The Political Force of Musical Beauty.

Cotter, Alice Miller

The Political Force of Musical Beauty. By Barry Shank. (Refiguring American Music.) Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. [ix, 330 p. ISBN 9780822356462 (hardcover), $94.95; ISBN 9780822356585 (paperback), $25.95; (e-book), various.] Illustrations, bibliography, discography, index.

In this meditation on the relationships between experiences of music and feelings of political belonging (or non-belonging), Barry Shank argues that music is a site where powerful political and aesthetic forces transpire. He locates an example of this concept in the rhythmic latitude Patti Smith brings to her cover of Van Morrison's "Gloria," a rendering that challenges the "masculine" conventions of rock and produces a musical experience that is as much aesthetic as it is political. A shared sense of community among listeners can result, and this feeling of "we," if fleeting, creates possibilities for new political communities to emerge. Shank calls this phenomenon "the political force of musical beauty." He explains how it works through close listening and cultural theory. Here, "theory" means the philosophical corpus of writing emerging primarily from France (Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Jacques Ranciere), but also Germany (Theodor Adorno), that attempts to grasp the mutable interactions connecting aesthetics and politics. The book is thus a hybrid creature--part intensive valuation of theory, part heartfelt discussion of the author's own listening experiences, with case studies of songs by artists ranging from Moby and the Velvet Underground to Toru Takemitsu and Alarm Will Sound. But it is coherent and complete, an admirable effort to probe the social and political stakes of music.

Throughout, Shank works hard to find a common vocabulary for describing the political-aesthetic exchanges that take place within a song. He identifies a political community as one "not characterized by sameness," but rather one that includes "the existence of meaningful difference among its members" (p. 3). Shank borrows Ranciere's notion of "the distribution of the sensible" (p. 3), the joining of the aesthetic and political in a way that broadens the scope of a community to include otherwise silent or marginalized voices. Nancy's theory of sens, "a longing for shared meaning" (p. 20), and clinamen, "a leaning toward others" (p. 24), further gives the author a vocabulary for discussing the elusive gap between what we hear in music and what it means. In an effort to understand how our persistent confrontation with popular culture shapes our relationship to the political, he at once relies on and critiques Bourdieu's concept of the interplay between culture and power. Shank observes a theoretical breach in Bourdieu's theory, a theory that accommodates the relations among cultural producers but not the relations between, in this case, musical objects and listeners' attempts to create meaning out of those objects (p. 145). This gap, the author asserts, can be closed by probing a series of aesthetic questions surrounding the "experience of musical beauty," an experience that is not necessarily about consonance or musical resolution, but rather one that produces a "sonic image of right relations" (p. 4), however disjointed or unpleasant. He likens the experience to the one that prompted Adorno to spend years searching for an adequate metaphor to describe the power of Beethoven's music. It is a comparison whose implications are skated over, but one that nonetheless draws attention to Shank's endeavor to navigate terrain that has traditionally been the domain of philosophy and aesthetic theory.

Shank is most persuasive in his long, interpretive musical descriptions. His acknowledgment at the outset that his analyses are based on his own impassioned experiences is neither limiting nor off-putting; rather his personal approach is, in fact, die book's greatest strength. Chapter 1, "Listening to the Political," dissects the cultural symbolism of and racial coding within Moby's "Natural Blues" (1999), which samples a 1959 recording made by Alan Lomax of Vera Hall singing the African American spiritual "Trouble So Hard." Shank punctures the inflated tendency to link music and the politics of exploitation within the limits of fixed racial identities. He locates Moby's treatment, specifically Moby's silencing of the instrumental tracks just before he samples Hall, in terms of its ability to create the sense of "luring, inclining, yearning" (p. 21), a la Nancy, for a political community that does not yet exist. In other words, the political force of the song is found neither in its brash appropriation nor in the evocation of spiritual suffering often assumed to be at the heart of the African American experience. For the author, it exists in the visceral immediacy of Hall's voice, triggered by a silence that draws the listener's attention to "the ongoing political salience of racial difference in the cultures of the United States ... to the work that still must be done to build political community with the knowledge of that divide, a political community of difference, with agon at its core, and an ever-more complex edge, drawn inward by music" (p. 37).

