Page 192 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

186 CULTURAL STUDIES

America in the 1990s is at least as complicated as that of anyplace on the
planet, especially since Euro-America is the place to which much of the rest
of the world has moved or longs to migrate.
(pp. x–xi)

What binds these books together (above and beyond the fact that they both belong
to Wesleyan University Press’s new ‘Music/Culture’ series) is that each attempts
to open up the field of music scholarship—in ways that it generally hasn’t been
opened up before—to the messy complexities of the circulation and function of
music on the contemporary cultural terrain.
Despite their shared commitment to moving beyond reductionist approaches to
the study of music, however, these two projects remain markedly dissimilar from
one another: so much so that it is tempting to see them as complementary
counterparts to each other, with each book providing a piece of the larger puzzle
that the other, because of its quite different focus, cannot supply. Subcultural
Sounds, for instance, is primarily a theory-driven project that operates at a
relatively abstract level of macro-analysis (even though its formal subject is
‘micromusics’), and Slobin is ultimately far more concerned with constructing
broadly applicable theoretical models 1 of music and culture than he is with
analyzing particular facets of specific local musics. While Slobin refers to an
incredibly broad spectrum of musical subcultures at various points throughout the
book (enough so that one can’t help but be impressed by his fluency with such a
wide range of musics), these brief dips into the real function primarily as illustrative
examples supporting the more abstract models that Slobin is trying to build. My
Music, on the other hand, is a more empirically oriented project dedicated to
fleshing out the minute details of a tiny corner of the musical terrain: the various
ways in which individual members of an urban community (Buffalo, NY) make
use of music in their daily lives. While the Music in Daily Life Project (hereinafter
referred to as MDLP) doesn’t seem to be antagonistic towards theoretical work on
music, the study at hand is far more interested in uncovering and presenting a
picture of the real world than in constructing (or applying) abstract of models of
that world. Consequently, this volume is devoted almost exclusively to transcribed
excerpts from forty-one interviews conducted with Buffalo-area residents on what
music is about to them (a brief foreword by Lipsitz and an even briefer introduction
and appendix by Charles Keil comprise the entirety of the critical commentary on
the study and its findings included here). Taken together, then, the implicit promise
of these two books is that My Music will provide us with a key to unlocking some
of the more perplexing mysteries of ‘the local’, while Subcultural Sounds will help
us understand the ways in which the various locals of the world get stitched together
to form ‘the global’.
In the end, however, only Slobin’s volume lives up to its side of this unspoken
bargain very well. This is not to say that Subcultural Sounds is entirely without
2
flaws. For instance, Slobin repeatedly conflates hegemony and ideology, he flirts
with the intentional fallacy school of semiotics (i.e., the meaning of music is