To talk about music between the end of the Second World War and the 1960s is to talk about the rise of rock n’ roll, to retell the stories of Elvis Presley, Chess Records, and the “Nashville sound.” Popular music’s dominant historical narrative in the postwar era is the creation of the genres and the careers of the performers that would define it for the rest of the century. It’s an old story, but one that hasn’t lost its sparkle, especially in an era where popular music seems to have caved in on itself, having exhausted so quickly ideas that once seemed so new and exciting.

However, like most stories that sparkle a little too brightly, the story of how rock n’ roll music took the world by storm is only a small part of the legacy. In Making Easy Listening: Material Culture and Postwar American Recording, Tim J. Anderson shifts the focus away from more familiar approaches to popular music studies in favor of an examination of the creation of the cultural objects, techniques, and industries that played a significant role in popular music as we know it today.

Anderson, a professor of Communication at Denison University, recognizes that popular music history tends to ignore the new technologies and modes of production that enabled this music to reach a wide audience, but he also acknowledges the ways that these technologies actually shaped that audience’s expectations of the listening experience.

Anderson situates his argument in the context of several eclectic sites, employing historical, literary, and theoretical analysis to examine the rise of a music culture based primarily in material objects (e.g. records and stereo equipment) rather than performance. Anderson makes a good, if labored, effort to tie the book’s three disparate sections on union strikes, the implications of multiple recorded versions of My Fair Lady, and the emergence of new recording techniques and hi-fi home stereos into this argument.

The book’s first section, which examines the 1942-44 and 1948 strikes of the American Federation of Musicians, handles these concerns most successfully. Prior to the strikes, movie studios, theatres, radio stations, and other venues where working musicians could eke out a living had turned increasingly to canned or recorded music. Under the leadership of James Caesar Petrillo (a fascinating figure in American labor history, equal parts hero and villain), AFM members refused to participate in any new recordings during the strikes as they fought to control the conditions under which their music could be reproduced.

While the strikes affected significant short-term gains for union members, their efforts were ultimately doomed because, Anderson argues, music listeners had already made the shift from sheet music and live performance to music recordings. The trend the AFM was resisting was ultimately much larger than any one industry, and had a significant impact on the way popular music was consumed by a mass audience.

Anderson’s take on this little-known chapter of music history is both insightful and engaging; however, the book’s later sections are less adept, becoming bogged down by redundancy and by the limitations of academic language to fully express the phenomena of aural experience.

In Making Easy Listening‘s most unusual study, Anderson addresses issues of intertextuality in My Fair Lady, the myth that became a play, then a musical, then a movie. Literally hundreds of recordings from the musical score appeared in the 1950s and ‘60s, and Anderson positions these reversionings as indicative of the recording industry’s desire to exploit a marketable property through reproduction and listeners’ desire to cultivate an ear for difference and distinction in sound recordings.

Despite what Anderson claims is the “ripeness” of this topic for further study, the My Fair Lady chapters seem like ephemera, leftovers picked from well-covered territory, and their placement in the book is somewhat disconcerting. And while interesting in their own right, neither this nor the section about the AFM provides an adequate transition to the book’s final section, which discusses the use of new technologies to create a realistic or, in some cases, fantastic listening experience.

These chapters begin by documenting technological advances in the recording industry that allowed listeners to experience the sensation of “authentic” live performances in the comfort of their own homes. Also discussed is the move beyond realist approximation in recording that brought about the exploration of sonic possibilities and the popularity of what was labeled “exotic music.” However, the discussions eventually stray away from the book’s central arguments, instead, plying readers with numerous examples of these trends, where fewer would have sufficed.

Admittedly, these criticisms of Making Easy Listening have less to do with Anderson’s choices as a writer than with the conventions of academic writing which, like a good deal of popular music, have taken on more weight than even the best craftsmanship can support. Still, the individual sections of Making Easy Listening work better as parts than as a whole. While novel and unexpected, the styles and execution of the each study are too dissimilar, and in the end, Making Easy Listening fails to hang together as a cohesive unit.