Review of Ron Moy, Authorship Roles in Popular Music: Issues and Debates (Routledge, 2015)

Abstract

[1] On the surface, the question of authorship appears simple: the sole author of this review must be Robin Attas. However, thinkers such as Roland Barthes (1977) and Michel Foucault (1977) have famously complicated the sole-author idea for written texts, and film critics since the 1950s have raised further questions about how to assign authorship to an art form created by a group rather than an individual.(1) But what of the author in popular music, perhaps one of the most significant and pervasive art forms in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? Ron Moy's Authorship Roles in Popular Music: Issues and Debates (hereafter, Authorship) joins a handful of prior studies in filling this gap.(2)[2] Moy is not a music theorist, and the genre of Authorship fits best within media and cultural studies. However, Moy is certainly a scholar of popular music, and his book reflects the interdisciplinary and wide-ranging nature of the field of popular music studies, while also including some detailed discussion of musical sounds that might pique a music theorist's interest. As a pop music theorist, I found myself grateful for the broader perspectives that Moy brings to the music I study. And even for music theorists not interested in popular music, this book can hold value. Our work relies upon an (often-unconscious) attribution of creative agency and authorship for the music we analyze. Studies such as Moy's force us to question our role in that attribution, and consider creative musical sources we may have overlooked.[3] Rather than suggesting a single overarching theory of authorship or drawing a neat conclusion, Moy raises a plethora of "issues and debates" and discusses a variety of short case studies that beg for expansion by scholarly specialists. This results in a unique writing style that mixes the personal anecdotes of a pop-music fan, academically-oriented summaries of centuries-long schools of thought compressed into a paragraph or two, and numerous brief discussions of songs, musicians, and record labels. While these examples appear to be drawn mostly from Moy's own personal playlist, and so do not cover the full gamut of pop-music history, there is still a considerable variety of genres, genders, races, and nationalities represented. Readers seeking a more straightforward academic text may be frustrated by the mixed tones and limited scope of examples, but if one adjusts one's expectations towards simply getting a taste of the range of "issues and debates" present in pop-music authorship, Moy's writing becomes more rewarding.[4] This approach also means that rather than presenting an absolute definition of author/auteur,(3) Moy touches on a number of possible definitions based on previous authors' work. He writes: "In an increasingly fragmented and pluralistic era . . . all unifying theories relating to authorship can be said to be, at the very least, open to challenge" (xi). Thus, Moy ends his introduction with a list of ten "key concepts" important to the remainder of the book. While on first pass the list seemed overly long and a disengaging style of prose, referring back to it when reading later sections was a helpful way for this reader to stay grounded in Moy's primary purpose.[5] Such back-and-forth reading was not necessarily encouraged by the book itself, since each chapter reads mostly as a stand-alone essay that tackles one aspect of the pop music author/auteur topic. Further, the title of each chapter only hints at the points Moy addresses. For instance, in the first chapter, "The Studio/Label as Auteur," Moy's exploration of whether the Motown studio can be considered an author/auteur embraces such diverse issues as the impact of location (both Detroit generally and Motown's Hitsville USA recording studio specifically); Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of the "chronotope";(4) a list of defining characteristics of the "Motown sound" including instrumentation, studio mix, tempo, genre influences, and instrumental roles in the groove; a consideration of the influence (or lack thereof) of Motown's session players, collectively known as the Funk Brothers; a historical summary of the careers of the songwriting/producing team of Eddie Holland, Lamont Dozier, and Brian Holland both during and after Motown; a similar exploration of the career of writer/producer Norman Whitfield; a discussion of how the 1980s British label PWL (Pete Waterman Ltd. …