I can’t speak highly enough about Music: A Subversive History. Though Gioia can be subtly boastful at times, it’s never egregious, and he is always fun to read ... I suspect that academic scholars will pooh-pooh aspects of Music: A Subversive History. That’s as it should be. Despite his awards, Ted Gioia remains something of an outsider critic, convinced that the passion for destruction can be a creative passion.
More than on musicology—indeed, in reaction to its strictures—Gioia draws on social science research into the past and present to forge a sweeping and enthralling account of music as an agency of human change.
... smart but readable, sometimes giddily effusive passages ... The charge that educators, arts institutions and music historians other than Gioia are, on the whole, blind to the value of transgressive innovation threads through Music: A Subversive History. This would no doubt surprise people at the institutions that have been organizing the Bang on a Can event series, the White Light Festival, Crossing the Line, the Vision Festival and other programs presenting venturesome, hard-to-categorize and often radical music in New York City alone. It would rattle the many music educators I know who are generally fearful of being taken to task for thinking too subversively, rather than too conservatively. And it would surely rankle authors such as Brent Hayes Edwards, Jennifer Lena, Allen Lowe, Kristine M. McCusker, Ann Powers, Alex Ross, Elijah Wald and others who have written probing, eye-opening works of music history untainted by reductive traditionalism or capitulation to tropes and clichéd thinking ... For all its sweep and noble intentions, Music: A Subversive History has a limited conception of what constitutes subversion ... he gives short shrift to the fiercely radical gender disruptions of Ida Cox, Mamie Smith, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Lucille Hegamin, Alberta Hunter and other sexually fluid and dynamic, proto-feminist women who made the blues a major force in American music a decade before Johnson recorded his first tracks ... Undervalued in his scheme is the challenge to musical ferocity that’s part of the cycle of aesthetic disruption and normalization: beauty.
Mr. Gioia’s claim that 'the main plot in the narrative of popular music' for more than a century now has been 'the descendants of African slaves rewriting the rules of commercial songs in every decade' is hard to dispute. Yet that point is complicated by his repeated use of the term 'underclass' in this context (Miles Davis, for instance, did not grow up poor). His narrative is sometimes tone-deaf ... Considering this book’s theme, it is curious that the author doesn’t mention the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians ... And given Mr. Gioia’s expertise in jazz, I was disappointed that his account of that art form effectively ends in the 1980s ... Yet in other important respects, Mr. Gioia stays current.
This isn’t a new idea, but in drawing from fields such as anthropology, psychology, theology, and folklore, the author raises thought-provoking questions in this wide-ranging survey ... Gioia’s argument is persuasive and offers a wealth of possibilities for further exploration ... This fascinating recontextualization will appeal to anyone who ever wondered why 'Hound Dog' became a hit only when Elvis Presley covered it.
... a working thesis that busts open a lot of sanitized academic and industry lore ... Admirably, in A Subversive History Gioia articulates what made pioneering outlier musicians subversive separate from the lore of their celebrity status. And most illustrative, he examines the underlying trends under the mainstream radar that emerge in spite of mainstream cultural orthodoxy ... Gioia’s theories of musical trends vis-à-vis changing cultural landscapes, past and present, are also brought into sharp focus ... Gioia details such fascinating musical revolutions of the louche musical underground of 19th century Paris, Amsterdam ... As comprehensive as it is, as in Gioia’s other encyclopedic volumes, there are questionable omissions. Scant mention of the modernist symphonic innovations of Gustav Mahler, for instance. Or referencing more recent eras, his attention on the cultural impact of the Sex Pistols, but almost nothing about David Bowie’s music except for his glam persona ... But those occasional slights in Music: A Subversive History, are outweighed by this vibrant study, which goes a long way in correcting a lot of music history that has been ossified by industry and academic orthodoxy.
