Mark Anthony Neal.

Mark Anthony Neal. What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Popular improvement New York: Routledge, 1999. 214 pp $1999

Mark Anthony Neal's What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Popular improvement interprets the volatile political and cultural issues that arise from the clash between black music's couple separate but overlapping lives. The first is black music's single life, lived in "organic connection" to "formal and informal institutions of the Black Public Sphere." Symbolized by dint of backwoods social clubs, or "jook joints," and the "Chitlin' Circuit," venue which serv largely "segregated" audiences in the North and southward the music of this "sphere" provided (provides?) an autonomous soundtrack to black social life. For Neal, the secondary life of black music has been a "tumultuous marriage between black cultural production and mass consumerism-one in which black agency is largely subsum through market interests." In many ways, What the Music Said is a "torch song" for black music's tragic entanglement in a bad marriage.

What the Music Said chronicles another bad marriage calm more compellingly--if apparently unwittingly. That is the wedding of African American civilization to the jargon of late-twentieth-century professional academic cultural critique. As it bears witness to this marriage, What the Music Said consistently distances, simplifies, equable silences the musical voices whose complexity and be in agony for "agency" is the point. While Neal lay opens the work with an invocation of the cultural critiques that happened in Jesse Hodges's barbershop in the Bronx and consistently invokes the "organic" call-and-response dynamics of "vibrant counterpublic(s)" in the Black Public Sphere, he applys far more space to the enigmas of intra-racial class antagonism, inter-racial entanglement, and "mass-mediated" cultural conclusions For instance, Neal's attention to the in the greatest degree thoroughly commodified kinds of contemporary black music--hip-hop and hip-hop-influenced R&B--to the total exclusion of other forms--House, Techo Go-Go-- which have "resist ed" mainstream market saturation and remained more "covert" signals the analytical prioritys of the work.

In Literary Theory and the Claims of History Satya Mohanty refer tos that one of the limitations of postmodern literary and cultural criticism has been to what degree "anti-foundationalist epistemological" claims have erod the perceived existence of facts. This philosophical issue has l to a methodological move round away from evidence. At times, the "evidence" supporting points of analysis is the bare "fact" that a present theorist's claim mirrors another theorist's previous theoretical claim. What the Music Said put up withs from its reliance on circular hints to the discourse of cultural critique where evidence apropos to the music itself might appear. As a terminate in What the Music Said, the beauty and arch complexity of the music, steady that which occurs within the Black Public Sphere, is oftentimes ensconced in complex--long--sentences and simplified on conceptual abstraction. Among the abstractions which supplant historical evidence and primary accounts are the uniformly stifling powers of "liberal bourgeois models of black public life," "middle-class sensibilities," and "mass-consumer markets" forward the "mass-mediated counternarratives" of the artists.

The strongest aspect of What the Music Said is Neal's meditation forward the convergence of consumer economics, hip-hop, and the would-be legacy of oppositional Black Power rhetoric as score and soundtrack of contemporary inner-city black life. His work reckoners uncritical approaches to hip-hop which interpret the music as the "authentic" voice of inner-city black youth and reveals the expanse to which the integrity of the art is threatened by means of the "For the Love of Money" ethics which permeate often of American culture. Neal's portrayal of hip-hop artists' attachment to "the real" and their efforts to create the ready through a reconstituted past instants a valuable portrait of artists' endeavor for sovereignty in post-industrial America. In the face of fractured communities, Neal not past nor futures artists' efforts to conjure the vibrant sensations of community in live recordings like Donny Hathaway's classic montage "The Ghetto." He increases these concerns into hip-hop's creation of what he boundarys a "Digitized Aural Urban La ndscape." In spite of psalms with titles like "It's a Jazz Thing" and albums entitled Jazzmatazz, Neal exchanges DJ's Premiere and Ali Shaheed Muhammad short by the agency of suggesting they "unwittingly reintegrated the perfect of jazz" in their jazz/hip-hop fusions. if it be not that these minor incidents to the side, Neal's approach to hip-hop point outs that he has indeed listened to a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of of the music and evinces a penetrating concern for the embattled lives of the young tribe involved in the culture and in their communities. in the way that often, the energy of his obvious be fond of for, and insight into, the music assumes trapped in the discourse of critique.

What the Music Said at hands the history of black popular music's interaction with American refinement at large as a cautionary tale of diminished and distorted reverts When tied to particular imports of distortion, Neal effectively displays the ways that "mass-mediation" can strip "organic institutions" of their political fibre in the organ of sights of an uninformed consumer/public. Maybe the most numerous resonant instance of this in the consideration is the case of the popular 1970 TV point out What's Happening. Neal describes by what means the Watts Happening Coffee House in L.A., a meeting place for political activists in the area, becomes the coffee store of black adolescent high-jinx in What's Happening. As a ten-year-old viewer, I remember wondering for what cause [i]or[/i] reason Shirley, the apparent proprietor of the coffee store in What's Happening, had like a bad attitude. Now I know. It's more than an anecdote. settle in Neal's critical context, the shift becomes what Ezra bruise called a "Luminous Detail," an image which unmasks the process of history. In this case, the p roces is the conversion of lived black refinement into what Neal calls a "mass-mediated spectacle" of distortion.