Page 197 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

REVIEWS 191

While there is a certain seductive appeal to an argument that questions simplistic
stereotypes (e.g. ‘rap is music for black people, country is music for white people,
and never the twain shall meet’), Keil’s comments here also point to a pair of larger
problems with the book as a whole. First, the fact that no two interviews were
sufficiently alike to create (or reveal) affinity-groups of any kind once again raises
the question of whose voices are really being heard in these pages: if these were
truly 150 heterogenous, diverse, highly idiosyncratic interviews (of which only
those conducted with Deadheads were at all interchangeable), then why were
these forty-one people—and not some other cast of characters—chosen to
represent the MDLP’s work? By what criteria did the book’s compilers decide, for
instance, that four-yearold Heather’s brief (if amusing) discussion of ‘Dude Looks
Like a Lady’ (p.7) was worthy of inclusion while some other interview wasn’t?
While it is certainly possible that a version of My Music that reproduced excerpts
from a completely different subset of the larger body of interviews would have
demonstrated the validity of the MDLP’s larger argument in much the same way,
the fact that no two of these interviews were similar enough to be exchanged for
one another (coupled with the lack of an explanation as to how those that were
chosen were chosen) leaves a few too many unanswered questions concerning the
authors’ standards regarding what they considered to be valuable findings. More
specifically, if the 110 or so interviews not included in the book were really that
different from those that were, then it would be helpful to know why the editors
thought that the voices they did include produced a ‘better’ (or ‘more accurate’, or
‘more entertaining’, or whatever the relevant standard here actually was) mosaic
than some other set of voices would have.
Second (and perhaps more perplexing), if Keil is right to say that it would only
take half of the interviews in this book to demonstrate the book’s primary thesis
(and this is a claim that I would agree with entirely), then why are all 210 pages
of the book’s main text still given over to interviews? Why, for instance, didn’t
the MDLP trim the number of interviews included in the final volume back to
twenty and use the remaining space for critical essays on the study’s broader
implications? Having demonstrated (just as convincingly, but in only half as many
pages) that ‘our musical lives are much more complicated’ than most critics and
scholars seem to think they are, the MDLP could then have offered some tentative
suggestions as to what this conclusion might mean for the future of research into
music, culture, and society. How, for instance, might we need to reformulate our
current theoretical models of music and culture to account for the complexities that
My Music uncovers? What changes should ethnomusicologists and popular music
scholars consider making in their research methods in light of the MDLP’s
findings? Is there any evidence here to suggest that we need to rethink our
approaches to studying other cultural phenomena as well? And so on. 7
In the end, then, both Subcultural Sounds and My Music attempt to convince us
that everything we know about music and culture (or at least an awful lot of what
we know) is wrong. And, in their very different ways, each of these volumes makes
a persuasive case to support such a conclusion. The most telling difference between