The emergence of disability-focused musicology, or musicological disability studies, over the last 10 years has been both a joy and a trial to all of us involved in its nurture and development. For those with a critical interest in popular music, it has been a peculiar and salutary intersectional experience. Already used to resistance from a mainstream discourse shaped by Adornian notions of musical value, cripping pop musicologists have taken a bit longer to establish a disciplinary space for their work. George McKay’s Shakin’ All Over: Popular Music and Disability is important not only because it is the first monograph to deal exclusively with the topic, but also because it provides foundational work across a wide range of concerns and approaches. While its individual chapters will function as springboards for many more investigations, the book’s broad perspective illustrates the potential scholarly richness and epistemological rewards of the intersection between disability studies and popular musicology.
The book is divided into five chapters. The introduction, which serves as a meeting place for musicologists, cultural theorists, and disability scholars, sets out McKay’s interdisciplinary stall, drawing together his principal methodologies with additional strands of performance studies and gender studies. Here we also learn that McKay possesses the ‘specialist embodied knowledge’ of a disabled punk rocker, which once embraced brought both clarity and perspective. By acknowledging his point of view is doubly subjective and critical (as disabled fan and disability-studies-music-scholar), McKay makes use of the particular gift granted by the scholarship of difference: the ability to speak from within with the authority of one outside. The voice is distinctive: the writing buzzes along with wit and energy, often with parenthetical asides and exclamations, in a conversational style that is maintained throughout the book. Often, it feels as it if would be best read as a script for performance; but once attuned to its rhetorical frequency, the reader (listener?) can relax and enjoy the show.
Nevertheless, this reflexive mode seems to have drawn unique boundaries around the kinds of disability and the generation of artists that are put to scrutiny. The first chapter, ‘Crippled with Nerves’, deals specifically with polio survivors in pop, particularly drawing on the histories of Neil Young and Ian Dury. Many of the book’s (largely male) subjects belong to the rock ‘n’ roll generation born in the late 1940s and early 1950s; the UK charts of the 1960s and 1970s act like a centripetal force from which the analysis finds it hard to escape. This is not necessarily problematic, but a clearer framework regarding the repertoire, and why physical impairments predominate, might have been helpful.
Chapter Two, ‘Vox Crippus’, considers the way in which the embodied voice ‘speaks’ of and to disability, and how technology mediates the disabled voice into something that is functionally whole. McKay coins the phrase mal canto (a binary opposite to the term bel canto, referring to the technique of western classical vocal production) to refer to the ‘strained, damaged, or disfluent’ voice, and illustrates his concept through the voices of artists with a variety of disabilities – the paraplegic Curtis Mayfield, whose voice is reconstructed in the studio; Hank Williams, whose yodelling falsetto manifested the emasculating and dehumanising effects of spina bifida; the polio-surviving Ian Dury and Steve Harley, who articulate the intersection of class and disability with their disfluent delivery.
Chapter Three, ‘Corpus Crippus’, complements the previous chapter by considering the visual performance of the disabled body in popular music. As might be expected, the impact of mobility impairment and neurological deficit on performance is central to the chapter, but McKay moves beyond these fundamental issues to a more contextual consideration of how the effects of disability on performance can become self-perpetuating. He shows how the epilepsy suffered by Ian Curtis became embedded in his performance persona as frontman of the band Joy Division, but also how the rigours of the music industry and the demands of top-level performance exacerbated the singer’s medical conditions, with fatal consequences.
Chapter Four, ‘Johnnie-Be-Deaf’, continues the strategy of pairing the discussion of a disabled performer with an acknowledgement of the disabling effects of popular music. The intersectional analysis of the career, lyrics, and reception of hearing-impaired torchsinger Johnny Ray, ‘the scrawny white queer with the gizmo stuck in his ear’, is as developed as the those of Curtis, Dury, and Young, but it is perhaps more conventionally presented because it is concentrated here rather than spread among a number of chapters. If anything, I wanted more – I wondered how Mitchell and Snyder’s concept of narrative prosthesis might be applied to Ray’s reception, particularly given that he was unique as a pop performer in making his invisible disability visible through the use of a hearing aid. The section on Ray is followed by an equally weighty section on how a lifetime of pop and rock endangers the hearing of both performers and fans. While I understand the rationale behind creating a single chapter from these two discussions, the join felt incongruous, at least until the final paragraphs that likened Ray’s earpiece to the ubiquitous earbuds of the iPod generation.
The final chapter, ‘Crippin’ the Light Fandango’, is the most generous in terms of its scope, pulling together narratives of how pop culture crips the celebrity physically and mentally with accounts of how it attempts to redress the balance through campaigning, using celebrity to raise awareness and capital. Close lyrical readings of Amy Winehouse’s ‘Rehab’ and Britney Spears’s ‘Piece of Me’ sit together with accounts of rock ‘n’ roll suicides, notably that of Kurt Cobain. This chapter gives us the most opportunity to consider female artists, relatively absent from the rest of the book, and a fleeting appearance of a blind artist, Stevie Wonder.
Shakin’ All Over is both accessible and challenging, and it will be equally valuable and invigorating in the classroom and to scholarship. With that in mind, however, I do have a caveat. It seems counter-intuitive to complain about technical imperfections in a book that celebrates cripping. Nonetheless, because I am certain it will need reprinting soon, I would implore the press to revisit the typescript and correct the many sorry and silly mistakes: frequent typos, repeated misspellings of names, omissions from the bibliography (not helpful when using author–date referencing), misdirections in the index. These problems will force me to excuse the book to my students before they have even begun to read it, and that is unfortunate for an otherwise welcome read.
University of Southampton, UK
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© 2014, Laurie Stras
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2014.984937