Geoffrey O’Brien’s Sonata for Jukebox does for (popular, recorded) music what his previous books, The Phantom Empire and The Browser’s Ecstasy, did for movies and books respectively. That is to say, Sonata for Jukebox is a wide-ranging meditation on the uses and meanings of music: how we make sense of it, what it means to us, and what role it plays in our lives.
I’ve perhaps used the pronouns we/us/our too freely in the last paragraph. For part of what distinguishes O’Brien’s writing is the way he moves so carefully (but also fluidly) between the singular and the general: that is to say, between the personal and autobiographical, on the one hand, and cultural and generational commonalities on the other.
Sonata for Jukebox contains brilliant essays on Burt Bacharach, the Beatles, and the Beach Boys. It also contains beautiful stories about O’Brien’s bandleader maternal grandfather, his radio-DJ father, and his own adolescence and young manhood, including reminiscences of friends who committed suicide. What brings all these discussions together is a subtle and ever-ramifying discussion of how music organizes (here I go again) our lives: our memories, our relationships, and our senses of ourselves.
This is great for several reasons: the elegance of O’Brien’s prose; the wide range of his musical (and more generally) cultural citations; his thoughtfulness about the effects of recording technologies, and more recently, digital technologies, on the texture of everyday experience; his uncanny ability to evoke and anatomize a Zeitgeist (that of the 1960s, for example).
O’Brien doesn’t have any easily summarizable theories: he’s an essayist and poet, not a philosopher. But his writing is informed equally by theoretical speculation and by empirical concreteness; which means that it is both intellectual and cosmopolitan, in the best senses of both these words.
Sonata for Jukebox is most valuable to me because of how it offers a way to think about music; my own sensibility is very different from O’Brien’s, but I am inspired by his ability to move between what the music sounds like and the circumstances (at once technological and social and personal) in which it is listened to, and on from there to what it stands for, what it is associated with, how it is woven into memory and desire and fantasy and hope and dread.
O’Brien was born in 1948, which makes him six years older than me. He concentrates on the music he listened to in his youth; though he is clearly very knowledgeable about more recent developments, his emotional allegiances are to the songs from back then. Of course he is right that, in our lifetimes, much more than was the case earlier in the 20th century, popular music has primarily been marketed to the young. Still, this means that O’Brien gives more importance to nostalgia, and to temps perdu, than I myself would be willing to do; or, to put it in inverse terms, this means that I (still) connect music more to the future (instead of the past) than O’Brien does; I would want to emphasize (as he does not) the role of (popular, recorded) music as a kind of ongoing exploration of “possibility space” or of the “virtual.”
Sonata for Jukebox
Geoffrey O’Brien’s Sonata for Jukebox does for (popular, recorded) music what his previous books, The Phantom Empire and The Browser’s Ecstasy, did for movies and books respectively. That is to say, Sonata for Jukebox is a wide-ranging meditation on the uses and meanings of music: how we make sense of it, what it means to us, and what role it plays in our lives.
I’ve perhaps used the pronouns we/us/our too freely in the last paragraph. For part of what distinguishes O’Brien’s writing is the way he moves so carefully (but also fluidly) between the singular and the general: that is to say, between the personal and autobiographical, on the one hand, and cultural and generational commonalities on the other.
Sonata for Jukebox contains brilliant essays on Burt Bacharach, the Beatles, and the Beach Boys. It also contains beautiful stories about O’Brien’s bandleader maternal grandfather, his radio-DJ father, and his own adolescence and young manhood, including reminiscences of friends who committed suicide. What brings all these discussions together is a subtle and ever-ramifying discussion of how music organizes (here I go again) our lives: our memories, our relationships, and our senses of ourselves.
This is great for several reasons: the elegance of O’Brien’s prose; the wide range of his musical (and more generally) cultural citations; his thoughtfulness about the effects of recording technologies, and more recently, digital technologies, on the texture of everyday experience; his uncanny ability to evoke and anatomize a Zeitgeist (that of the 1960s, for example).
O’Brien doesn’t have any easily summarizable theories: he’s an essayist and poet, not a philosopher. But his writing is informed equally by theoretical speculation and by empirical concreteness; which means that it is both intellectual and cosmopolitan, in the best senses of both these words.
Sonata for Jukebox is most valuable to me because of how it offers a way to think about music; my own sensibility is very different from O’Brien’s, but I am inspired by his ability to move between what the music sounds like and the circumstances (at once technological and social and personal) in which it is listened to, and on from there to what it stands for, what it is associated with, how it is woven into memory and desire and fantasy and hope and dread.
O’Brien was born in 1948, which makes him six years older than me. He concentrates on the music he listened to in his youth; though he is clearly very knowledgeable about more recent developments, his emotional allegiances are to the songs from back then. Of course he is right that, in our lifetimes, much more than was the case earlier in the 20th century, popular music has primarily been marketed to the young. Still, this means that O’Brien gives more importance to nostalgia, and to temps perdu, than I myself would be willing to do; or, to put it in inverse terms, this means that I (still) connect music more to the future (instead of the past) than O’Brien does; I would want to emphasize (as he does not) the role of (popular, recorded) music as a kind of ongoing exploration of “possibility space” or of the “virtual.”