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If It Sounds Good, It Is Good: Seeking Subversion, Transcendence, and Solace in America's Music
Music is fundamental to human existence; it is embedded in our evolution and encoded in our DNA, which is to say, essential to our survival. Academics in a variety of disciplines have devised explanations that Richard Manning, a lifelong journalist, finds hollow, incomplete, ivory-towered, and just plain wrong. He approaches the question from a wholly different angle, using his own guitar and banjo as instruments of discovery. In the process, he finds himself dancing in celebration of music rough and rowdy. American roots music is not a product of an elite leisure class, as some academics contend, but of explosive creativity among slaves, hillbillies, field hands, drunks, slackers, and hucksters. Yet these people—poor, working people—built the foundations of jazz, gospel, blues, bluegrass, rock ’n� roll, and country music, in an unparalleled burst of invention. Use this book to follow where Manning'sguitar leads. Ultimately, it sings the American body electric.
- GenresMusicNonfiction
320 pages, Hardcover
Published July 1, 2020
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 23, 2021
Mr. Manning has produced an autobiographical tribute to American music, with a little neuroscience thrown in. However, if you are expecting a comparison of Frank Sinatra with Michael Jackson or Barbara Streisand with Beyonce, you will be extremely disappointed. The author has a very specific type of American music ( what he would describe as authentic American music) in mind. This would be music played by handmade stringed instruments, preferably ones whose origins can be traced back prior to the nineteenth century. This is the music that he is familiar with, and obsessed with, and around which he has fashioned his life. He describes the origins of this music in prior centuries among musicians with little or no formal musical training and also outlines in detail the instruments involved, tracing their lineage to present day models. I found all of this very interesting.
Manning is less convincing when he delves into the neuroscience of music and how humans relate to it. There is no doubt that music has a deep impact on many people (Manning included), however the author (an avowed atheist) appears to have created his own deities in this style of music and his practitioners. Certainly, Manning is not the first to have done this, as the term, rock god, is so common as to not require capitalization.
Much of his discussion of the qualities of the music he adores and his own personal journey into it are entertaining and worthwhile.
Manning is less convincing when he delves into the neuroscience of music and how humans relate to it. There is no doubt that music has a deep impact on many people (Manning included), however the author (an avowed atheist) appears to have created his own deities in this style of music and his practitioners. Certainly, Manning is not the first to have done this, as the term, rock god, is so common as to not require capitalization.
Much of his discussion of the qualities of the music he adores and his own personal journey into it are entertaining and worthwhile.
December 22, 2021
…I was a senior at the University of Michigan, three months from wrapping up three routine papers for three routine courses that would grant me a bachelor’s degree in political science. It was no small feat from where I came from; no one in my extended family of farmers and carpenters, no one in my lineage, had ever earned a college degree. I was on a glide path, carrying a 3.0 and never breaking a sweat. A month or so later, I stopped going to classes and never went back, did not finish my degree...
Richard Manning hailed from the state of Michigan. I believe he was brought up in the small city of Alpena which sits on the shore of Lake Huron about sixty miles north of my hometown of East Tawas. So we have that in common. I did not get my degree either, even in light of winning an academic scholarship for a full ride. In fact, I never attended college at all, ever. I do not have an excuse either. I just didn’t go.
…At some point I decided I didn’t have enough problems and so began to learn to play banjo…Some coincidences are not merely coincidence…introducing myself, shaking his hand as I read the name tag: “Martin Grosswendt.� I forgot about the bunk for a moment and blurted a three sentence version of the backstory I have given you above, then concluded by saying I was glad to meet the man who had more or less ruined my life, a man I had not seen since a winter’s night in Ann Arbor forty-two years before, had not seen or even known he continued to exist�
This is where our paths no longer merged. And I never met a man who would ruin my life, but I did meet a girl who did change the course it would take forever. It took some time, but she finally righted the ship with me in it. Then Gordon Lish entered the picture, we sort of became collaborators, and ever since the three of us kind of broke up and went our separate ways, my girl and I have been making music on our own.
…Your brain and body have no separate pathways, channels, and circuits for awe, beauty, and simply getting by, the elements of survival. Survival. Persistence. These are the sacred elements of evolution…Monogamy is a rarity among all animals. So is music, and this is true even within families of animals. Only about half of all bird species learn songs (as opposed to voicing calls) and only about half are monogamous. Turns out it’s the same ones, a direct correspondence. The singers are monogamous…a crisp aphorism shared among evolutionary biologists says that all evolution can be reduced to three questions: Can I eat it? Will it eat me? Can I fuck it?..
In light of the many meanderings Manning embarks on in his text I am with him every step of the way. I too believe in evolution. Especially persistence. I am also interested in monogamy and how it relates to being happy and remaining so. But I love being on the edge of the precipice.
…Yet a better way is simply to understand that prose becomes prosody by borrowing from music, lilt, timbre, pitch, and rhythm, especially rhythm�
It is interesting, the many parallels among writing and music. Manning not only delivers the goods on the history of music but also adds a few caveats into the world of good writing and how it is achieved. The painter and memoirist Dorothea Tanning would likely add that all the arts are connected.
