The author begins the book by a detailed background of modern art and then drills down to dissect three separate and distinct kinds of modernism: Introverted, or art for art’s sake, as exemplified by the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky’s abstractions and early 20th Century Anton Friedrich Wilhelm von Webern’s Austrian atonality musical compositions Extroverted, which revitalizes tradition and reaches out to its audience, the way painter Vincent van Gogh and jazz-meister and composer Duke Ellington did and Perverse, which “makes obscenity and serious artistic value synonymous.” Bayles has been teaching humanities at Boston College and lives in Newton, Massachusetts.

This fairly deep academic study and dive into popular music, published in 1994, was written by the former TV and arts critic for the Wall Street Journal and a regular contributor to the Boston Globe, Weekly Standard, and the Claremont Review of Books. Finding censorship of popular music 'both a practical and a constitutional impossibility,' Bayles insists that 'an informed shift in public tastes may be our only hope of reversing the current malignant mood.' She argues that culture shapes the market and not the other way around. Unlike other recent critics of popular music, Bayles does not blame the problem on commerce. Yet despite the vigor and balance of these musical origins, Martha Bayles argues, something has gone seriously wrong, both with the sound of popular music and the sensibility it expresses.īayles defends the tough, affirmative spirit of Afro-American music against the strain of artistic modernism she calls 'perverse.' She describes how perverse modernism was grafted onto popular music in the late 1960s, and argues that the result has been a cult of brutality and obscenity that is profoundly anti-musical.

From Queen Latifa to Count Basie, Madonna to Monk, Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music traces popular music back to its roots in jazz, blues, country, and gospel through the rise in rock 'n' roll and the emergence of heavy metal, punk, and rap.

Hole in Our Soul by Martha Bayles