Bad Music: The Music We Love to Hate (review)

Every now and then a book comes along that articulates something that is embedded in our collective cultural conscience that we rarely see publicly discussed. Bad Music: The Music We Love to Hate is such a volume. It is one thing to hear a song and impose our judgments on it, conditioned or otherwise; but to publish a scholarly work about such a subversive topic as this, that in many ways underscores our personal opinions about what is bad music, well, that is quite another undertaking. But Christopher J. Washburne and Maiken Derno have done just that in their new collection of essays.

The idea for the book germinated from a discussion held by Washburne and Tim Taylor over a glass of wine about how music scholars typically avoid discussions of everyday, mundane music, and focus more on music that is highly influential or significant in some way within the prescribed musical canon. They organized a "Bad Music" panel for the 2001 meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology. Out of that panel came this wonderfully diverse and interdisciplinary book.

The increasing acceptance of the study of popular culture as an area of serious academic scholarship is bridging the gap between highbrow and lowbrow culture, including art and music (p. 2). Heretofore, gatekeepers of academic inquiry have not valued the music of the masses—which, according to Washburne and Derno in their introduction, "serve[s] as the soundtrack to our daily lives"—because we disdain it or take it for granted (p. 3). Some of the seventeen contributors have sought to defend the right of "musical parody, camp, irony, cheese, experimentation, and celebratory masquerade" (p. 7) as viable members of the family of music, even though these styles may be privately known as the black sheep. Consequently, Bad Music helps readers find their way from auditory cheesecake (the sublime) to the musically banal (ridiculous) without denouncing either, unless they so choose.

We are all guilty of thinking or saying what we deem to believe is "good" or "bad" music. Do any of the following register a bleep on your Cringe Factor graph? Lounge music (conjure up Bill Murray's polyester-clad character on Saturday Night Live); smooth jazz (Kenny G style); folk revival music; golden throats; karaoke; elevator / dentist office music, or muzak; film music (Yentl perhaps?); disco (Saturday Night Fever?); polka music; opera; rap; bubblegum pop; American Idol; someone/anyone singing in the shower; minstrelsy; extreme hard core punk; New Age; the accordion; glitch; Christmas carols; a soloist crooning to taped accompaniment; metal; hillbilly music (the label itself denotes disdain); lip-synching and air guitar; techno; minimalism; rock operas; contemporary country; easy listening; yodeling; klezmer; the shotgun vibrato of a Tiny Tim or a Buffy Sainte-Marie; other easy targets have been ABBA, Britney Spears, Shanaia Twain, Liberace, and Wayne Newton. Some of these and further examples are noted in Bad Music.

The book is divided into four sections, preceded by an introduction by Washburne and Derno, and a discussion by Simon Frith on "What is Bad Music." The last section contains the first complete English translation of Carl Dahlhaus's "Trivialmusik," whose aesthetic judgments published in 1967 share an uncanny resemblance to comments made in this collection of essays (Introduction, p. 12).

In her essay "Theorizing the Musically Abject," Elizabeth Tolbert provides a succinct definition of "bad" music, as "that which disturbs identity, systems, and order" (Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Louis S. Roudiez [New York: Columbia University Press, 1982], 115). However, Bad Music does not try to define what is "bad music" (although plenty of examples are given) as much as it tries to examine the cultural and historical degrees of valuations within a variety of different musical genres and contexts (p. 4). For this reason the book is a significant tool for the social sciences and the interdisciplinary study of a culture, with music being...