Ted Gioia's 'Music: A Subversive History' is daringly ambitious but, laments critic Robert Christgau, disdains the pleasure of 'mere entertainment.'
Jazz critic turned music historian Ted Gioia’s “Music: A Subversive History” is a dauntingly ambitious, obsessively researched labor of cultural provocation.
As someone who’s spent years researching such matters as the music of the ancient world and the age of the troubadours while also tracking current releases, I’m pleased to report that Gioia taught me plenty. But both formally and polemically, he’s swimming in deep water. Its prose pragmatic and its structure baldly chronological, his grand overview is doomed by its very ambition to a sprawl with little chance of achieving all it sets out to. These flaws weren’t inevitable.
What I found most memorable in this exhaustive history is a six-page, 40-point epilogue called “This Is Not a Manifesto.” Some examples: “3. Songs served as the origin for what we now call psychology — in other words, as a way of celebrating personal emotions and attitudes long before the inner life was deemed worthy of respect in other spheres of society.” “9. Diversity contributes to musical innovation because it brings the outsider into the musical ecosystem.” “21.
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