In The Political Force of Musical Beauty, Barry Shank shows how musical acts and performances generate their own aesthetic and political force, creating, however fleetingly, a shared sense of the world among otherwise diverse listeners. Rather than focusing on the ways in which music enables the circulation of political messages, he argues that communities grounded in the act and experience of listening can give rise to new political ideas and expression. Analyzing a wide range of "beautiful music" within popular and avant-garde genres—including the Japanese traditions in the music of Takemitsu Toru and Yoko Ono, the drone of the Velvet Underground, and the insistence of hardcore punk and Riot grrrl post-punk—Shank finds that when it fulfills the promise of combining sonic and lyrical differences into a cohesive whole, musical beauty has the power to reorganize the basis of social relations and produce communities that recognize meaningful difference.

Acknowledgments vii
Introduction. A Prelude 1
1. Listening to the Political 10
2. The Anthem and the Condensation of Context 38
3. Turning Inward, Inside Out: Two Japanese Musicians Confront the Limits of Tradition 72
4. "Heroin"; or, The Droning of the Commodity 108
5. The Conundrum of Authenticity and the Limits of Rock 147
6. 1969; or, The Performance of Political Melancholy 201
Coda. Listening through the Aural Imaginary 244
Notes 263
Bibliography 301
Discography 317
Index 319

Barry Shank is Professor of Comparative Studies at Ohio State University. He is the author of Dissonant Identities: The Rock 'n' Roll Scene in Austin, Texas, and A Token of My Affection: Greeting Cards and American Business Culture, and a coeditor of American Studies: An Anthology and The Popular Music Studies Reader.