Shank brings the perspicacity of a cultural theorist, a musicologist, and a poet to his next chapter, "The Anthem and the Condensation of Context," which charts the history of the anthem, from its religious beginnings to civil rights songs, and its ability to "delineate political bodies" (p. 40). The author goes to great lengths, with reference to Lauren Berlant's concept of the "intimate public," to explain a well-known cultural phenomenon, namely that group singing can create powerful experiences of belonging. He ties this idea into a discussion of "The Star Spangled Banner," arguing that the song's difficult performance dimensions present "a musical parallel to the aspirational nature of the nation" (p. 52). For this reason, the anthem produces not an "intimate public" but rather a "docile one, one normalized not by an equality of singing but rather by the consuming equality of spectatorship" (p. 52). The expansion of this idea might have led to a more dynamic understanding of the efficacy (or lack thereof) of America's national anthem, but Shank stops short of exploring the moral implications of how this type of passive listening affects a nation plagued by gross intolerance and division, not to mention the perverse relationship between U.S. politics and media culture. More convincing is his analysis of "We Shall Overcome," which affirms the need to acknowledge that political struggle sometimes involves us all.

Chapter 3, "Turning Inward, Inside Out: Two Japanese Musicians Confront the Limits of Tradition," takes up Japanese politics and music, examining the ways that Yoko Ono and Torn Takemitsu restructured the political connotations of their shared Japanese musical heritage. Though Shank acknowledges the fallacies of essentialism throughout the book, he skirts around them in his survey of the changing politics and symbolic associations of traditional Japanese music (associated in post-WWII Japan, for instance, with nationalism) and Western classical music (representative of Germany's corrupted military enterprise). He makes the point that Takemitsu's efforts to separate his music from the state involved the paradoxical embrace of Orientalism, inspired by the Japanese composer's encounters with John Cage, a crude Orientalist himself. Cage made Takemitsu's music "Japanese" in the stereotypical sense; Takemitsu, in turn, gave a positive spin to Cage's Orientalist pursuits. Ono, whose life also intersected with Cage, likewise incorporated aspects of traditional Japanese music into her neoDada works, such as Kabuki-style singing and saxvari (the exploitation of the physical material of the sound-making object). Ono's collaborations with John Lennon drew much criticism but situated sawari in a greater political context. The "experiences of musical beauty" in the examples of Ono and Takemitsu, Shank observes, are less about East-West boundaries or esoteric historical conceits than they are about imagining new communities. It is a compelling, if idealistic, notion.

The last half of the book takes up the issue of authenticity in the music of the Velvet Underground, Patti Smith, the hardcore scene of the 1980s, and Alarm Will Sound. Throughout these chapters, Shank addresses the idea of conceptual purity in music that is ineluctably impure, with elements borrowed and conventions reformed. It is not until the final chapter, which narrates the convergence of the sonic and social, of "the connectedness of bodies" through sound (p. 246), that the author poses the most intriguing questions. Can we trust the feelings that music generates in us? Do these feelings have political traction? The assessment of authenticity, Shank argues, arises from the attempt to recognize music that "feels real." That what "feels real" can be linked to the theories of Bourdieu, Nancy, and Ranciere is a gratifying realization. But occasionally theory works too hard to grasp something most people take for granted, namely that music is rooted in something more than just vibrations. Moreover, Shank's reliance on theoretical explication points to the unavoidable disconnect between the experience rendered by the act of listening and the lived, street-level events that provoke conversation, protest, and political transformation. Even though the aesthetic uplift of an anthem like "We Shall Overcome" can draw listeners closer to feeling as if they are part of a movement to oppose politically-entrenched repression, recent events such as the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson and the subsequent passionate, outraged response remind us that music is limited when it comes to setting the groundwork for "real" political change. Shank helps us see that music's embrace of difference, combined with its ability to create shared experiences of the world, can make us more aware of inequality; this, in turn, can motivate us from within to express ourselves collectively. But nothing, not even powerful song, can replace the most difficult work of all, the interrogation of the depths of our own prejudices and fears, and the transformation of that energy into political action.

Alice Miller Cotter

Princeton University