Footsteps in the Dark: The Hidden Histories of Popular Music

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Colette Marie O’BannionChapman University

Footsteps in the Dark: The Hidden Histories of Popular Music. GeorgeLipsitz. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.

Neil Young’s recent comments about the state of popular music—that ‘‘the time when music could change the world is past’’—left manyobservers scratching their heads. For the iconic singer– songwriter tomake such a statement points to the uneven, if politically ineffective,discourses of popular music. At the same time, if the overtly politicalYoung feels music can no longer enact much-needed social change, thequestion of music as progressive politics merits further scrutiny. EnterGeorge Lipsitz, whose Footsteps in the Dark serves as an important rebuketo Young’s quiet refusal of the political possibilities of music. In hisexamination of a wide range of popular musics and transnational culturalpractices, Lipsitz illustrates how the production, circulation, consump-tion, and appropriation of popular music genres by diverse, globalcommunities represent an ongoing articulation of political praxis.

In Lipsitz’s view, the cultural production, dissemination, andconsumption of musical styles like salsa, hip hop, jazz, techno, banda,and merengue (each genre discussed in chapter-length case studies) areinformed by the socio-political and historical currents that make thesediverse musics possible. Together, Lipsitz argues, these musical genresreveal a deeper understanding of the hidden histories of politicalstruggle, repression, violence, sexism, poverty, and difference. Musicserves as a crucial site of resistance in contemporary popular cultureupon which identities are constructed and negotiated, throughwhich the unacknowledged stories of history can be told, and wherepopular songs not only document but preserve the stories of a chaoticpresent.

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Footsteps is an exploration of the ways in which marginalized historiesare (re)inscribed in the popular imagination, most often through thecomplex interactions of diverse communities, the playful appropriations oflanguage and culture, and the mass proliferation of transnational musics.These intercultural exchanges take centre stage in the book, mosteloquently articulated in the chapters on merengue, salsa, and techno. It issignificant that these chapters not only speak to the different culturalinfluences that give shape to what appear to be markedly different genres(although a closer examination reveals that these genres share much incommon), but also to the ways in which intercultural exchange facilitatesthe transmission of particular stories. Merengue, for example, tells thestory of Dominican migration; salsa, the history of greater Mexico; andtechno, the story of deindustrialization in Detroit. Each genre reliesheavily on the confluence of cultural politics and musical innovation totell its story. In the process these collaborations also shed light on how the‘‘elasticity of identities’’ (208) and the openness of musical discoursessimultaneously contribute to and complicate our overall understanding ofthe hidden histories of marginalized communities.

Despite Lipsitz’s remarkable craft in recounting the stories ofmarginalized communities through the lens of popular music, thebook’s structure is far too elastic and the connections between musicand community are less explicit than they should be. Lipsitzdemonstrates his vast breadth of knowledge, but the reader is oftenleft with the heavy task of making explicit the sometimes hiddenconnections between the ideological, political, and social currents thattie these communities together. Despite these minor shortcomings,Footsteps is an important work that represents the best of what culturalstudies has to offer—an expansive study of (sub)cultural activities, arich historical context that informs and explains the emergence ofpopular music phenomena (what Lipsitz calls ‘‘the long fetch ofhistory’’), and an examination of the real socio-political implications atwork in the formation of these ever-evolving social movements. In anaccelerated capitalist culture of accumulation and conspicuousconsumption, perhaps music still serves as the great equalizer, onethat celebrates Foulcault’s maxim that ‘‘where there is power, there isresistance.’’

Ian ReillyUniversity of Guelph

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