Making
Easy Listening, Material Culture and Postwar
American Recording
by Tim J. Anderson
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis,
2006
280 pp., illus. 10 b/w. Trade, $69; paper,
$23
ISBN: 0-8166-4517-5; ISBN 0-8166-4518-3.
Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen
Hogeschool Gent
Jan Delvinlaan 115, 9000 Gent, Belgium
stefaan.vanryssen@hogent.be
The University
of Minnesota Press has been publishing
a number of outstanding studies in its
"Commerce and Mass Media" series,
and this twelfth title is certainly no
exception. Tim Anderson, who is an assistant
professor of communication at Denison
University, has tackled the recording
industry and the reception of its products
in post-war America from three different
angles and gives us an entirely new understanding
of the fundamental changes in the means
of interaction between musicians and their
audiences. Instead of looking at the recording
industry as the 'bad guys' who are curtailing
musicians' creativity, suppressing authenticity
and individuality and turning music into
a mass commodity, he emphasizes the material
changes that took place roughly between
'48 and 64 long before rock
and roll became the dominant genre in
the market. The central issue of course
is the availability of affordable playback
apparatus for affordable, robust records
with an acceptable sound quality and an
extended lifetime (vinyl stereo longplayings)
and the gradual demise of sheet music
publishing. American middle-class households
gradually shifted from amateur performing
stages where one or the other was banging
out a tune on a honky tonk piano to pseudo
theatres where would be connoisseurs could
enjoy 'authentic' recordings in the quiet
and comfort of their living room
in stereo!
Anderson focuses his analysis on three
subjects: the recording process and the
post-war recording bans; production and
reproduction in the case of My Fair
Lady and Stereo, Hi-Fi and the birth
of Easy Listening. The chapters on the
strike of the American Federation of Musicians
essentially illustrate what constitutes
a change in labour relations following
a change in the mode of production. In
marxist terms this is a simply illustration
of a generic process: as capital accumulates
and technology advances, the way commodities
are produced undergoes a qualitative leap
in this case from live performance
of compositions to recordings of performances
and a massive laying off of labourers
follows. Anderson endeavours to explain
the whole episode in non-marxist terms
and in my opinion falls a bit short of
getting a full grasp on the underlying
dynamics of the strike and the issues
at stake. But this is only a minor weakness.
In his analysis of the exploitation of
the music of 'My Fair Lady', Anderson
is at his best. He clearly describes the
interplay between audiences, music, performers
and genres, and the way the recording
industry instantly fills each and every
niche of the market with pre-cooked and
easily digested stuff. How music becomes
a property and how this property is made
to be profitable clearly is what he understands
best. This is the section where one gets
a glimpse of why popular music is popular
music at all. For the first time, I find
here a convincing discussion of the gradual
but unavoidable shift between two hierarchies.
Before, the concert or theatrical performance
came first. After, performances got reduced
to promotional tools for the record. And
this long before the worldwide promotional
tours of the Rolling Stones or the merchandising
of Kylie M. A similar shift, by the way,
has been happening in the past with tunes
from movies or TV-series becoming number
one hits, and in a few years we will see
how the Internet again changes the relationship
between mode of production and mode of
distribution of popular music.
In the last section, Tim Anderson discusses
roughly the changes brought about by the
introduction of hi-fi and stereo technology
in the marketing and the reception of
music. Similar studies have been done
already extensively and more fully by
Colin Symes for classical recording and
Peter Doyle for popular music (see reviews
elsewhere in LDR), so the benefit
of Andersons approach lies in the connections
he makes between this aspect of American
recording history and the two other themes
of his book.