…Music is not to be emailed to people as recordings; it is to be performed, delivered in performance, and if I could not clear this hurdle, then how could I begin to call myself a musician?�
I have only rarely performed my poetry to a live audience. My guitar playing and singing is a much different story, though also rare compared to most song-and-dance men and women. However, the older I get the more I think I need to get out there before it is too late. But hiding in the shadows is my most advanced forte. I envy the musical campfire circles and wish I could one day attend.
…Mimicry works by allowing our brains to become someone else, by crossing the solipsistic divide. The drivers of mimicry in our brains are exceedingly complex and in fact demand a great deal of neural power, just power we are not really aware of, unconscious…Charles Limb, the principal investigator in this work ( the inexplicable order of music) said in a TED talk about it, “To be creative you have to have this weird dissociation in your frontal lobe. One area turns on and a big area shuts down so that you are willing ro make mistakes and you are not constantly turning off all these generative impulses.”…real music only begins to flow when one relaxes effort�
In my early work I claimed to write “from the unconscious to the unconscious.� When looking back it was my greatest creative output. Less narrative than the poems I write today. More nouns, which gets to the point much harder and with definitely more force. But to let go and allow the unconscious a free rein is exhilarating to say the least. Afterwards the rational and critical brain needs to take over in revision and with tidying up loose ends. But the thrill of seeing where we can go in our art is exhilarating.
…To become a musician, you need four things: a mirror to judge one’s physical engagement with the instrument, a metronome to enforce fidelity to a rhythm, a tuner to stay in tune, and a recording device to hear yourself…We learn magic by mastering the mundane. Rigor is the foundation of creativity…Music is an act of subversion. I began this book by asking why we humans persist in making music. Here’s one answer: because it opens a pathway to our larger selves�
Making music, writing, painting, and photography all make us better. Whole worlds await us when we dive to muster in. This book is about much more than a banjo and the beginnings of music so many eons ago. It is a guide as well as a way forward.
…Important piece of advice to students: Don’t try to copy it note for note. Instead, make it your own, which appears like a prima facie case of appropriation, more theft than love. But this is not so. To sell a song, to own it, one does not replicate the original, just the opposite. One reaches simultaneously into the original and into one’s own self to wire together common human emotions and experiences�
Take a cue from the renowned and infamous thief Bob Dylan. He makes everything his own. Not to mention Jerry Garcia who did so as well. And because I play guitar and sing by myself I also attempt to restructure a song just for me and to play the parts that I hear the rest of my band contributing behind me. We aren’t called The Moldy Figs for no good reason.
…How did these poor people cause an exquisite and refined art to arise from sadness, oppression and violence? What is it about these troubles that sponsored creativity? I need to know what happened then to serve as some solace against what is happening now�
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. Not only did I learn some interesting historical facts regarding music, I was also introduced to many names of musicians to one day discover. Richard Manning is a fine writer worthy of our attention.
May 1, 2021
The paleontologist Stephen J. Gould said that some phenomena are best explained, not logically or theoretically, but historically. That is, knowing the evolution of a thing can explain how it came to be as we see it today. Richard Manning's book is one historical exploration of American music, and alternates between explaining where our music comes from and where musicianship comes from. It will be of interest to those who like history, music, cognitive psychology, and American culture.
The book appeals to me personally because I play some of the same music as the author, know some of the people he mentions, and struggle with musical skills that evolve in fits and starts.
Manning's writing style is almost stream of consciousness. Some of the run-on sentences and waterfall-like paragraphs seem analogous to the flow of influences from one musician to another that Manning describes, and so may be quite deliberate. The style is rough but intelligent and charming - with one picky complaint about editing.
The book deserved better copy-editing. The reader is jarred on almost every page by glitches that cannot be excused as stylistic eccentricities. Consider this sentence and count the unforced errors: "Tourette's sufferers can, for instance, accomplish such feats such as snatching a flying insect out of midair, and action too fast for most of us to even see, let along duplicate." (p. 227)
Despite the annoying grammar and spelling, I liked this book very much, and am going to recommend it. The friends I have in mind for the book may be less annoyed than I. I only hope that in a future edition or printing the text gets a once-over by someone with better proofreading skills .
The book appeals to me personally because I play some of the same music as the author, know some of the people he mentions, and struggle with musical skills that evolve in fits and starts.
Manning's writing style is almost stream of consciousness. Some of the run-on sentences and waterfall-like paragraphs seem analogous to the flow of influences from one musician to another that Manning describes, and so may be quite deliberate. The style is rough but intelligent and charming - with one picky complaint about editing.
The book deserved better copy-editing. The reader is jarred on almost every page by glitches that cannot be excused as stylistic eccentricities. Consider this sentence and count the unforced errors: "Tourette's sufferers can, for instance, accomplish such feats such as snatching a flying insect out of midair, and action too fast for most of us to even see, let along duplicate." (p. 227)
Despite the annoying grammar and spelling, I liked this book very much, and am going to recommend it. The friends I have in mind for the book may be less annoyed than I. I only hope that in a future edition or printing the text gets a once-over by someone with better proofreading skills .
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