Inspiring Older Readers

posted on 28 Nov 2018

Breaking Down The Walls of Heartache: how music came out by Martin Aston

If you set yourself the task of writing a history of how LGBT musicians influenced the popular music scene from the beginning of the 20th century until the present day, you’ve got some tough decisions to make. You can either go for drawing the broadest landscape you possibly can, or, you can mine a few selected areas for depth and restrict yourself to a limited number of stories that might be representative of the points you want to bring out. Aston’s slab of a book – it’s well over 500 pages – goes for the former.

What we get as a result is a strictly chronological journey through the decades with Aston pulling back the curtain on stars of the day, just how deeply in the closet they were and how lyrics to songs were often barely disguised or coded messages about their sexuality. This can, of course, be hugely entertaining, especially when he’s uncovering some of the background machinations of the music business that the average listener is never going to know about.

But there’s also a danger in this approach. Once that the initial frisson of the show and tell becomes blunted by the constant pulling of the same rabbit out of the same hat, the ‘I didn’t know he/she was gay!’ element begins to pall and the book becomes, at times, nothing much more than a catalogue of LBGT pop acts.

I’m aware that this sounds a little carping and I don’t mean it to be. I did enjoy the book, it’s an easy read and there’s lots of gossipy information I didn’t know and loved stumbling on. And, I think there’s a place for a book like this that is so thoroughly grounded in research and knowledge of the scene because it fills in so much of the background to a pop culture that has, at times, been afraid to speak its name.

But there are some downsides too. The book shuttles us along a timeline and doesn’t really give us that much space to consider how we should respond to some of the issues that arise. There’s a sort of flattening out of the peaks and troughs in such a way that potentially momentous events or fascinating psychological insights are never taken up and developed.

There’s also a distinct lack of texture in the background canvas of this story – the social and political fabric is only touched on in the most superficial ways and it becomes hard to assess the significance or impact of the musicians and impresarios who fill the pages. We can perhaps say what significance they had for us as individuals or for Aston himself but we don’t get any real sense of their impact on the wider social fabric.

I would have loved to have more speculation from Aston about issues that were left to dangle in mid-air because he wanted to hurry us on to the next significant personality. These aren’t trivial questions either : how can we evaluate the similarities and differences between the gay experience in pop from that of the lesbian experience? What role is patriarchy playing in this?  What are the circumstances that create and allow homophobia to continue flourishing in certain parts of the music industry ( yes, you  lot - poodle rockers, some rappers, some reggae artists)?

By the end of the book I was fully sated in terms ticking off the list of LGBT artists who have undoubtedly shaped pop culture over the past century but it left me thirsting for more analysis and more informed opinion. I can, however, entirely go along with the central thesis of this book – LGBT performers have always been there, always will be and are hugely influential and creative. As such this becomes an informative and valuable reference book and certainly it helps me to describe what’s been happening but where it leaves me much less satisfied is in the fact that it doesn’t move me along much further in genuinely understanding this phenomenon.

You can get a paperback or hardback of this book which should be available to order from your local independent book store.

 

Terry Potter

November 2018