, Denis Stevens:

The gist of [Hamm’s] argument is that one of the best musicological journals in the world …, should be censured for failing to give publicity to jazz, pop, rock, folk and trick music …. We are told that “many younger people today … understand only too well the artistic, historical, and sociological value of this music.” Younger than whom? Perhaps this sentence should read: “many immature quasi-illiterates understand perfectly the atavistic, hysterical and social appeal of this noise.” For noise most of it is.³

As outlined by Cusick,⁴ the American Music Society had a similar exclusionary philosophy regarding the inclusion of women when establishing the organization three decades earlier in the mid-1930s, and it is gratifying to note that nearly half a century after Stevens’s article, not only is rock scholarship pervasive but so too are feminist approaches to rock analysis, via authors such as Susan McClary, Mavis Bayton, Norma Coates, Arlene Stein, and Sheila Whiteley.⁵ It is also interesting and perhaps ironic to point out that many of the “younger people” referred to in Stevens’s article were not only rock music’s audience but also some of its earliest academic writers, with Dave Laing’s pioneering Sound of Our Time (first published in 1969) arguably being the most notable example of this relationship.⁶ Written when he was still in his early twenties, Laing’s book foreshadows numerous debates that were to be taken up by later scholars, discussing factors such as the tensions of autonomous creativity vs music industry “restrictions”; relationships of rock to broader society;⁷ the emergence and conception of songs as “records”; impacts of technologies on creativity and “product”; the development and importance of the producer; the significance of semiological meaning as an analytical method; interrelationships of lyrics and musical sounds; the position of place in music making; the relationship of live and recorded environments; the emergence of “youth culture”; and innovations in production and distribution. Many of these discussions have been revisited by scholars to a greater or lesser extent over the last fifty years and are pervasive strands in this current collection.

Attention relating to the scholarship of rock music has of course grown significantly in the years since Laing’s book, with the genre now having a number of key academic texts by authors such as Moore, Zak, Covach, and Walser—all of which have influenced critical engagement with the genre.⁸ Whereas these writers discuss rock music musicologically, authors such as Frith,⁹ Longhurst,¹⁰ Schippers,¹¹ Hebdige,¹² Gracyk,¹³ Kearney,¹⁴ and Berger have examined the genre (or its subgenres) more sociologically, culturally, philosophically, and ethnographically.¹⁵

The texts dealing directly with rock music, whatever their philosophical foundations, have of course been complemented by the more general expansion of popular music scholarship, which has gained particular momentum since the inauguration of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) and the journal Popular Music in 1981, published by Cambridge University Press. These initiatives, which were preceded by the first popular-music-related journal—Popular Music and Society in 1971¹⁶—have been followed by journals such as The Journal of Popular Music Studies, The Journal of World Popular Music, Journal on the Art of Record Production, Popular Music History, and more recently, The Songwriting Studies Journal.¹⁷ Although all of these journals examine rock music alongside other popular music genres, to date Rock Music Studies is the only journal to deal exclusively with the genre, considering subjects such as the etymology of the name “Heavy Metal,” rock journalism, gender branding, and rock authenticity, since launching in 2014.

In addition to the texts already mentioned, a few select academic publishers have also provided a “home” for single volumes on rock scholarship, in some cases over many years. Commencing in 2003, Bloomsbury’s ​33 1 ⁄ 3 series is the most comprehensive sequence of books to specifically engage critically with album analysis, and although not dealing exclusively with rock music, the majority of its current 139 titles feature rock albums, ranging from the iconic—for example, Pet Sounds (1966) and Electric Ladyland (1968)—to more niche recordings—for example, Forever Changes by Love (1967) and Entertainment! (1979) by Gang of Four. To complement this series, Bloomsbury also launched their Music and Sound Studies series, consisting of a broad range of texts on subject matters such as the recording industry;¹⁸ songwriting;¹⁹ rock subgenres such as heavy metal, punk, and progressive rock;²⁰ rock history;²¹ genre;²² place;²³ music festivals;²⁴ and individual artists.²⁵ The series also includes numerous more generic popular music–related texts, such as The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education; An Architectural History of Popular Music Performance Venues; Popular Music in the Post-Digital Age; and Popular Music and the Awareness of Death, all of which allude in some way to rock music.²⁶

