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)
More than ever, we need a subversive history of music. We need it
both to subvert the staid accounts that misrepresent the past as well as to
grasp the subversive quality inherent in these catalytic sounds in our own
time. This book aims to provide that alternative narrative. But the goal isn’t
to be iconoclastic or controversial. I have no interest in adopting a
provocative revisionist pose so I can stand out from the crowd. I simply want
to do justice to the subject. I want to tell the story of music as a change
agent, as a source of disruption and enchantment in human life.
I started work on an alternative approach to music history more
than twenty-five years ago, but back then I didn’t realize the scope of what I
would uncover. My starting point was much simpler than where I ended up. My
core belief back then—unchanged today, so many years later—was that music is a
force of transformation and empowerment, a catalyst in human life. My curiosity
was piqued by the many ways songs had enhanced and altered the lives of
individuals throughout history, and especially the great masses of people who
don’t get much visibility in surviving accounts. I didn’t exclude kings
and lords, or popes and patrons, from my purview. But I was perhaps even more
interested in peasants and plebeians, slaves and bohemians, renegades and
outcasts. What did their music sound like? Even better, what did it do?
… My aim is to celebrate music as a source of creation,
destruction, and transformation. I affirm songs as a source of artistry, but
will also insist on taking them seriously as a social force and conduit of
power, even as a kind of technology for societies that lack microchips and
spaceships. I want to cast light on the neglected spheres of music that survive
outside the realm of power brokers, religious institutions, and social elites,
and explore how songs enrich the day-to-day lives of small communities,
families, and individuals. Above all, I hope to show how music can topple
established hierarchies and rules, subverting tired old conventions and
asserting bold new ones.
Ted Gioia’s would-be subversive history of music is the most conventional
wisdom an American historian of jazz and blues could have written. Gioia
believes that music is magical and has the power to shake things up and that
music, when it taps into what he regards as its shamanistic powers, can heal people
and, according to the ancient Greek figure Empedocles, raise the dead.
Gioia has read the history of American popular styles of music pioneered by
African Americans as a synecdoche for the history of music the world over and
molded the rest of music history to fit that American mythology.
