Rock over the Edge: Transformations in Popular Music Culture. (Book Reviews: Popular Musics).(Book Review)

Rock over the Edge: Transformations in Popular Music Culture. Edited by Roger Beebe, Denise Fulbrook, and Ben Saunders. Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 2002. (392 p. ISBN 08223-2900-x. $64.94 (hbk.); ISBN 0-8223-2915-8.$22.95 (pbk.).] Music examples, illustrations, index.

"Rock isn't what it used to be" (p. 1). This simple observation provides the driving force behind Rock over the Edge, a collection of essays that addresses the changing nature of rock music and rock criticism in recent years. With once venerable rock publications such as Rolling Stone caught in an economic tailspin as they measure themselves for style makeovers, and with rock videos now a scarce commodity on MTV, rock has become less of a dominant cultural force than it was previously. As the editors point out, where critics once invoked the label of "rock" as a marker of authenticity, an "automatic honorific" (p. 2), these days they are more likely to castigate rock as a regressive entity. Rather than valorizing rock music, many of today's writers wince at rock's often embarrassing history of sexist, homophobic, and racist tendencies. This has been reflected in the academy, where scholarly interest has gravitated away from rock's central domain towards other styles such as pop, hip-hop, electronic, alternati ve, and indie.

Given such developments, what does it mean to practice rock criticism today? While Rock over the Edge poses this question, the editors do not offer concrete answers. Instead, they view the current climate of confusion as an exciting opportunity to assess the changing tide and to take stock of the diverse styles, crossovers, musical markets, and new audiences that have emerged in the face of rock's splintering and apparent decline. This, in turn, provides the impetus to step back and retheorize many of popular music studies' most entrenched critical approaches.

Like two other recent popular music studies collections, Mapping the Beat: Popular Music and Contemporary Theory (Thomas Swiss, John Sloop, and Andrew Herman, eds. [Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1998]) and Reading Rock and Roll: Authenticity, Appropriation, Aesthetics (Kevin J. H. Dettmar and William Richey, eds. [New York: Columbia University Press, 1999]), Rock over the Edge features the work of North American scholars primarily from the areas of English, cultural studies, communication studies, and film studies. Of the book's thirteen essays, only two are by musicologists; this ratio honestly reflects the distribution of academic scholarship within such interdisciplinary organizations as the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM), where musicology traditionally has been poorly represented.

Given the book's slant toward cultural studies, it comes as little surprise that the acknowledged cornerstone essay is from one of America's premiere cultural studies scholars, Lawrence Grossberg. His polemical "Reflections of a Disappointed Popular Music Scholar" is a lengthy indictment of popular music studies and its perceived methodological shortcomings. While Grossberg's complaints are numerous, one problem in particular feeds his displeasure. When he surveys the field of popular music studies, he finds it a messy, aimless enterprise stuffed with intellectual dilettantes and devoid of a common critical vocabulary. In simple terms, Grossberg believes that popular music studies have no unifying theoretical grounding. This diagnosis, however, betrays Grossberg's own particular investment in cultural studies. For whatever reason, he refuses to acknowledge the existence of music theory and its obvious contributions to popular music studies. Like Grossberg, the majority of contributors to Rock over the Edge le ave the vast well of music theory and analysis untapped. So for all of the book's many perceptive critical insights, one is often left wishing for some more nuanced discussion of musical style that might clarify, amplify, or even complicate the authors' arguments and viewpoints.

That caveat aside, many of the book's authors do share with Grossberg a healthy sense of skepticism. Trent Hill, writing about country music; Jason Middleton, writing about the Washington D.C. punk scene; and R.J. Zanes, writing about the meanings of fandom, all question the ways in which the field of cultural studies has ...