Page 194 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

188 CULTURAL STUDIES

different cultures? And so on. Though Slobin’s primary focus here is music, and
consequently the main audience for his book will probably be scholars working in
the fields of ethnomusicology and popular music studies, Subcultural Sounds is
also a potentially valuable resource for cultural studies researchers whose objects
of study don’t include music. In particular, Slobin’s extended discussion of the
categories of ‘superculture’, ‘subculture’, and ‘interculture’ provides a useful way
of thinking about a broad range of cultural phenomena—from literature to
television, from fashion to social customs—and the various ways that local and/
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or minor inflections of these phenomena relate to and interact with mainstream
culture.
My Music, on the other hand, is not at all likely to be taken up by non-
musicallyoriented scholars—and, in the long run, its value even to critics
concerned with music is somewhat limited. To be sure, this collection of interviews
picks up some of the slack left over by Slobin’s ‘musician-centric’ account, insofar
as it focuses exclusively on the uses that ‘ordinary people’ make of music in their
daily lives. Moreover, the MDLP manages to offer some interesting insights on
the question of how people choose and use the music that they do, as the
accumulated data reproduced in My Music provides strong evidence against the
commonsense idea that musical tastes fall into readily predictable patterns of taste
(e.g. the stereotype-laden notion that if you’re a member of demographic group X,
you’re likely to enjoy music Y and hate music Z; or that if you’re a fan of music
A, you probably also like music B, but couldn’t care less about music C, etc.).
Thus, within these pages, we find such supposedly unlikely characters as Abby
(pp. 85–9), whose musical tastes simultaneously encompass the likes of Elvis
Costello, early (i.e., pre-soul) Aretha Franklin, and Ghanian high life music;
Edwardo (pp. 52–3), a fan of ‘classic’ rock who listens to rap when away from his
rock-centered peer group; and May (pp. 54–60), a classical music aficionado who
also enjoys new wave music and happily hums television theme songs (e.g. The
Flintstones, My Three Sons) to get her through the day. Similarly, the interviews
published here demonstrate that the uses different people make of music in their
daily lives are at least as varied and unpredictable as their tastes: people use music
to reinforce their moods and to alter those moods, to define themselves as unique
individuals and to blend in with their peers, as background music that requires little
conscious attention and as a focal point of activity that precludes the possibility of
all other activities, and in any number of other seemingly contradictory ways.
One of the main problems with My Music, however, is that, in paying so much
attention to individuals, it misses its own point concerning the complex social
functions of music. Lipsitz’s foreword to the book begins with an insightful
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discussion of music as a social practice that, oddly enough, is not reflected at all
in the body of the larger project (except on those relatively rare occasions when
interviewees raise the subject themselves). So while it’s not altogether surprising
that, in his introduction, Charles Keil expresses concern that ‘all these headphoned
people [are] alienated, enjoying mediated “my music” at the expense of a live and
more spontaneous “our music”’ (p. 3), the real problem here seems to be that the