First off, the musical subject of this interesting book is less likely to be familiar to folklorists than its cultural/subcultural approach. Kimberly Kattari’s work is a deeply academic analysis of a musical sub-genre hatched in England and the United States in the mid-to-late 1970s, now receding due to the growing (middle) age of its leading practitioners. A musical form derived from 1950s-style rockabilly and 1970s punk, psychobilly was—or is—an odd hybrid of the energetic American acoustic style brought to the fore by Elvis Presley and many other young southern players and the loud, defiant sound of British punk.
Kattari’s book has less to do with the roots of psychobilly than with its metabolism as a subculture serving young musicians and an audience committed to stepping over these roots and creating something original, distanced from pop and other musical forms engineered by the recording industry for young audiences. Hence the author’s attentiveness to the distinctive hairstyles of psychobilly musicians and their favoring elaborately decorated upright bass fiddles over electric bass guitars. Details such as these are useful markings of psychobilly’s borrowings from the past and the musical community’s insistence upon creating a clear distinction not only from its musical roots but also from other forms of music in the air—the mark of a clearly defined subcultural community.
How well Kattari defines this community is consequently a matter of some importance. As an ethnomusicologist specializing in popular music, Kattari’s effort is somewhat uneven. On the plus side, her incorporation of wide-ranging fieldwork provides breadth and solidity to the study, as does a broad employment of academic literature. The book is original in its organization, giving special attention to the place of women in the unique (largely male) world psychobilly creates for itself in the performances that inscribe its boundaries and recharge its membership.
On the negative side, for a book about music, Kattari does not always display a sure hand in describing what she and her subjects are hearing. Psychobilly is not only a subcultural musical form; most readers will also find it somewhat obscure, if relying upon the author to create bridges between what she has heard and what we have heard. This is not an easy problem to solve, but it is a challenge with which ethnomusicologists are familiar. I own albums by a couple of the psychobilly bands to which Kattari refers, but I found this familiarity insufficient in drawing the comparisons necessary to follow several of the author’s key points. It might have been worth the time and trouble to package even a brief CD sampler of some important artists, or--if not--to expand the book’s skimpy discography with either brief descriptions of the thirty-two items the discography contains, or to select for description a few of the titles international companies like Bear Family has released. After all, Bear Family has released more than one hundred psychobilly titles. (Please note: this is not an endorsement of Bear Family.)
Belaboring this point a little bit further, I noted above that Kattari establishes the importance of the psychobilly “look.” Yet only five of the book’s fourteen black-and-white photographs depict the appearance of psychobilly musicians or enthusiasts. It turns out that web merchant Etsy sells more than six hundred different items that their website identifies as “psychobilly.” I don’t take their word for it and would welcome Kattari’s guidance through Etsy’s maze of t-shirts and hair clips. (Note: I don’t endorse Etsy.) My point is that images are out there that might provide a useful supplement to this book. If Kattari did no more than identify sites where the music and apparel that are distinctive to psychobilly could be found, then the rather thin discography and illustrations would be considerably enhanced.
All in all, the book under review is an original and worthy undertaking. No offense, but
ethnomusicology seldom yields solid academic books about American subcultural music.
Scholars interested in the subject should find in
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[Review length: 664 words • Review posted on April 29, 2021]