Journal of Popular Music Studies, Volume 25, Issue 3, Pages 398–405

BOOK REVIEWS

Still a Long Way to Go, Muheres!

Review of Deborah R. Vargas. Dissonant Divas in Chicana Music: TheLimits of La Onda. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2012. 313 pp. $22.50(paper), $67.50 (cloth).

Reviewed by Susan McClaryCase Western Reserve University

Over twenty years ago, cultural pundits began to announce that we hadentered into the postfeminist era. Obliquely acknowledging the battles andachievements of the previous decade, they implied that we had been thereand done that—and that we could all return to the serious work associatedwith the status quo. And so here we are, two decades later, attempting onceagain to revive the fundamental agenda of situating female musicians withinour historical narratives.

Deborah Vargas’s Dissonant Divas in Chicana Music brings thisrecovery effort to Tex-Mex culture. For although music scholars now payattention to the wave (“la onda”) of Chicano repertories, such as mariachi,norteno, and corridos, they rarely mention women in their historicalaccounts. To the extent that such genres are identified with heroic andresistant working-class masculinity, women would seem to have no placeexcept as the objects of desire or disdain that appear in lyrics. In otherwords, the principles of inclusion and exclusion that have long prevailed inmainstream musicology also shape this research, exacerbated still more bythe Latino ideology of machismo.

Describing her project, Vargas writes that she “assembles a dissonantcultural and sonic landscape of Chicana/Tejana singers and musicianssince the early decades of the twentieth century to the present who—through performance, song, style, aesthetics, lived experience, voice,and instrumentation—are incompatible, inconsistent, unharmonious, andunsuitable within canonical Chicano/Tejano music narratives . . . .” (ix).Vargas goes beyond merely adding women to the now-accepted picture,aspiring, rather, to demonstrate how these women disrupt it.

C© 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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For some of the women she studies, standard documentation exists:recordings, posters, photographs, and the like. All of them, however, haverequired that Vargas turn to supplementary sources of information, inparticular ethnographic interviews with the subjects themselves or theirfriends, family members, fellow musicians, and fans. She also relieson what she calls “archisme”: a fortuitous combination of “archive”and “chisme”—the Spanish word for gossip—which she proposes “as away of acknowledging hearsay, murmurs, and silent gestures in Chicanocommunities as another base of knowledge production” (Vargas 56).Archisme becomes invaluable to a project that strives not only to grantwomen their places in cultural history but also to understand the difficultiesthey encountered: barriers to receiving training or pressures put upon themby parents and partners to conform to gender norms. Moreover, Vargas paysattention to the often ignored listeners (hotel workers, for instance) scatteredthroughout Latin America who found inspiration and self-confirmation inthe music these women performed.

Vargas begins her book in San Antonio, Texas—her own hometownand also a longtime center of Chicano/Tejano musicking—with Rosita(Fernandez), who had a remarkably successful career that spanned severaldecades. During much of that time, she served as the emblem of thecity, often pictured along with the Alamo; she was Lady Bird Johnson’sfavorite performer. But that very success has made it hard for historians toposition her within narratives designed to highlight working-class and ethnicresistance. In this beautifully written chapter, Vargas explores the complexrelations between the populations that are still enjoined to “remember theAlamo,” the violent events that led to Tejas becoming Texas, and thenegotiations necessary for a Chicana to become the face of multiracialSan Antonio. Much as Louis Armstrong was often disparaged as an UncleTom by Black radicals, so Rosita has been dismissed as inauthentic. Vargasrestores her struggles and triumphs to their rightful place.

Chelo Silva had the fortune and misfortune to be musical andmarriage partners with Americo Paredes, whose book With a Pistol inHis Hand: A Border Ballad and Its Hero (1958) set the agenda for thescholarship on and critical reception of corridos. This partnership allowedSilva greater visibility at the outset of her career, but it came to hamper herprofessionally and artistically. Vargas interprets Silva’s boleros as “borderballads,” demonstrating how these songs of disappointed love give voice toa specifically Tejana subjectivity and mode of resistance.

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Two of Vargas’s women—Eva Ybarra and Ventura Alonzo—playedaccordion, widely regarded as an instrument exclusively for men. Vargasinvestigates the conditions that made it possible for such women (includingTexan avant-garde composer Pauline Oliveros) to learn how to play theaccordion and to work their way into professional ranks. And the songs ofanother, Eva Garza, are still remembered fondly by working-class womenin Havana and Mexico City.

The last of Vargas’s women, Selena (Quintanilla-Perez), would seemnot to need rediscovery. A major international star during her short life,she broke through so many barriers as to render them obsolete. Yet Vargaschooses to conclude with her story, thereby situating her within the Tejanocontext reconstructed so painstakingly over the course of this book. Manydimensions of Selena’s career take on new meaning as a result. We seeher no longer as anomalous but rather as a later manifestation of a lineof talented and courageous Chicanas who have beaten the social odds tobequeath us sonic testimony to their notions of aesthetic beauty and humandignity.

