Part One:
The ostensibly subversive premise
Music: A Subversive History
Ted Gioia
Basic Books, Hachette Book Group
Copyright © 2019 by Ted Gioia
ISBNs: 978-1-5416-4436-6 (hardcover),
978-1-5416-1797-1 (ebook)
Pages 1-2
The real history of music is not respectable. Far from
it. Neither is it boring. Breakthroughs almost always come from provocateurs
and insurgents, and they don’t just change the songs we sing, but often shake
up the foundations of society. When something genuinely new and different
arrives on the music scene, those in positions of authority fear it and work to
repress it. We all know this because it has happened in our own lifetimes. We
have seen firsthand how music can challenge social norms and alarm upholders of
the status quo, whether political bosses, religious leaders, or just anxious
parents fretting about some song bellowing ominously from behind a teenager’s
bedroom door. Yet this same thing has been happening since the dawn of human
history, and maybe even longer—although you won’t get told that side of the
story in Music 101, or from the numerous well-funded music institutions devoted
to protecting their respectability and the highbrow pretensions of their
mission statements. …
Page 3
Musical innovation happens
from the bottom up and outside in, rather than vice versa; those with power and
authority usually oppose these musical innovations, but with time, whether
through co-optation or transformation, the innovations become mainstream, and
then the cycle begins again.
Page 5
… The songs of outsiders and
the underclass have always posed a threat, and thus must be purified or
reinterpreted. The power of music, whether to put listeners into a trance or
rouse them to action, has always been feared, and thus must be controlled. The
close connection of songs to sex and violence has always shocked, and thus must
be regulated. And the narratives that chronicle and define our musical lives
are inevitably written and rewritten in recognition of these imperatives.
Gioia
makes his thesis plain that the history of all music is a battle between
superego and id; between masculine music of order, discipline and the state and
the feminine music of eroticism, emotion and passions; and between the ideal of
music as the decoration of luxury and the healing magic of song by, for and
from the downtrodden. For Gioia music
has always been a source of magic and revolution whose real history has been suppressed by all the powers that be since
basically the dawn of history as we know it but now, here in the 21st
century, he’s going to give us the real history of music. Gioia’s
history overtly apocalyptic literature, a story that will tell us the
previously hidden truth about the history of music as a cosmic battle of
dualities that has been written in “official” stories by the side of
technocrats who want to suppress the magic of music.
