Playing For Change: Music and Musicians in the Service of Social Movements by Rob Rosenthal, Richard Flacks (review)

Rob Rosenthal and Richard Flacks’ Playing For Change: Music and Musicians in the Service of Social Movements is a fascinating study that examines how music can serve social movements in significant ways. Unlike materialists who are interested in understanding social movements as frameworks for altering material realities and producing culture, Rosenthal and Flacks are concerned with how music affects movements and the social context of its creation and reception. These scholars contend that popular music, while neither inherently regressive nor inherently liberatory, retains the possibility to achieve either of those ends under particular conditions. In order to demonstrate how this nexus has developed, Rosenthal and Flacks provide readers with a range of music-movement examples that include, but are not limited to, popular music’s engagement with black liberation, labour, feminism, student and anti-war movements.

Rosenthal and Flacks argue that music has been, and continues to be, a formidable weapon for social movements, even while it can be at times, unpredictable and inaccurate. The music-movement nexus, defined by a range of complicated uses, functions, and effects, is one where music has helped create, sustain, and alter social reality as well as reflect it, sometimes in a single act. Therefore, it is particularly valuable to understand this nexus as a dialectical one. In Playing For Change, Rosenthal and Flacks aim to catalogue and assess the many uses of music claimed or suggested by analysts, performers, and movement members, in order to contend that it is possible to determine how music’s functions and effects vary depending on social and historical contexts.

Rosenthal and Flacks’ greatest contribution is their insistence upon the theoretical triad “transmission-reception-context.” They argue that scholars must first examine “transmission,” which entails how an artist expresses their message lyrically, musically, aesthetically, and through various other modes of performance and identity. Second, it is necessary to explore “reception,” which explores how audience members receive and understand the genre, artist and content disseminated. Finally, scholars must account for context, as well as factors and processes that frame the interaction between artist and audience. These factors can include who controls music, the conditions under which the music is played, and what social and political events inform the performance and messages conveyed. In tracing these three factors, Rosenthal and Flacks convincingly contend that scholars would be wise to analyze the music-movement nexus using this theoretical triad given that they otherwise risk conceiving of culture too narrowly and categorizing its effects and processes into neat boxes in order to serve scholarly theories.

Divided into three parts, Rosenthal and Flacks’ study is a welcomed intervention within the current historiography of popular music studies given its intention to complicate theoretical approaches and understandings of how music can be liberatory. With the help of interviews of artists and political activists, social movement literature, and college student surveys, Rosenthal and Flacks have demonstrated that the extent to which music shapes the direction of culture and social movements is the result of an extremely complex process. In Part I, an introduction to the music-movement link, Rosenthal and Flacks detail the schools of thought that have informed scholarly engagement with the music-movement nexus. They highlight the work of Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, the “Interactionists,” Social Movement Studies, and the Birmingham School, in order to highlight how their own work contributes to and engages with the historiography of popular culture. Part II, an exploration of the meaning of music, is a detailed discussion of the images, sounds, and lyrical messages artists deliver through the culture industry, the setting and audience base that serves as a starting point for interpretation and reception, and the importance of context (time and space) in music’s meaning making. Finally, Part III is a nuanced undertaking that aims to explore how musicking functions within, and in service of, social movements. Rosenthal and Flacks detail how musicians create art intended to serve...