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Historical Materialism #73
Groove: An Aesthetic of Measured Time
What is the relationship between music and time? How does musical rhythm express our social experience of time? In Groove: An Aesthetic of Measured Time , Mark Abel explains the rise to prominence in Western music of a new way of organizing rhythm—groove. He provides a historical account of its emergence around the turn of the twentieth century, and analyses the musical components that make it work.
Drawing on materialist interpretations of art and culture, Mark Abel engages with aesthetic arguments, challenging in particular Adorno's critique of popular music. He concludes that groove does not simply reflect the temporality of contemporary society, but, by incorporating abstract time into its very structure, is capable of effecting a critique of it.
Drawing on materialist interpretations of art and culture, Mark Abel engages with aesthetic arguments, challenging in particular Adorno's critique of popular music. He concludes that groove does not simply reflect the temporality of contemporary society, but, by incorporating abstract time into its very structure, is capable of effecting a critique of it.
268 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
December 28, 2016
A very interesting book, though difficult at times. The author does, I think, a great job of sympathetically presenting the aesthetic positions of earlier writers (Bergson, Schulz, and Adorno, in particular) before offering his own nuanced and compelling counterarguments. Abel takes the pieces of these earlier writers' ideas which he finds valuable, and combines them with his own historical materialism and experience as a performing musician.
That the author is a musician is pretty obvious, and he quite correctly identifies serious flaws in the critiques of earlier writers which seem to stem largely from their not being musicians. Abel counters the elitist attitude that can be summed up as "popular music bad, artsy music good", with jazz music taking the prime place as an example of pop music (due largely to the time period in which the critiqued authors were writing, but no doubt also because Abel is a jazz musician).
There was, I believe, one major flop in Abel's reasoning, right at the very end of the book. While he had been so successful in defending popular forms of 20th century music as being more than mere capitulations to capitalist commodification, he seems to fall into exactly the same trap that he identifies in earlier writers when he appears to dismiss computer-composed "dance music" for lacking completely in a "subjective" aspect and representing only an "objective" beat, without syncopation and by necessity unifying and without multi-part composition.
While this makes up less than a paragraph at the very end of the book, it was quite disappointing, as it demonstrated the same lack of understanding he was rightly critical of in Bergson and Adorno's criticisms of jazz. Electronic music, and even more narrowly dance music, is extremely diverse, and is as much a reflection of the emerging digital culture as jazz was of emerging monopoly capitalism.
The temporal aesthetics of continuous-pulse styles of EDM like techno, psytrance, and DnB are structurally complex, and, to my view, are more consciously a musical representation of time as subject than much of the 20th century groove musics which Abel defends as being able to mount a meaningful challenge to the repressive reification of time imposed by industrial capitalism. It is the purpose of such musics, which are centered around a continuous tempo marked by a "bass drum" beat characteristic of each particular style, to push the regular meter of groove music to its extreme conclusion through an unfailingly regular beat, pushing it so far that the tick-tock workday experience of time is dissolved completely and replaced by the immediate and social experience of the continuously unfolding moment. Which is what rave culture, in my view, is all about. The close association between these forms of music and psychedelic culture pushes this point further.
Abel makes the interesting point that groove musics tend not to have definitive endings, relying often on fade-outs or medleys to transition from one track to another. This, he argues, is evidence of groove music being more than a metrical imitation of clock-time, and instead being an artistic representation of time itself, offering a critique of the capitalist subjugation to reified, objective time by creating within that temporal form a liberatory, affirmative experience for and by the working class. For working people, the objective time of capitalism is an undeniable and real aspect of lived experience, and not merely an abstraction. Groove music is powerful because it allows for the working class to reclaim this experience of time and to make use of it for their own purposes. Acccording to Abel, it is Adorno's failure to see this that results in his hopelessly pessimistic attitude towards popular music.
Now, consider electronic dance music. In many forms of EDM, there is no fade out, there is no medley, and there is definable end point because each piece is structurally linked to the previous and the next either by the compositions themselves, or by the manipulations of a DJ. There is no need to create the illusion of continuity, because the continuity is real. This continuity generally is maintained even between performers, with the next one coming on before the last one has finished. It would seem to follow from this that these forms of music are even better positioned than 20th C groove music to represent time. Which is, of course, where the term 'trance music' comes from.
And unlike earlier groove musics, until very recently, the performers and DJs that deliver this musical experience have not been turned into rock-stars by the sticky frigid fingers of the capitalist music industry. The division between performer and audience that long ago crystallized in 20th century styles and saw the near deification of a select few musicians is at odds with the very nature of dance music, where the performer/audience dichotomy is largely subsumed by an experience where everyone is an participant. The appropriation of electronic dance music by the capitalist mainstream is undermining this somewhat, but it does so paradoxically, as now we play dance music everywhere where people aren't and can't dance, and we even have "DJs" performing at stadiums. But the festival culture and club culture that created and nurtures the scene is still alive and well, and is where the really creative stuff is coming from.
So yeah. Great book, but I think the author should give more credit to modern electronic music, as he rightly criticizes those who came before him as failing to give proper credit to the popular musics of the 20th century. That dance music is inherently without syncopation or multi-part composition is factually inaccurate. But, more importantly, electronic dance music can be just as fertile a ground for launching an aesthetic critique of capitalism as jazz or funk, and much more so than rock and roll. Like the groove musics of the 20th century, contemporary dance music is diverse, and ought not to be dismissed.
