cornelia's Full Review: Sonata for Jukebox: Pop Music, Memory, and the Ima...
Sonata for Jukebox: Pop Music, Memory, and the Imagined Life is yet another stunning collection of cultural observations from poet/writer/critic/editor Geoffrey O’Brien, whom I like to think of as “the thinking man’s thinking man.”
While framed as a series of essays on the history of American pop music, Jukebox is to the average collection of non-fiction pieces as Joyce’s Dubliners is to a run-of-the-mill short story grouping. O’Brien is just firing on so many cylinders, operating on so many levels, that the book pretty much transcends classification: one is tempted to appropriate musical terms of art in order to do the thing justice.
These essays use 20th Century pop tunes as touchstones for exquisite, haunting riffs on family, radio, loneliness, love, commercialism, companionship, loss, youth, age… He gives voice to ideas that loop and rise and fade, only to crackle forth again when we least expect them, like a snippet of BBC commentary on a shortwave, or some phrase of oboe melody in a Mozart piece, before evanescing once more.
What I found most enjoyable about this collection, however, was the accessibility of O’Brien’s references. His commentary is profound and original, but this isn’t the sort of grandstanding “insider” claptrap that so often typifies music writing. There’s no wink-wink nudge-nudge stuff about how it was really the bass player’s second cousin filling in on the B-side during that infamous Hamburg session, because (as “we” all know) Pumpkinhead’s ex-girlfriend had bronchitis that week. The author instead accords highly appropriate gravitas to “Surfer Girl” and “Walk on By,” because he doesn’t need to make himself feel superior by drowning us in the minutiae of liner notes.
There’s just something so pleasurable about reading the work of a guy who totally GETS the music we’ve been inundated with through the years. O’Brien summarizes “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing” as “a Coca-Cola jingle transformed into the kind of song that a chorus of Chinese orphans might have sung in a late 50s movie about missionaries martyred by Communists.” He articulates that the trouble with “Tie a Yellow Ribbon ‘Round the Old Oak Tree” is its “ineluctable stridency.”
Jukebox doesn’t bypass the contributions of Alan Lomax or Tin Pan Alley or Jimmie Rodgers or Paul Robeson to musical history, it’s just that O’Brien doesn’t have to beat the underbrush for nuggets of footnotable obscurity in order to be taken seriously. He finds meaning in the ubiquitous, and shares this wisdom with an open hand—accomplishments which are entirely too rare.
Perhaps the best way to summarize this book is with a description from within it: “He will walk you through the history of music as though it were the history of the world, and as if both were nothing more than the history of this particular evening, the story of how you will somehow reach dawn.” A writer who can achieve that sonority and then observe, “I will know that old age has arrived when even the oldies are unfamiliar songs of younger generations,” is a guy deserving both our respect and applause.
Geoffrey O'Brien's survey of pop music in the 20th century is also partly a memoir of his own and his family's experiences with the genre, and partly ...More at Alibris
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