Pop When The World Falls Apart: Music in the Shadow of Doubt ed. by Eric Weisbard (review)

The third in a series of collections drawn from the proceedings of the Pop Conference at the Experience Music Project, Pop When the World Falls Apart brings together eighteen brief essays that deal in some way with the role of music and music criticism in a time of conflict and strife. Based on papers presented between 2006 and 2008, the essays share a backdrop that includes seemingly endless wars, Hurricane Katrina, the uncertain transformation or death of the music industry, the disappearance of music (and film and literary) criticism from almost every newspaper across the country, and the collapse of the global economy. So what’s a serious fan of popular music to do?

Well, explore the relationships between Reaganism, Theodor Adorno, and the Carpenters as a pair of call-and-response essays in the collection do (Tom Smucker calling and Eric Lott responding). Or try to understand the meaning of Isaac Hayes’s appropriating in 1969 a country-pop song as does Diane Pecknold in her contribution. In other words, do what American Studies scholars have always done: work to make clear the connections between political or economic conditions and the cultural practices and products of that time and place. Thus, the collection serves as an excellent introduction to the wide range of approaches to the study of popular music—the authors of individual essays come from university departments of sociology, English, music, communications, gender studies, creative writing, and more; and, true to the open spirit of the Pop Conference, they also write for the New York Times, the Village Voice, the Chicago Tribune, Salon, and NPR.

That eclectic range and the type of audience that such range implies—that is, they all have to talk to each other—is the collection’s greatest strength. And though most readers will not find in this collection the definitive essay on any particular topic, to measure the book by this standard would be a mistake. (I should hasten to add, though, the scholarly essays collected here by Lott, Pecknold, and Oliver Wang are excellent by any measure.) Only by reading through all the essays, by reading them up against one another, do you start to hear the various ways that we talk when we talk about music.

One of the contributors to this collection, Carlo Rotella, suggested a few years ago that scholars should “cultivate open ears” in the same way that some guitar players listen carefully to “horn players and pianists, rather than exclusively to other guitar players …” (American Quarterly, Dec. 2003, 749). Reading Smucker up against Lott, reading Carl Wilson’s analysis of identity according to our “guilty displeasures” such as his hatred of Celine Deon, and reading Larry Blumenfeld’s study of jazz culture fighting to survive in post-Katrina New Orleans will cultivate open ears. Blumenfeld, for example, writes not just to understand; he writes to understand and to explain and to move his reader in order to save neighborhoods, music, musicians, and culture. And in times of strife and conflict, his may just be an approach more of us should adopt.