Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Pt. 1: The Weird Music of the New World 1: Introduction 2: Why Music Is the Wild Card 3: The Three Strains of Modernism 4: The Obstacle of Race 5: The Taint of Commerce 6: Cubists and Squares: Jazz as Modernism Pt. 2: From Rock 'n' Roll to Rock 7: The Strange Career of 1950s Rock 'n' Roll 8: Rock 'n' Rollers or Holy Rollers? 9: Reaction and Revitalization 10: Another Country Heard From 11: Blues, Blacks, and Brits Pt. 3: Inspiration and Polarization 12: Words and Music: The Rise of the Counterculture 13: Art and Religion, 1960s Style 14: Hard Rock Becomes a Hard Place 15: Soul Loses Its Soul Pt. 4: The Triumph of Perversity 16: Their Art Belongs to Dada 17: Punk: The Great Avant-Garde Swindle 18: High on High Tech 19: Rap: Trying to Make it Real (Compared to What?) 20: You Don't Miss Your Water (Till Your Well Runs Dry) 21: Coda: Escape from Postmodernism Notes Index

Reviews

Bayles, former TV and arts columnist for the Wall Street Journal , takes the title for her book from the old saying, ``If you don't like the blues, you've got a hole in your soul.'' The author of this wide-ranging study of American popular music maintains that the African American tradition--blues, jazz, gospel--is this country's ``distinctive musical idiom . . . truer to civilized values'' than punk, heavy metal, rap and other antisocial impulses descended from the late-19th century European avant-garde trends in art that led to futurism, surrealism, dada and ultimately to music whose aim is to shock. It is a powerful thesis, but Bayles obfuscates her arguments by forcing all types of music and art into such rigid categories as ``introverted modernism'' and ``extroverted modernism.'' She calls the tendency to shock, for example, ``perverse modernism'' and claims that this antiart, together with racial stereotypes, has kept African American music, which should be a humanizing antidote to the brutal and the obscene, out of the mainstream. (Apr.)

Impressively researched and organized, this work explores historical, cultural, and sociological factors that figure in the evolution of American popular music. Bayles, an educator and arts critic, leaves few stones unturned in her effort to shed light on the current state of pop music. She begins by contrasting European and African American musical influences and defining musical modernism. She then factors in race, politics, sex, radicalism, religion, and commerce while evaluating the relative importance of each to the musical scene. Her approach is richly complex: a mixture of in-depth reflection, history, quotes, and analyses of styles and performers within the idioms of jazz, blues, rock, country, punk, rap, and the like. For large music collections with a scholarly readership.-- Carol J. Binkowski, Bloomfield, N.J.