Vargas is not a musicologist, and her interrogations rightly focus onbiography, historical context, ideology, and reception. Yet if these womenbecame stars, it was because of their musicianship. Fortunately it is possibleto find many of the recordings Vargas refers to on YouTube. Take time tolisten, for instance, to Chelo Silva’s “Cheque en blanco.”1 After a perkyintroduction that promises little more than standard Tex-Mex, Silva enterswith a husky voice and impeccable timing to pull the listener into the bitterlyironic zone for which she was justly celebrated; the dissonance is palpable.Then move on to Eva Garza’s extraordinarily sensuous performance of hermajor hit, “Sabor de engano.”2

A labor of love, Deborah Vargas’s Dissonant Divas offers a portalto a relatively unfamiliar genre of popular music, its artists, and their work.It should be read not only by specialists in Chicano and women’s studiesbut by anyone who cares about the music produced in the Americas in thetwentieth century.

Notes1. See <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGvdsi1vmd4>.

2. See <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyJdjsOVNBQ>.

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Beyond Category? Never! The Game of Genres in Popular Music

Jennifer Lena. Banding Together: How Communities Create Genres inPopular Music. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2012. 272 pp. $35.00 (cloth).

John Shepherd and David Horn (Eds). Continuum Encyclopedia of PopularMusic of the World Volume VIII: Genres: North America. New York:Continuum/Bloomsbury, 2012. 832 pp. $250.00 (hardback).

Reviewed by Eric WeisbardUniversity of Alabama

The late cultural sociologist Richard “Pete” Peterson, who came of age lovingbebop and wrote typographies of musical subcultures all the way throughto alt-country, had a knack for making what might have been reductiveframeworks enormously generative. In his great essay “Why 1955?”he applied the production of culture school’s institutional categories—occupational careers, law and regulation, etcetera—to bear on the questionof why rock and roll broke in the mid-1950s, and not when its sound emergedin the late 1940s, quickly recasting a mythology of rebellion as a shift to aTop 40 biz sensibility of entrepreneurial chance-taking. Later, he introducedthe “Soft Shell vs. Hard Core” dichotomy to country music studies, turning aknee-jerk critique of pop-leaning Nashville product into an age-old dialecticwithin a music that needed both to modernize and to remain apart. Finally,in “Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore,” he gave us ashorthand for cultural cosmopolitanism that has been used ever since.1

Jennifer Lena wrote three articles on music genres for the AmericanSociological Review and elsewhere in collaboration with Peterson, thendecided after his death in 2010 to write the book Banding Together. Much ofPeterson’s spirit lives on here, as Lena, looking to show the collective forcesthat matter as much as individual inspiration, moves gracefully across manycategories of music in many eras to arrive at her own shorthand for thetrajectory of genres over time: AgSIT. That would be avant-garde, scene-based, industry-based, and traditional. To get us acclimated, Lena spendsa chapter on three examples: bebop, bluegrass, and old school rap. Each,respectively, originated in a particular (though not necessarily vanguardist)incubator: afterhours jams at Minton’s in Harlem, the musicians employedby Grand Ole Opry regular Bill Monroe, and South Bronx neighborhoodparties. Subsequently, each became codified by a subculture, promoted and

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distorted by record labels, and was ultimately reclaimed as the stuff ofrevivalism.

This may sound too simplistic to be entirely true, and Lena makesclear that there are exceptions, checks, and other models in play as well,as she expands her inquiry to cover 60 genres impacting US listening andfour international examples. First, there is unabashed pop: Tin Pan Alley,crossover radio fodder, anything that esteems its plasticity. Second, genreflows are a trickle against bigger categories like rock, jazz, and ultimatelyhip hop: these, drawing upon Philip Ennis, she calls “streams.” A thirdcountertendency, shorthand IST (industry, scene, traditional), and involvingsuch consequential genres as funk and outlaw country, begins with thesestreams: the industry fosters its own creation, not a separate group ofexperimenters. Fourth, not every genre has the clout to get from Ag toT. Fifth, outside the market-driven United States one sees governmentsponsorship and antistate activism driving everything from Chinese folkand Serbian turbo-folk to leftist nueva cancion and juju. The trajectory ofAgSIT, then, is not so much the characteristic nature of music genres as theirsubcultural ideal—the four-year research university of musical pollination.

But even Lena’s expansive categories seem limited compared to the120 entries in the volume on “North American genres” of the ContinuumEncyclopedia of Popular Music of the World. Here, genres is used looselyto include some pop categories (adult contemporary radio, Broadwaymusicals), greater chronological and ethnic range (barbershop quartets,Chicano music), and musical approaches akin to cinematic or literary genres,as in Richard Middleton’s ambitious survey of the ever sentimental, usuallyscorned ballad, from troubadours to Celine Dion. Entries on honky-tonkcountry, hotrod songs, and house music suggest the range of work thatmusic genres can do: cheating songs and steel guitars made honky-tonkcountry’s version of soul; the car culture preeminently described by TomWolfe gave rise to a limited but fascinating group of songs; gay blacksoperating in Chicago, the city where Steve Dahl blew up disco records in1979, perpetuated dance beats for the future of both music and the liberatorymoments it sometimes serenades.

