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Sounds English: Transnational Popular Music. By Nabeel Zuberi. Transnational Cultural Studies series. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Pp. viii + 276. Index, discography. $34.95 cloth. This book is about the national, in its many guises. Focusing mainly on the ideas of England and Englishness as expressed through popular musics of the UK, the author tackles his topic as both fan and critic. The notion of "transnational" serves as an almost symbiotic foil to expressions of the national that Zuberi investigates, for the one presupposes the other. And, as the child of Pakistani immigrants, one who grew up in lower-middle class Britain on a sonic diet of popular musics stretching to all corners of the globe (both culturally and physically), Zuberi himself figures as a reference point for his discussion of the transnational/national axis. Sounds English is a collection of essays (written over several years) that approach the book's central notion from divergent angles. Essay topics include British working-class popstar Morrisey and his role in gender, race, and class politics of the UK (Chapter 1); notions of authenticity and identity as expressed from a queer vantage point in the music of the Pet Shop Boys (Chapter 2); popular music's politics in the rave/DJ culture and the displacement of guitar-based rock as a viable channel for political expression (Chapter 3); debates over new technologies of music production (eg. sampling) and their effects on black British diasporic music (Chapter 4); and tensions between travel and home as found in hybrid popular musics of the British Asian diaspora. The wide range of topics covered by these essays is counterbalanced by a central question running throughout: what does it mean to be British? Zuberi asks this question in multiple ways and from multiple positions throughout the book. Rather than seeking a straightforward answer, however, he aims to delineate the ground on which such questions are negotiated. These essays are both insightful and biographically revealing. Zuberi is often his own subject, and he analyzes his personal experiences in order to help make sense of the discourses surrounding popular musics. He is neither above nor outside the topic at hand, but rather intimately entwined with it. The theoretical base of the book falls generally within what Zuberi calls "the rubric of transnational cultural studies." He draws on critical theory associated with British cultural studies since the 1960s. Race, class, and gender are pivotal concepts throughout the book, and ideas from subcultural theory, queer theory, and various strands of literary criticism inform Zuberi's writings. In addition to drawing upon received bodies of theory and thought, Zuberi presents a novel critical idea: the music itself is theoretical. By this he means that it is more than an object to be studied, but can embrace and expand upon models of explanation. Over the course of the book, he works toward making popular musics at least partially autonomous from bodies of theory that seek to explain their objects into oblivion. For anyone looking to keep up with the ongoing juggernaut of popular music studies, this book provides a refreshing viewpoint. John Fenn |