Yes, some dance music is pedestrian and uninteresting. But so is Bachman Turner Overdrive.
That the author is a musician is pretty obvious, and he quite correctly identifies serious flaws in the critiques of earlier writers which seem to stem largely from their not being musicians. Abel counters the elitist attitude that can be summed up as "popular music bad, artsy music good", with jazz music taking the prime place as an example of pop music (due largely to the time period in which the critiqued authors were writing, but no doubt also because Abel is a jazz musician).
There was, I believe, one major flop in Abel's reasoning, right at the very end of the book. While he had been so successful in defending popular forms of 20th century music as being more than mere capitulations to capitalist commodification, he seems to fall into exactly the same trap that he identifies in earlier writers when he appears to dismiss computer-composed "dance music" for lacking completely in a "subjective" aspect and representing only an "objective" beat, without syncopation and by necessity unifying and without multi-part composition.
While this makes up less than a paragraph at the very end of the book, it was quite disappointing, as it demonstrated the same lack of understanding he was rightly critical of in Bergson and Adorno's criticisms of jazz. Electronic music, and even more narrowly dance music, is extremely diverse, and is as much a reflection of the emerging digital culture as jazz was of emerging monopoly capitalism.
The temporal aesthetics of continuous-pulse styles of EDM like techno, psytrance, and DnB are structurally complex, and, to my view, are more consciously a musical representation of time as subject than much of the 20th century groove musics which Abel defends as being able to mount a meaningful challenge to the repressive reification of time imposed by industrial capitalism. It is the purpose of such musics, which are centered around a continuous tempo marked by a "bass drum" beat characteristic of each particular style, to push the regular meter of groove music to its extreme conclusion through an unfailingly regular beat, pushing it so far that the tick-tock workday experience of time is dissolved completely and replaced by the immediate and social experience of the continuously unfolding moment. Which is what rave culture, in my view, is all about. The close association between these forms of music and psychedelic culture pushes this point further.
Abel makes the interesting point that groove musics tend not to have definitive endings, relying often on fade-outs or medleys to transition from one track to another. This, he argues, is evidence of groove music being more than a metrical imitation of clock-time, and instead being an artistic representation of time itself, offering a critique of the capitalist subjugation to reified, objective time by creating within that temporal form a liberatory, affirmative experience for and by the working class. For working people, the objective time of capitalism is an undeniable and real aspect of lived experience, and not merely an abstraction. Groove music is powerful because it allows for the working class to reclaim this experience of time and to make use of it for their own purposes. Acccording to Abel, it is Adorno's failure to see this that results in his hopelessly pessimistic attitude towards popular music.
Now, consider electronic dance music. In many forms of EDM, there is no fade out, there is no medley, and there is definable end point because each piece is structurally linked to the previous and the next either by the compositions themselves, or by the manipulations of a DJ. There is no need to create the illusion of continuity, because the continuity is real. This continuity generally is maintained even between performers, with the next one coming on before the last one has finished. It would seem to follow from this that these forms of music are even better positioned than 20th C groove music to represent time. Which is, of course, where the term 'trance music' comes from.
And unlike earlier groove musics, until very recently, the performers and DJs that deliver this musical experience have not been turned into rock-stars by the sticky frigid fingers of the capitalist music industry. The division between performer and audience that long ago crystallized in 20th century styles and saw the near deification of a select few musicians is at odds with the very nature of dance music, where the performer/audience dichotomy is largely subsumed by an experience where everyone is an participant. The appropriation of electronic dance music by the capitalist mainstream is undermining this somewhat, but it does so paradoxically, as now we play dance music everywhere where people aren't and can't dance, and we even have "DJs" performing at stadiums. But the festival culture and club culture that created and nurtures the scene is still alive and well, and is where the really creative stuff is coming from.
So yeah. Great book, but I think the author should give more credit to modern electronic music, as he rightly criticizes those who came before him as failing to give proper credit to the popular musics of the 20th century. That dance music is inherently without syncopation or multi-part composition is factually inaccurate. But, more importantly, electronic dance music can be just as fertile a ground for launching an aesthetic critique of capitalism as jazz or funk, and much more so than rock and roll. Like the groove musics of the 20th century, contemporary dance music is diverse, and ought not to be dismissed.
Yes, some dance music is pedestrian and uninteresting. But so is Bachman Turner Overdrive.
May 23, 2024
Groove is a bit more unfocused than what I expected for a temporality-focused book from Haymarket's Historical Materialist series. Abel does provide some insight into the history of groove within music that is intriguing, but Abel's true value here may be as a crash course breakdown of how different Marxist philosophers have thought about time in the later chapters. Much of this breakdown will be familiar to anyone who has read much on temporality studies. I think if I came into this book expecting more in terms of music theory, I would have came away a bit more satisfied.
June 29, 2025
a very enjoyable journey through Marxist readings of temporality, though I found the conclusion surprisingly reductive - see Devogene's review. Abel keeps a great tension between measured and subjective time throughout. thoroughly recommend.
December 18, 2023
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote precious little on the subject of popular music. This wasn’t necessarily because they were insouciant toward it, but rather because – the advent of Tin Pan Alley half a world away notwithstanding – their lives pre-dated popular music as we understand it today. Edison’s phonograph was patented only six years before Marx’s death, and Engels passed away just as mass produced records were becoming widely available to the public. Neither could have had much notion of what we now call popular music, at least not in the context of a highly technological consumer capitalism. Anything they could have written would, by necessity, be quite far flung from the final word.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews