Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock

You have to get around terms like "ontologically thick" and "ontologically thin" but most of the book is self-explanatory as far as it goes. As other reviewers have noted the most salient point is that pop music is transmitted by recording rather than performance tradition or written score.

But this case is exagerrated since cover bands are proof that a performance tradition exists for rock. Gracyk's never manages to account for this. He recognizes that covers exist but he is so fixated on defining rock as the sounds themselves he doesn't see what Led Zeppelin plastered on an album cover, the song remains the same. Gracyk can't prove that Al Green and Talking Heads are singing different songs when they sing "Take Me to the River" but that's what his philosophical definition of pop music and its transmission requires. It just doesn't work but he asserts that the same song in different styles becomes a different song in each style. This is a weirdly atomized view of what a song is.

Gracyk also manages to dismantle rock and pop aesthetic camps to show how the musical styles are related. He even goes so far as to argue that pop music is a manifestation of hegemonic capitalism but then at the end he backs off completely and argues that rock and pop still stand for radical individualism and freedom because classical music doesn't. This duality is so absurd and historically indefensible it baffled my Gracyk decided to defend the very mythology he deconstructed through his book.

His attempt to pretend that pop music is not hegemonic but that classical music is ignores jazz completely and doesn't account for the shared harmonic vocabulary found in all three styles. if Gracyk's concern to dismantle the myth of authenticity had extended as far as the political oppositional thinking he tries to inject in his study of pop music he could have produced a more helpful book.


what book was disco75 reading?   July 13, 2002
 2 out of 3 found this review helpful

Don't overlook the fact that Rhythm and Noise was published by an academic publisher, Duke University Press. It doesn't actually get around to the question of how many record producers can balance on the head of a pin (just like a mattress on a bottle of wine?), but its origins with an academic publisher should lead readers to EXPECT a certain amount of hairsplitting. The book is not about rock music so much as it is about theories of rock music. Gracyk treats rock as an extremely inclusive category, equally admitting Michael Bolton and Whitney Houston alongside Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love. Gracyk starts from the premise that they're all commercial artists, none of them being any more authentic than any other. Too bad that "disco75" was hoping to have his/her musical tastes confirmed, but this book isn't about validating anyone's taste. It's a look at a musical landscape in which we hear the same recordings over and over, and then can't escape them when we're subjected to them again in TV commercials and coming out of car radios. It's about musical experience that involves cranking up the volume (the chapter on noise) and moving in time with the music (the chapter on rhythm, where Gracyk is not so kind to disco's thud thud thud thud). As the closing chapter makes clear, it's ultimately about how we try to use commercial music to express ourselves in a commercial culture where the distinction between genuine and manufactured music really is just a pointless academic exercise.


Academia In The Stadium   June 1, 2002
 1 out of 2 found this review helpful

The author has written a hybrid book: part theoretical treatise, part fan statement. He provides a good deal of interesting information and makes some important points about rock music.

Among these is that records rather than performances or written songs are the relevant objects of study in rock music. Gracyk supports this claim by making the argument that sound qualities and their textural combinations are more relevant than melody or composition.

He makes good points about how the record-making process, rather than performances, are the real work of rock musicians. He explains the role of arrangers, producers, recording engineers, and mixers in the process of creating the records. Gracyk reveals the collaboration between the nominal acts and their studio-based, somewhat anonymous colleagues. To explain his premise, the author uses the parallel example of film-making as more relevant to rock music than cultivated (art) music.

In making his points, Gracyk reveals the exaggeration of images in rock music: the "jam-oriented" guitar player, the unity of the band, the rebel-against-the-capitalist-system persona. He goes into lengthy explorations of writings about rock music from Theodor Adorno, Harold Bloom, and Camille Paglia.

It is in the rebuttals to these other authors that the writing becomes most problematic. Gracyk's hair-splitting approach is cumbersome and almost but not quite hides the fact that his arguments with these other writers are incomplete, his logic circular or based on assertion rather than explanation. At times he sounds like a fan who has been upset to hear that not everyone likes his favored music. He never really adequately explains his assertions that rock music is not cultivated (art) music, nor is it folk music. To this reader, the former claim is evident, while the latter one still needs careful explanation.