Ray, Mary Beth, ed. Essays on Music, Adolescence, and Identity: The Adolescentia Project. Springer Nature, 2024.
Essays on Music, Adolescence, and Identity: The Adolescentia Project is an immense, diverse, and expansive look into how adolescent music fandom (most frequently in the individual LP/EP format) has molded the lives of seventeen different academics. Co-Editor Mary Beth Ray uses the appropriate term “therapeutic glimmer” in her chapter on the debut 1994 EP by Mary Timony’s trio Helium.
Given my own 1990s experiences as a teenage music obsessive, I was grateful for the chance to read these “essays [which] illuminate the ways in which music of adolescence impacts our identities in adult life.” 1 Looking over the table of contents, I could not have predicted that a story about New Kids on the Block would be my favorite: Njelle Hamilton’s beautiful reflection on how an all-White boy band from Dorchester, Massachusetts, provided a crucial “safe space – for better or worse” for a Jamaican woman’s coming of age. 2 Despite having grown up as a white American kid socialized to hate NKOTB (yet secretly believing that “Tonight” was kind of the jam), I related to her chapter immensely.
As this reviewer sees it, this book has two optimal target audiences: other academic music-nerds who appreciate reflexivity, and current adolescents fascinated by their parents’ music and going through similar struggles that the authors once did. I imagine most young readers will be excluded, though, due to Springer’s excessive list price (at the time of writing, over $100 for even the eBook version). I requested a physical review copy of the book, and the editor informed me that the publisher doesn’t issue them. Hopefully, the authors and editors are seeing some fair level of commission for not only their hard work but for sharing such personal and thoughtful stories.
I bring up the academic list price as well because this collection consciously melts away those boundaries imposed on academics who also happen to be music lovers; it’s almost always music that (however indirectly) led folks to academia rather than vice versa. Generally, though, the contributors balance their personal reflections with theoretical foundations. In one example, D. Bruce Campbell contextualizes Public Enemy with Tara Yosso’s ‘Cultural Wealth Model,’ a contemporary reframing of Bourdieu’s cultural capital. The editors did well to keep each chapter consistent; to this Geographer with one foot in musicology, that interdisciplinary, measured approach was helpful. Additionally, three of the authors (all of whom contribute chapters separately) contribute introductions for each decade, adding valuable structure via sociological, technological, and historical context.
The greatest strength and vulnerability of this book, though, was in how much fun these authors are clearly having, throwing in occasional jabs at the excesses of glam/hair-metal (cf. Isard’s overview of the 1980s section) and questionable deep-cuts on albums they love. Tom Grochowski, for instance, calls “Please Do Not Go” (track 3 of the Violent Femmes eponymous 1983 debut) a “Midwestern acoustic reggae travesty.” 3 As much of a non-sequitur as this may seem, reading that jogged my own memory of watching beach-bro guitarist Jack Johnson cover the song at an all-day Modern-Rock-Radio festival in 2003. To any lover of indie/underground music, that would seem horrible on paper, but I remember it as a beautiful moment, offering a reprieve after 30 minutes of Nationalist butt-rock by the Memphis band Saliva. Given the derision the editors here have for the misogyny-coded rock of their 1980s youth, it may have been interesting to hear from a millennial who was once “down with the sickness” (which I know was not Saliva, but could easily have been).
The editors’ division of the book into the 1980s, the 1990s, and the 2000s will hopefully invite an eventual 2010s update to the Adolescentia Project once that decade’s adolescents enter academia. To anyone in that generation who gets their hands on this (or, gets assigned a chapter), meditations like Isard’s chapter on her love of the Smashing Pumpkins, in the context of unfathomable bullying and ‘fatphobia,’ can provide valuable cautionary tales about modern students’ habit of romanticizing the pre-internet era.
Though the book does not appear to be oriented as such, many of the chapters – more so as the book moves into the 2000s – address topics related to queerness on top of body image. This is appropriate, given how one of the editors also works in Gender Studies, but that dimension adds to the collection’s valuable potential for curricula related to sexuality, media studies, and social work.
Footnotes
Ray, Essays on Music, Adolescence, and Identity, 2,
Hamilton, in Essays on Music, Adolescence, and Identity, 72.
Grochowski, in Essays on Music, Adolescence, and Identity, 36.