In Bayles’ telling, rap’s old school period was not just prior to the advent of rich sampling, but also prior to what we might call the gangsta-rap scam . Old-school rapping did the dozens, did f-bomb-dropping comedy, did “battle rap” exhibitions of verbal prowess, and was . . . . Continue Reading »
Again, apologies for this getting put on hold a while . . . Martha Bayles wrote Hole in our Soul in 1994, but most of the key elements of the rap story were in place by that point. That is, as we saw in the previous post , critics admit that rap’s “golden age” was over by then, and . . . . Continue Reading »
Martha Bayles’s expertise, which besides her punchy prose is the main attraction of her Hole In Our Soul , extends beyond the p’s and q’s of American popular music, but also covers the impact various theories of modernism and art had upon the music’s development. She is . . . . Continue Reading »
Can’t talk about the 60s, especially 60s “Love,” without dealing with the Beatles. Last time we were occupied with one of their so-so late 60s numbers, but here we’ll be giving them their real due, by considering their early style. Let’s begin with this , part of a recent . . . . Continue Reading »
Having written one , two , three , four ALMOST FAMOUS-driven posts and now this one, I obviously do think it is an excellent film. Its one weakness is a certain complacency, underlined by its ending. I don’t have a problem with happy endings per se, but the one it provides really is too easy. . . . . Continue Reading »
It goes without saying that Fred Siegel should be reading my Rock Songbook, which underlines the middle-class mediocrity of most rock, even as it defends, with respect to music, the low, the high, and even the middle-brow version of the high. He could go to my last post , about the tensions between . . . . Continue Reading »
Rock and disco, the typical middle-class alternatives to Afro-American popular music, are inferior forms of music; however, as Pete Townsend helped us to see in the last Songbook post , it may usually be too difficult, and is (arguably) inauthentic anyhow, for middle class persons to play . . . . Continue Reading »
Its lyrics are fairly interesting (in a nutshell, relativistic autonomy gets declared in a “manly” mod key) and music-wise it features the ground-breaking and still tasty-sounding feedback break. But my discussion will focus on the relation between The Who’s trademark . . . . Continue Reading »
The last Songbook post could have been titled What Martha Bayles Has to Learn from Retro Rock n’ Roll. This post could be titled What Retro Rock n’ Roll Has to Learn from Martha Bayles. The basic lesson: the primitivist aesthetic cultivated by many in the retro scenes, and particularly in . . . . Continue Reading »
Musically, my Songbook is grounded upon Martha Bayles’s theory of American popular music, and my last post gave an account of what I believe I’ve learned from her. In the next several posts, I’ll be providing some elaborations upon or reactions to her theory. That theory is . . . . Continue Reading »
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