Similarly, Ashgate’s Popular and Folk Music series (now published by Routledge) has commissioned 159 books since its inception in 2000.²⁷ Like Bloomsbury’s series, rock music is directly and indirectly addressed via topics such as songwriting,²⁸ subgenre,²⁹ place,³⁰ music festivals,³¹ modernism,³² rock reception,³³ individual artists,³⁴ gender,³⁵ and stardom.³⁶

In addition to these exemplar traditionally academic texts, a fascination with the history of rock music and stardom more generally, has resulted in a plethora of books designed for the mainstream market,³⁷ complemented with magazines such as Classic Rock and Q,³⁸ TV series such as Classic Albums and Rock ‘n’ Roll Britannia,³⁹ and the emergence of rock tribute artists,⁴⁰ reunion tours,⁴¹ museum exhibitions,⁴² and film biopics on artists such as the Doors, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and more recently, Queen and Elton John.⁴³ Indeed it could be argued that settings such as the David Bowie and Pink Floyd exhibitions, showcased at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 2013 and 2017 respectively, are signifiers that rock music is finally being considered part of the music “Establishment”—an Establishment that musicologists such as Denis Stevens, educationalists such as Brian Brocklehurst,⁴⁴ and later commentators such as Roger Scruton have been intent on ring-fencing.⁴⁵

However, as outlined below, the acceptance of rock by institutions such as museums, school curricula, and indeed academia are ironically factors that can also signal its “death,” by stripping it of its anti-establishment rhetoric.

Due to the sheer number of texts already published,⁴⁶ this is not the place to document a detailed history of rock music, although we deem it important to very briefly highlight the speed at which the genre developed stylistically, technologically, socially, and culturally, especially during its formative and consolidatory years. For example, when examining the decade between the mass emergence of rock ‘n’ roll in the late 1950s and the early 1970s, one can appreciate how developments in studio technologies impacted the creative practices of musicians, producers, and engineers. When speaking about Pink Floyd’s interface with studio technologies throughout the band’s time together, Nick Mason believed that “at every stage in this [technological] evolution there has been a need to improvise with whatever the current technology provides,”⁴⁷ a dialogic process that led authors such as Albin Zak and Virgil Moorefield to consider the emergence of “producers as composers.”⁴⁸ This resonates strongly with Richard Middleton’s observations, that “technology and musical technique, content and meaning, generally develop together, dialectically.”⁴⁹ Moorefield notes not only how record producers such as Phil Spector and George Martin progressed from “technical” to “artistic” skill bases during the emergence of rock music, but also how the emphasis on record production changed from what he describes as the “illusion of reality” to the “reality of illusion”—where close replication of a live music setting was no longer the aesthetic objective.⁵⁰ This environment, in which the creation of recorded “virtual spaces” became possible, was the context in which rock music matured.⁵¹

It is important to remind ourselves that during rock music’s “incubation” years in the 1960s and early 1970s, Mason’s “improvisation” and Moorefield’s “studio-based creativity” were usually only available to those who had the financial resources to access it. Despite the “authenticity issues” associated with this creative environment being financed by a capitalist system,⁵² the resultant products of this experimentation can be considered to have changed the expected “skill base” of rock music’s practitioners, in addition to the aesthetic experience of its listeners, not only in sound quality but also in the emergence of the album as an aesthetic object. Indeed, if one compares a particularly innovative exemplar recording from 1966, the Beatles’ Revolver, to a snapshot of albums released in 1959, the difference over a seven-year period is startling, it being easy, even for the casual listener, to hear the transition Moorefield refers to. Albums such as Chuck Berry on Top, Frank Sinatra’s Come Dance...