Hole in Our Soul
Bayles, Martha
T 4 4 oday," the philosopher Theodor Adorno began his treatise on aesthetics, "it goes without saying that nothing about modern art goes without saying." Born just after the turn of the century,...
...This magazine is not the venue for a sustained defense of the soul stylings of Barry White, and few TAS readers will rue Bayles's woefully wrong readings of the work of Parliament/Funkadelic, the Sex Pistols, or Marvin Gaye...
...More importantly, to argue against the content in today's pop is to underestimate the depth of Generation X's cynicism and irony—and hence the music's tremendous appeal...
...p opular music, for all Bayles's devoted attentions, can't suddenly be moored to notions of morality and conduct that have been discarded by the larger society...
...Bayles clearly means for Hole In Our Soul to be a kind of call-to-arms, as if the violence, misogyny, crime, and general social pathology advocated in much of present-day pop music can be done away with simply because we recognize that it's destructive...
...Indeed, taste is virtually all about which most young people in America are informed...
...Today's pop is without doubt thin, often soulless, musically bereft, angry and bitter, fundamentally asocial, and largely opposed to the cheeriness and positive inclinations of earlier music...
...TsFjthe 1960s—which, in her view, is when things began to go awry...
...That taste, furthermore, is fundamentally opposed to the erudition that Hole in Our Soul evinces and advocates...
...Whatever else pop music may be "about," it is without question the soundtrack of youth...
...Born just after the turn of the century, Adorno lived to see music, his first love, transformed from the twelve-tone compositions of Schonberg into the twelve-bar feedback of Jimi Hendrix—a development that has bewildered more than a few souls in the twentieth century...
...Why...
...Far too much has been made of late concerning the stupor and stupidity of the loosely defined gaggle of twenty-somethings known as Generation X—to the upper end of which this reviewer arguably belongs...
...Her research is creditable, and there is much here to delight and infuriate both casual listeners and students of twentieth-century history...
...Censorship of popular culture is both a practical and a constitutional impossibility," she says, but only censorship will eradicate the elements of popular music against which she argues so passionately...
...City: State: ZIP: Mail this form with check payable to: The American Spectator, 2020 N. 14th St, Suite 750, Arlington, Virginia 22201...
...Bayles's book is useful in that it will remind those tenacious enough to fight through its erudition of perhaps the most essential difference—that even the sixties,generation, for all their revolt and rebellion, were still essentially people of faith...
...Only a young person could hear the good in most of it, just as only someone older could sense the danger...
...And much to the credit of youth: whatever is askew in American society today, it is not the fault of either the fourteen-year-olds or their music...
...Bayles has done a fine job in Hole in Our Soul of tracing the development of pop music...
...Telling the youth of America that Prince is just a poor man's Little Richard won't work...
...There is no longer the widespread sense of possibility, a belief that animated so much of the populace even in the 1960s...
...This generation is as hewn to its irony and pessimism as to its word protessors and jumbo jets, and it is silly to expect popular music not to express those sentiments...
...the idea of a 40year-old happily singing along to the Ramones' "I Wanna Be Sedated" is unnerving at best...
...This is a generation, by contrast, that doesn't hope, doesn't dream, doesn't care, and doesn't even know why...
...her analysis of the Afro-American musical tradition and its confrontation with European modernism is unparalleled in its comprehensiveness, if quirky in its reasoning...
...First of all, the blues tradition upon which most pop is based is chock-a-block with violence and misogyny...
...But both in her interpretations of individual performers and on the bigger point of the music's tremendous decline, Bayles is mostly at a loss after HOLE IN OUR SOUL: THE LOSS OF BEAUTY AND MEANING IN AMERICAN POPULAR MUSIC Martha Bayles Free Press /453 pages /$24.95 reviewed by M. D. CARNEGIE The American Spectator June 1994 69 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR® T-SHIRTS 100% Cotton Shirts with The American Spectator logo...
...They attempted to substitute for their parents' belief in rectitude and hard work their own belief in a passel of freedoms, but they were believers nevertheless...
...But this is a fully ironized generation, and, consequently, the news that Bayles has totell us—that American popular music was once mostly beautiful and is now mostly tawdry—will elicit scarcely a jaded, cynical shrug of the shoulders...
...But this nihilism and self-absorption compose the psychic skeleton of the generation, and no matter what its manifold shortcomings as art form, political medium, or cultural artifact, pop music surely does represent how a large segment of the population feels about its life and times...
...Few commentators have essayed a serious study of popular music from a sympathetic perspective, not least because one usually needs to be under commentator age to feel the sympathy...
...By the time one attains commentator age, the subtler critical distinctions so close to the hearts of music fans—that Sting is a pompous blowhard but a wonderful songwriter, or that Digital Underground betrayed their enormous verbal gift by turning to gangsta rap—recede in importance...
...A more cogent summation of how pop music developed from the Delta blues to the Moody Blues is unlikely to appear for quite some time...
...T he latest generation operates largely in absence of motivat-- ing beliefs, and it is this want of faith that sets them apart...
...young people listen to Nirvana's Kurt Cobain, recently dead by his own hand, because his words and music resonate with them, not because they need to be informed about their taste...
...one need--be well on the other side of an American childhood nowadays before realizing that getting stoned and listening to Pink Floyd is rather less than the optimal use of one's hours...
...But upon reading Martha Bayles's Hole in Our Soul, one conclusion about that generation seems inescapable: they have a world-view so radically different from the generations before that they are largely inscrutable to their predecessors...
...CI 70 The American Spectator June 1994...
...The grim truth about American life today is that so many, those in Generation X and those yet younger, do feel hopeless, cynical, and ironized past the point of redemption...
...In the main they cannot tell you how Congress works, or find the United States on a map, or offer convincing evidence they know who fought whom in World War II—but they can tell you loads about style and taste, especially in popular music...
...In small doses, ironical detachment is as necessary for getting along in life as greed or love or any of the other human qualities...
...such material is largely not new, Bayles's harrumphs notwithstanding...
...Blaming the music is only decapitating the messenger...
...and though spending countless hours listening to exhortations to crime, undergirded by a savage beat, is without question bad for the kids, urging, as Bayles does, that pop music reincorporate styles and subjects now gone by the boards is futile...
...Pop music critics, one of the most venal and wretched sub-species of the human race, will lambaste her in due course for her misjudgments...
...The irony, cynicism, and unfeelingness of much of today's music is the expression of a worldview, not its cause...
...Whatever the solution to that might be, for sure it's not making better records...
...If it is disturbing to hear millions of children singing along to songs bearing the most nihilistic and hopeless of messages, it is a good deal more unsettling to realize that they believe almost every word they're saying...
...M. Carnegie writes for the Washington Post and New York Newsday, among other publications...
...Their posture in the world is one of virtually total irony, a basic detachment from a society of the new and improved, the low-tar and the fat-free, the 30 percent more and the 40 percent less, the revolutionary new cleansing formulas and the exclusive, patented brush actions...
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...She understands jazz, and delineates its importance in the development of American popular music with a skill and intelligence hardly ever manifest in the writings of critics, journalists, or scholars...
...T he larger mistake Bayles makes is in her cry for reform, her own generational belief transferred to the realm of popular music...
Vol. 27 • June 1994 • No. 6
