Listen Again: A Momentary History of Pop Music (review)

It seems very appropriate that Seattle, the city in which Jimi Hendrix was born, boasts an Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum. The Seattle Museum's Experience Music Project Pop Conference is a unique annual event bringing together a wide range of academics, journalists, fanzine writers and similar enthusiasts to share their work on popular music. The EMP Conference is organized by Eric Weisbard, and in Listen Again he has collected and edited some of the best papers from recent EMP conferences. Perhaps because EMP events differs from typical academic conferences by featuring work from a very wide spectrum of authors—including journalists, poets, musicians, fanzine writers and assorted pop cultural practitioners and entrepreneurs—the papers featured in this volume are typically eclectic, eccentric and unorthodox while remaining highly readable and sometimes quite brilliant.

Charting musical experiences ranging from the ear-shattering monolithic Midwestern stadium rock of Grand Funk Railroad, to the refinement and middle class sophistication of 'quiet storm' soul, to a one-off 'necrophiliac' performance by a suicidal Dartmouth student in the early 1980s, the papers in Listen Again offer a refreshing alternative to the historical chronologies and cultural essentialism which characterize much academic writing on popular music. The emphasis here is instead upon Anglo-American pop's enchanting 'little narratives', the non-sequiturs, unusual connections and heretical taxonomies which can combine to produce 'magical' interplay between music, identity and location.

Because they manage to bridge the gaps between the objectivity of academic research, the passions of 'fandom' and the hard realities of the production of pop culture, many of the papers in this volume succeed in delving into startlingly original territory. Outstanding examples include Marybeth Hamilton's work on James McCune, an alcoholic obsessive record collector who invented the idea of a Delta Blues genre; Ned Sublette's penetrating analysis of rise and fall of the influence of the cha-cha on American pop before and after the Cuban missile crisis; Cleveland punk rock pioneer David Thomas' fascinating and amusing paper on the influence of Ghoulardi, a 1960's late-night TV monster movie host, on the development of Cleveland's alternative pop scene in subsequent decades, or Holly George-Warren's tender and deeply engaging analysis of the mysterious career of country music icon Bobbie Gentry. The papers by Jason King on Roberta Flack and Mark Anthony Neal on the 'White Chocolate Soul' of Teena Marie and Lewis Taylor stand as definitive examples of the importance of flexible interpretation and anti-essentialism in popular cultural analysis.

Some more conventionally academic articles included in Listen Again are the work of a new generation of musicologists who challenge the fiercely policed traditional boundaries which have separated pop from 'serious' music within university music departments. Robert Fink's paper on the complex relations between a dying European avant-garde modernist classical tradition, the seminal German electronic pop group Kraftwerk and the rise of hip-hop and techno charts the death of a high cultural musical canon and its contribution to the rise of new and vital musical formations via a collage of snippets, cross references and ironic reinterpretations.

As original as it is refreshing and engaging, Listen Again and, by implication, the work of the EMP Pop Conference, represents an important contribution to the serious consideration of pop music—essential reading in an era in which our experience and understanding of music is fragmenting, mixing and morphing at a bewildering pace.