Music

A Subversive History

By: Ted Gioia

Narrated by: Jamie Renell

"A dauntingly ambitious, obsessively researched" (Los Angeles Times) global history of music that reveals how songs have shifted societies and sparked revolutions

Histories of music overwhelmingly suppress stories of the outsiders and rebels who created musical revolutions and instead celebrate the mainstream assimilators who borrowed innovations, diluted their impact, and disguised their sources. In Music: A Subversive History, Ted Gioia reclaims the story of music for the riffraff, insurgents, and provocateurs.

Gioia tells a 4,000-year history of music as a global source of power, change, and upheaval. He shows how outcasts, immigrants, slaves, and others at the margins of society have repeatedly served as trailblazers of musical expression, reinventing our most cherished songs from ancient times all the way to the jazz, reggae, and hip-hop sounds of the current day.

Music: A Subversive History is essential for anyone interested in the meaning of music, from Sappho to the Sex Pistols to Spotify.

©2019 Ted Gioia (P)2019 Basic Books

Critic reviews

"A dauntingly ambitious, obsessively researched labor of cultural provocation."—Robert Christgau, Los Angeles Times

"[A] sweeping study...The author aims to subvert our ideas about music history—essentially, Western classical tradition and its contemporary and popular offshoots—in part by removing its pedestals...Gioia challenges notions of progress based solely on aesthetic or stylistic innovation...characteriz[ing] music history as a cyclical power struggle with shifting battle lines."—Larry Blumenfeld, Wall Street Journal

"Music: A Subversive History is by some distance the most wide-ranging and provocative thing he's [Gioia's] come up with... In terms of scope, well, put it this way: it starts out talking about a bear's thighbone that Neanderthal hunters apparently turned into a primitive flute somewhere between 43,000 and 82,000 years ago and ends up, 450 pages later, discussing K-pop and EDM."—Guardian

Has expanded my mind!

Bravo! This is a magically potent walk through the history and present of music. Thank you!

Interesting and thought-provoking

Fun, lots of interesting facts and ideas. If you've read Howard Zinn's People'a History of the US, they've being made here (successfully, if less seriously) will be familiar.

Tour de force

Although I’d read and reread at least 4 of Gioia’s books on music, I was a little skeptical that the “subversive” conceit could plausibly be sustained for a whole book. I was wrong! This is a tour de force — a book he’s no doubt been training himself to write almost non-stop since childhood.

The book is well read. But you will have to figure out how not to cringe as Renell mangles every single French word or name.

Groundbreaking Analysis

Easily the important book on music and its history that I have ever read

Great for anyone trying to get a better understand

Great read for anyone trying to get a better understanding of the history of music. This book approaches and analyzes music from almost every angle. I greatly enjoyed it, and definitely recommend it.

Outsiders become insiders.

The thesis is that real change in music comes from outsiders and even despised parts of society until the “corporate” interests realize there is money to be made and it becomes mainstream. Then the process happens all over again. “Rock” over taken by the most down and out sections of the South Bronx and LA. Of course this theme applies to the Blues, Rock, Jazz, Rap and Hip Hop. The story begins a couple of millennia ago. So for someone who has followed this it may be blindingly obvious but I found the details interesting.

Pretentious

This book was not for me. I found no thread to latch onto, and the book in general felt pretentious and full of itself.

Dry boring academic

Monotonous kill joy blurred an ambitious effort with cold academic boorishness. Bloody hell this could’ve been amazing but is so damn dull.

Squeezing cherry-picked facts into a simplistic narrative

The argument that “the man” took everything outside of the mainstream and neutered it to control it is such a banal assertion. The banal assertion is “backed” with cherry-picked facts that make the narrative seem plausible, as you can do with basically any narrative. That’s why narrative is so powerful. That’s why it’s so easy to brainwash people.

Ultimately, this is a forced, simplistic neo-Marxist narrative that pits the “subversive” pleb artists outside of the mainstream as against the terrible bourgeois establishment (that evidently stretches back thousands of years lol). Then supposedly the evil “man, maaaan,” like anyone who has any power according to neo-Marxism, shuts them down by incorporating them into the mainstream, thus taking away their power.

While the author (who I love, actually, his books about the history of jazz, listening to jazz, and the birth (and death) of the cool are a few of my favorites) strains and strains to make this case, the actual truth always bubbles beneath the surface, and this truth actually gives the outside the mainstream innovators their due.

What the subversives did was revolutionize the mainstream. They become accepted after years of hardship, struggle, and persecution *despite* the best efforts of the mainstream to stop them. Then the mainstream couldn’t ignore it anymore or brush it away so the subversives became mainstream. Which gives them the credit they deserve. They changed the course of history and music over and over.

To cheat them is that accomplishment by saying that all they did was get co-opted by the mainstream is stripping them of all their power and diminishes their struggle. The author can’t see this, however, because he wants so badly to see history as the a Marxist power struggle. So pathetic.

This book reminds me of Peter Doggett’s There’s a Riot Going On. Politics always bubbles under in his work, but in that book he got explicitly political, and it showed both just how warped his views are and how brainwashed by the far left he is. But he used music as a catalyst and engine for the book, basically ripping on any artist in the 60s who didn’t denigrate their work by getting explicitly political. What this author does is similar: he uses the subversive v establishment in music false binary as a screed to espouse his simplistic political views.

Sad!