Oh Boy! Masculinities and Popular Music.(Book review)

Oh Boy! Masculinities and Popular Music. Edited by Freya Jarman-Ivens. New York: Routledge, 2007. [vii, 279 p. ISBN-13: 9780415978200. $99.] Illustrations, music examples, bibliographic references, index.

Since Judith Butler's revolutionary manifesto (Gender Trouble, 2d ed. [New York: Routledge, 1999]), a spate of texts exploring gender construction has routinely littered the scholarly offerings of publishing houses. Thanks to the work of Catherine Clement, Susan McClary, and others whose contributions to the burgeoning field of identity politics offer invaluable insight into musical representation of women, the link between gender construction and music has become a viable field of inquiry. However, for too long, the "gender" in "gender construction" has been synonymous with "female." How timely, then, that Freya Jarman-Ivens presents this edited collection of essays probing the construction of masculinity in popular music. Oh Boy! Masculinities and Popular Music is the first serious look at how sexuality and masculinity are represented in the music of artists as diverse as Jeff Buckley. Freddie Mercury, Elvis Presley, Justin Timberlake, and Mama Thornton. Oh Boy! does not purport to be a history of men or masculinity in pupular music; rather the collection is "founded on an underlying characteristic of masculinity, namely that it has a tendency to define itself as non-performative and is commonly perceived and presented as absolute, natural, original" (p. 5). The book seeks to focus on (per)formations of masculinity without, re-marginalizing the feminine.

Jarman-Ivens is ideally placed as editor of this volume--her forthcoming book on voice, subjectivity and fragmentation in popular music coupled with her teaching at the University of Liverpool in the musical construction of character in Austro-Germanic opera informs her skillful editing, intelligent choice of essays, and of course her own contribution to the book. The introduction, co-authored by Jarman-Ivens and Ian Biddle (the latter the author of" 'The Singsong of Undead Labour': Gender Nostalgia and the Vocal Fantasy of Intimacy in the "New" Male Singer/Songwriter" which forms chapter 6 of the book) is immediately engaging. Sampling just a few appearances of the phrase "Oh Boy" in (American) popular music, Biddle and Jarman-Ivens implicitly suggest a theme that threads many of these essays together: the transgressive nature of the identities and sexualities of the artists discussed. Exploiting the etymological connection between 'boy' and 'boi,' Jarman-Ivens and Biddle engage in word play--a written cognate to the gender play (trouble) discussed throughout the volume. In so doing, they allow for ambiguity and disruption of more traditional understandings of masculinity, opening space for a malleable and changeable definition.

Oh Boy! draws on a remarkably wide range of repertories in its study of the representation and construction of masculinity. From Sheila Whitely's discussion of Queen and cock rock to Henry Spiller's analysis of Indonesian pop, this commitment to a broad spectrum of genres not only ensures the book's wide appeal--it also invites comparison between the essays. Jarman-Ivens' apt grouping of the essays "Boys, Boys, Boys: Male Bonds, Masculine Connections": "Boys Don't Cry: Troubled/Troubling Masculinity"; and "Boys will be ...? other modes of masculinity," ensures cohesion and lends a sense of structure to the work.

As Jarman-Ivens articulates in her introduction, masculinity only becomes obvious in its refusal to map directly on to the body (p. 15). A male body draws attention when it is seen as insufficiently (or excessively) masculine. Judith Halberstam goes so far as to claim that "Masculinity ... becomes legible as masculinity where and when it leaves the white male middle-class body" (p. 7). Well known for her work on queer identity, in her chapter entitled "Queer voices and Musical Genders," Halberstam takes the opportunity to explore non-male constructions of masculinity. Focusing specifically on the relationship between Elvis and ...