Publishers Weekly
In All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, Carson Holloway discusses the ills of music censorship, despite his own briefly stated views on the "depravity" of some contemporary rock. But instead of dismissing the music that inspires such criticism, he explores its cultural power and import, the ancient legacies of both music and the fear it sometimes evokes, and the ability that pop music shares with all music to impassion listeners. This refreshing look at a tired dilemma may well appeal to both critics and defenders of pop music.
Kirkus Reviews
A controversial study of the moral effects of rock music. Since its explosion onto the popular music scene in the 1950s, rock has been heralded as an instrument of liberation and damned as a major contributor to the decline of American culture. While much of the debate has been restricted to surfaces (the violence and misogyny of rap, for example, or the pseudo-Satanism of heavy metal), Holloway (Political Science/Concord Coll.) aims to move to a deeper level by asking, What is the place of music in the formation of character, and what are its effects, particularly on the young? In the tradition of Leo Strauss, he looks for the answers to his questions in the writings of the great political philosophers. In the ancients, Plato and Aristotle, he finds a recognition of the crucial effects music can have: the modes and melodies of music, apart from the words that may be set to it, can either coarsen and enflame the soul or assist it in the cultivation of virtue and contemplation. In such early modern thinkers as Hobbes and Locke, the author finds an indifference to the contemplative virtues and a concern for physical security and animal comforts, while in the late modern thinkers Rousseau and Nietzsche the importance of music is again recognized—but this time in the interests of the very passions the ancients were concerned to control. Holloway then turns to a consideration of contemporary discourse about music and its effects, pausing along the way to consider Allan Bloom's notorious polemic against rock in The Closing of the American Mind and Robert Pattison's defense of it in The Triumph of Vulgarity. His unsurprising conclusion is that the ancients were right, andthatweexpose our youth to rock music only at their and our peril. Those who are already persuaded by the classical view of character and culture will find little new here; those who are not so persuaded will find much that is puzzling and little that might change their minds.
