Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | N | Notes

Bad Music: The Music We Love to Hate.

Article Excerpt
Bad Music: The Music We Love to Hate. Edited by Christopher Washburne and Maiken Derno. New York: Routledge, 2004. [x, 379 p. ISBN 0415-94366-3. $24.95.] Illustrations, index.

Every now and then a book comes along that articulates something that is embedded in our collective cultural conscience that we rarely see publicly discussed. Bad Music: The Music We Love to Hate is such a volume. It is one thing to hear a song and impose our judgments on it, conditioned or otherwise; but to publish a scholarly work about such a subversive topic as this, that in many ways underscores our personal opinions about what is bad music, well, that is quite another undertaking. But Christopher J. Washburne and Maiken Derno have done just that in their new collection of essays.

The idea for the book germinated from a discussion held by Washburne and Tim Taylor over a glass of wine about how music scholars typically avoid discussions of everyday, mundane music, and focus more on music that is highly influential or significant in some way within the prescribed musical canon. They organized a "Bad Music" panel for the 2001 meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology. Out of that panel came this wonderfully diverse and interdisciplinary book.

The increasing acceptance of the study of popular culture as an area of serious academic scholarship is bridging the gap between highbrow and lowbrow culture, including art and music (p. 2)....

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!