Book Review
Dec. 18th, 2016 09:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kenjariSweet Air: Modernism, Regionalism, and American Popular Song
by Edward P. Comentale
I had very mixed feelings about this book. Comentale explores early popular music, specifically blues, country, folk, and rockabilly through the lens of modernism. He makes some really great points about how the regionalism of these styles came out of the breakdown of territoriality in the 20th century as people increasingly moved away from rural areas to towns and cities and thus helped listeners express and deal with the separation from home and the land. Comentale also touches on the ways in which pop music, especially rockabilly as epitomized by Elvis, not only partakes of industrialized consumerism but also helps mediate the experience of that consumerism for its fans.
On the other hand, Sweet Air suffers from its author's lack of training in musicology (he is an English professor). Comentale fails to get into the music itself, even when he invokes concepts of form and structure. I have trouble finding arguments about music entirely convincing when they only really deal with the lyrics and generalities of sound. Comentale also gets into a lot of French critical theory in the last two chapters, which I found neither compelling nor convincing at all.
by Edward P. Comentale
I had very mixed feelings about this book. Comentale explores early popular music, specifically blues, country, folk, and rockabilly through the lens of modernism. He makes some really great points about how the regionalism of these styles came out of the breakdown of territoriality in the 20th century as people increasingly moved away from rural areas to towns and cities and thus helped listeners express and deal with the separation from home and the land. Comentale also touches on the ways in which pop music, especially rockabilly as epitomized by Elvis, not only partakes of industrialized consumerism but also helps mediate the experience of that consumerism for its fans.
On the other hand, Sweet Air suffers from its author's lack of training in musicology (he is an English professor). Comentale fails to get into the music itself, even when he invokes concepts of form and structure. I have trouble finding arguments about music entirely convincing when they only really deal with the lyrics and generalities of sound. Comentale also gets into a lot of French critical theory in the last two chapters, which I found neither compelling nor convincing at all.
