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Reviewed by:
  • This Is Pop: In Search of the Elusive at Experience Music Project
  • Kevin J. H. Dettmar (bio)
This Is Pop: In Search of the Elusive at Experience Music Project. Edited by Eric Weisbard. Cambridge ma: Harvard University Press, 2004.

Any book whose title makes me hear, involuntarily, the chorus of an XTC song is off to a good start. Add a picture of Sleater-Kinney on the cover, whom I'm inordinately proud of having been able to identify. Finally, include an essay by the same Carrie Brownstein whose image graces the cover. The omens are august indeed.

And the collection, This Is Pop, is, on balance, the strongest, smartest collection we've seen on pop music in quite a long time. I write as a scholar, and there's much for scholars to take exception to in the volume's (and conference's) too-simple scholar/journalist/performer "trichotomy"; suffice it to say that we scholars don't come out on top in the volume's framing rhetoric. And while it was no part of the volume's stated purpose, turning this many smart performers, journalists, and scholars loose on the topic of pop music inevitably means that there's much of interest here for the student of women and music.

One important contribution in this regard is Gayle Wald's essay on Sister Rosetta Tharp; in [End Page 116] her title (as well as in the essay) Wald interrogates the phrase (seemingly trademarked by Rolling Stone) "women in rock" and uses the example of Tharp to demonstrate just how many things such a phrase misses. A "woman in rock," Wald reminds us, is something like a trilobite: fossilized, unable to move. Sister Rosetta Tharp, on the other hand, not only could play the hell out of her guitar, but she could also move. Wald argues that we must construe "rock" as a verb here and focus our attention on women who rock—with Sister Tharp foremost among them. As Wald demonstrates, "Gospel is unique among U.S. popular music idioms for offering female musicians creative opportunities to develop their talents"; and her essay, early on in the collection, begins to suggest that defining its purview as "pop" and not just "rock" will open up unexpected lines and objects of inquiry. Indeed, one might argue, though it's not an argument pursued systematically in the essays here, that pop is precisely rock's feminized other in the way that Andreas Huyssen and Ann Douglas have, in their very different studies, critiqued the feminization of modern popular culture.1

Daphne A. Brooks's essay, "Burnt Sugar: Post-Soul Satire and Rock Memory," takes a hard look at the efficacy of satire, or irony more generally, as a tool for undoing the historical structures and effects of rock's misogyny and racism. Brooks's primary case study is African American comic Chris Rock's 1998 "novelty" song "Snowflake," which she calls "an extended parody of 'Brown Sugar' that inverts the system of racial fetishization in ribald and self-consciously offensive terms." Her reading of "Snowflake" is perceptive, unmasking it as a subtle and knowing critique of the racist/sexist discourse of the Stones' classic; but Brooks is (thank heaven) not content to rest simply with formal analysis and insists on pressing the question, much more difficult to answer, of whether this kind of satire makes any discernible political difference. Why, post-"Snowflake," is "Brown Sugar" still a staple of classic rock stations? Oughtn't we be horrified? Brooks is more optimistic about the power of rapper Mos Def's "antimisogynist lyrics and musical signifying practices," as evidenced in a song like "Rock N Roll," which she explores in some detail. (I would be interested to know—though the song postdates this essay's publication—what Brooks would have to say about the recent Jay-Z/Pharrell Williams/Beck mash-up, "Frontin' on Debra": postsoul satire, indeed!) The essay concludes with an appeal for women satirists of rock's patriarchal structures, writers, and performers with the wit and intelligence Brooks finds, for instance, among contemporary women novelists.

Though its title promises a great deal, Sara Dougher's "Authenticity, Gender, and...

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