Page 195 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

REVIEWS 189

MDLP focuses exclusively on individual uses of music, rather than on how people
are using music to alienate themselves from one another. Having based their entire
project on one-on-one interviews with individuals who don’t know one another (at
least not as far as one can tell from this account) on the question of their
idiosyncratic relationship to music (i.e., ‘what does music mean to you?’), it would
have been highly surprising if the MDLP had found out anything of significance
about the social role of music. In fact, it might have made for a more interesting
study if the MDLP had interviewed already existing social groups (e.g. family
units, bands, musical ensembles, high school classes, sets of housemates, etc.)—
both as groups and as individuals—about their musical tastes and practices and
then attempted to map out the complex relationships between individual and social
uses of music. Methodologically speaking, this would undoubtedly have resulted
in a much more difficult and unwieldy project than the one presented here, but
such a study would also have been more useful in addressing questions of ‘the
social’ and ‘the cultural’, instead of being able to speak only about ‘the individual’.
Even more problematic than its too-narrow focus, however, is the fact that My
Music is ultimately little more than a collection of data in desperate need of some
sort of broader analytic framework. A footnote in the book’s appendix (i.e., a
comment in the margins of the book’s margins) reveals that, at one point during
the study, the authors had intended to include a selection of critical essays
commenting on the interviews. Unfortunately, however, this plan was eventually
abandoned, as one of the MDLP’s goals was to get beyond what critics and scholars
had to say about music (a discourse that, presumably, can no longer tell us anything
new or worthwhile) and let these ‘ordinary people’ speak for themselves:

We hope this book will find its place on the still small shelf of books where
people not ordinarily heard from get to have their say at last. Music critics,
experts, commentators, authorities, all hope (or make believe) that they know
who they are writing for and why. Well, here is what some people out there
have to say for themselves.
(P. 3)

The problem with this argument (which comes at the very end of Keil’s
introduction), however, is that the people interviewed for My Music ultimately
don’t—and can’t—speak for themselves at least not within the pages of this
volume, as the far-from-invisible hand of the MDLP editorial team intrudes upon
(and interferes with) what these people have to say in obvious and problematic
ways throughout the book. For instance, the raw tapes of the interviews needed to
be transcribed (with an unavoidable loss of various non-textual nuances—context,
facial expression, tone of voice, etc.), then the transcripts had to be trimmed to a
usable length (a process that presumably left large chunks of data on the cutting-
room floor), and finally the edited texts were resituated in the alien context of the
finished book (where the themes raised in one interview suddenly resonated in new