Shakin’ All Over: Popular Music and Disability by George McKay (review)

In pointing out opportunities to crip popular music, George McKay has written an accessible and illuminating book that will be of interest to disability and popular music scholars alike. There is of course a long history of academic critique of the music industry, stretching back at least to the Frankfurtian Marxist analyses of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in the 1930s, yet this book can claim to be the first monograph study of the intersection of popular music and disability. Somewhat like Michael Bérubé pointing out that disability is everywhere in film if you know where and how to look, McKay makes a case for disability being overlooked and almost hidden in plain sight in the popular music industry, even though “There are identifiable and powerful links between popular music and the damaged, imperfect, deviant, extraordinary body or voice, which can be, and surprisingly often is, a disabled body or voice” (1).

After an introduction that carefully and explicitly locates the book within the field of disability studies with reference to a number of canonical writings, most prominently Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s Extraordinary Bodies, as well as work by Lennard Davis, Tobin Siebers, Sharon Snyder, and David Mitchell, McKay evinces a light touch with theory. He uses it deftly to illuminate possibilities for “cripping” pop music theory, without labouring points or over-abstracting the analysis. He provides a cultural, rather than musicological, account although there are brief passages of very close examination of how the semiotic modes of voice, music, lyrics, gesture, and movement combine to construct, perform, and also sometimes to conceal disability. In fact, McKay draws attention to a number of apparent paradoxes: the way the music industry both hides and flaunts disability, provides a simultaneously enabling and disabling site of cultural production, creates disability, and also campaigns on disability issues (including those it helps to create).

In the introduction, McKay justifies studying popular music and disability together in part because “they were invented at the same time” (3), highlighting the way popular music became an industry as a consequence of the urbanisation and commodification of life engendered by the Industrial Revolution, processes that also help reify notions of disability and ab/normalcy. He also identifies a number of resonances between sociocultural aspects of popular music and disability: elements of defiance, deviance, and emphasis on the countercultural, summarized later in the book as “the key tropes of being misunderstood, of suffering, exclusion, alienation” (129). The book is then divided into five chapters and the first four provide case studies of a small number of disabled performers. Chapter One deals specifically with polio survivors in popular music. Chapters Two and Three discuss the disabled voice and body respectively. Chapter Four focuses on hearing impairment and popular music as a disabling culture, a theme carried through to the final chapter, which explores the wider industry’s uneasy relationship with disability.

In Chapter One, “Crippled with Nerves,” McKay focuses on polio survivors in popular music. Leading on from disability and popular music’s synchro-genesis, he points to the quirk in history that meant that polio epidemics in more developed countries coincided with broadcast and electronic media becoming prevalent, before going on to make the case for what might be termed “polio gain.” Arguing that it is often the “deformations” in art that are most highly valued (those works and talents that transcend or break the formal rules of composition or genre), McKay discusses a number of artists whose unique style and sound could be partially attributed to their experiences of polio. These include Joni Mitchell’s “cripped” guitar technique, jazz pianist Carl Perkins’s “crabbed,” sideways-on playing, and Neil Young’s “shaky,” frail voice. McKay devotes the second half of this chapter to a detailed analysis of the oeuvre of an artist he deems particularly significant: Ian Dury. He reads Dury’s musical output as a kind...