-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Keir Keightley, Book Reviews, Journal of Communication, Volume 57, Issue 2, June 2007, Pages 409–411, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2007.00349_3.x
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
Two recent trends in media scholarship meet in Making Easy Listening. The first involves the past decade’s explosion of interest in the specificities of recorded sound, variously called “phonography” (Eisenberg, 2005; Rothenbuhler & Peters, 1997), “record consciousness” (Gracyk, 1996), or “sound studies” (Altman, 1992; Katz, 2004; Sterne, 2002). This area of research has important ties to medium theory, insofar as it seeks to investigate the central yet long-ignored role of recording and playback technologies in the production, dissemination, and consumption of music and other forms of organized sound. Making Easy Listening makes an important contribution to historicizing the rise of the recorded over the live performance as the dominant mode of contemporary musical experience by focusing on popular music from the so-called “prerock” era. The emergence of popular music as a distinct field of research in the past 20 years or so, with its own traditions, journals, associations, and degree programs has been marked by an obsession with youth culture and rock music. This has led to a particular, and even peculiar, neglect of the popular mainstream that immediately preceded rock, circa 1945–1965. Anderson’s focus on this era is part of a second scholarly trend in redressing popular music studies’ more “rockist” tendencies by seeking to understand the historical development of mainstream popular music before the rise of rock (Doyle, 2005; Hayward, 1999; McCracken, 1999; Taylor, 2001).
