Nor is the book’s final section altogether coherent or convincing. Intriguingly entitled ‘Liberation’, it starts brilliantly with a discussion of the patriotic spirit in music, from Purcell’s King Arthur in Restoration England and the repellent ‘Ça ira’ in revolutionary France to 19th-century German supremacism and the role of jazz in the American civil-rights movement. But the sharp gear- change into the chick-pulling, cock-rocking, gender-bending anarchy of recent pop music just seems silly and opportunistic — the sort of thing Blanning might have flung into a lecture course to keep his undergraduates awake.

All the way through the book he is careful not to make qualitative or value judgments, and an historical phenomenon, Niggaz with Attitude merits the same blanket of academic objectivity as J. S. Bach. Blanning insists that his topic is the triumph of music, ‘not the triumph of serious music, classical music or even good music (however defined)’. But in a brief conclusion, he almost comes clean by admitting his sympathy for the idea that

music in the classical tradition has disappeared into a stratospheric sonic world of plinks and plonks … while pop music had plumbed ever more subterranean depths of offensive vulgarity.

Perhaps Blanning should have released his inner Colonel Blimp. Admitting the degeneration of music rather than its triumph would have provided a far stronger, sharper polemical frame for this pleasant but fuzzy book. q

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