The encyclopedia volume’s wide-ranging contributors, reflectingmultiple academic disciplines, indicate that the interpretation of genres canbe subject to redefinition as well. On one side, Rob Bowman writes entrieson early rhythm and blues and soul, which are steeped in the details ofmusical style and record company intrigue, but almost openly disinterestedin the perspectives of African American Studies to the point that their

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bibliographies omit critical writing by figures such as Mark Anthony Neal,Guthrie Ramsey, and Paul Gilroy, even as Bowman complains that there isnot enough scholarship on his subject. On the other, an overview of jazzby Alan Stanbridge leaves all the who-played-what and who-made-moneystuff to subcategories on New Orleans, free jazz, and the like, deployingjazz studies to a range of metatopics that begins with race and nationalism.Similarly, Matt Sakakeeny’s reading of Mardi Gras Indian music, a revivalalmost by definition, finds “a continuous dialogue between community-level performance traditions and mass-mediated recordings in a way thatquestions the primacy and authenticity of ‘the folk’ as prior to secondarymediations and commodifications” (320). Is there an AgSIT equivalent forthe trajectory of popular music genre scholarship?

Yes and no, I think, and this brings up my biggest critique of bothof these books: they offer little historical periodization of the developmentof popular music genres across stylistic categories. One step toward this inLena’s book, informed by the industry inquiries of sociologist TimothyDowd, comes when she talks about how the “open system” of majorlabels, put in place after rock split the prestige category in two and thefamous Harvard Business School report suggested that Columbia Recordsinstitute a black music division, reconfigured to incorporate—rather thanexclude—streams and genres of music, rather than continuing to emphasizean all-encompassing mainstream. Another such moment comes when Lenacites race as a major reason why genres such as delta blues, doo-wop,and New Orleans jazz went from scene-based to traditionalist without everexperiencing an industry-based stage of support.

This is no place for a full historical survey of genres in popularmusic, but I’ll try a quick outline. (1) The show business phase, dominatedby theatrical performativity and a variety ethos, emphasized formal ratherthan folk genres such as the ballad, impersonation, or dance. (2) Thearrival of folkloric authenticity (detailed by Karl Hagstrom Miller inSegregating Sound) in the likes of ragtime, jazz, blues, and hillbilly, rootedgenres as a popular—Popular Front, even—antithesis to a now concretized,often exclusionary mass culture.2 (3) Rock and roll, building on swingjazz, ushered in the use of folkloric authenticity to segment and formatmass culture. This in turn mixed showy plasticity and roots communalityto detonate an explosion of genres—Lena believes the majority of USmusical styles were created in the second half of the twentieth century.(4) Neoliberal stratification pushed against the collectivism of genres andput their trajectories of representation under enormous rhetorical pressure:

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e.g. Kurt Cobain, Tupac, the Dixie Chicks. Even if my markers are off, seehow heuristically useful (and fun) the attempt is?

Of course, the history I just potted is almost entirely a US one,which brings up a final question: are genres ultimately local, national,continental, or placeless? The Continuum Encyclopedia’s devotion of avolume to “North American Genres,” with many categories relegated toa future International Genres omnibus, frustratingly cuts 1965–90 rock,heavy metal, and punk out of consideration. Arguably, an Anglo-AmericanGenres approach that quit pretending the United Kingdom was musicallyEuropean, would have come closer to our lived experience of popular sound.The British-American musical alliance was a key aspect of phase threeof my history, just as globalization and diminished UK-US genre-sharing(grunge, for example, which gets a Continuum entry) characterizes phasefour. Our idealized notion of genre, I’d argue, along with Lena’s AgSIT andthe core entries of the Continuum book, was born in rooted phase two butflourished in popularizing phase three; excepting in the case of hip hop,born postindustrially in phase three and flourishing in tabloid phase four,and known for its knack of embodying the “glocal”—global and local atonce.

Genres can never be fully defined in popular music because differenteras use them for different purposes. The tensions lurking within thatepistemology give us some of our best clues about the contradictions thatpropel popular music: between songwriting pop pragmatism and a notionthat, as Lena’s subtitle wants to have it, genres are communal creations;between localized and bigger music publics; between categories developedby musicians and categories imposed by marketing (and/or needed bylisteners). Duke Ellington, who paved the way for Peterson’s omnivores,used to say that the best music was beyond category. But like Kafka’scage that went in search of a bird, genres work the hard sell to makesure that the best music comes back to them. Not (only) because theyare corrupt, but because that process is how music is socialized. Maybe weshould tweak Ellington and conclude that the best categories are beyondmusic.

Notes1. Richard Peterson, “Why 1955? Explaining the Advent of Rock Music,”

Popular Music 9.1 (1990): 97–116; “The Dialectic of Hard-Core and Soft-ShellCountry Music,” South Atlantic Quarterly 94 (1995): 273–300; Creating Country

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Music: Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997); Richard Petersonand Roger Kern, “Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore,” AmericanSociological Review 61 (1996): 900–907.

2. Karl Hagstrom Miller, Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Musicin the Age of Jim Crown. Durham: Duke UP, 2010.