Mapping the Beat

by Thomas Swiss and Andrew Herman

One of the most vibrant and exciting new areas of academia inquiry falls under the cross disciplinary category of cultural studies.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 157718078X
• ISBN13: 9781577180784
• Release Date: December 1997
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Shhh! Or, the Methodological Earplugs of Cultural Studies

This collection of interesting essays is about things I like. The subtitle is "Popular Music and Contemporary Theory," which promises an all out battle between the "What is Happening?" (knowing) and the "Is it Happening?" (feeling). Or in the language of pop music, between Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On" and REM's "It's the End of the World As We Know It." The fisticuffs between philosophy and rhetoric reverberate here in an articulation specific to cultural studies: The conflict between critic and fan. Is the goal to chart how capitalism and hegemony maintain their grasp on the culture industry or to celebrate the defiances and transgressions that make the Billboard charts a tally in the continual victory of life over death? Mapping the Beat wants to chart a course between these extremes by tapping the critical powers inherited from Adorno and others without accepting his blanket rejection of popular music. Jacques Attali's Noise, with its Foucault-inspired historicist approach to music and culture, offers a way to conceptualize this methodological pathway. "Mapping the beat," the collection's introduction explains, means following Attali's lead in tracing the shifting boundary between what culture understands to be music and noise. Because the designation of 'music' is given to sound with order and because the perception of order is ideological, the boundary between music and noise is a political one. The boundary always reflects a political reality; the structure of music reveals/conceals/becomes/reflects the order of things. The understanding that epistemological assumptions have political ramifications is not new, but Attali's work is important because it provides a conceptual starting place for a serious study of popular music. For one, Attali's celebration of jazz and especially free jazz contradicts Adorno's rejection. Adorno preferred the atonal algorithms of 12-tone compositions, in which all 12 tones of the scale have to be sounded before one is repeated so that one key does not become dominant. Adorno wanted the musical symbolic to be thwarted consciously, in an approach that could be justified in the abstract. Attali goes the other way, into the material use-value of sound as its own justification, in which improvisational composition reconfigured social relations immediately. Attali's Noise is a high theoretical expression of DIY attitude. Attali's discussion is exciting because it tells us that noise is prophetic. We can look at contemporary music from the self-conscious compositions of John Cage, Brian Eno and Negativland on the one hand to the more visceral sound critiques of Bikini Kill and the Pansies on the other, and consider what the shifting boundaries between music and noise hearken. In this way, mapping the beat is about the relationship between "What is happening?" and "Is it happening?" At its best, the mapping of the beat would be a ritual examination of bone