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Susan Fast. In the Houses of the Holy: Led Zeppelin and the Power of Rock Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. vii, 247 pp. ISBN 0-195-14723-5 (paperback). Perhaps the most significant aspect of Susan Fast's In the Houses of the Holy is its musicologicai dedication to a single artist within the realm of contemporary cultural theory-driven popular music studies. After two decades struggling at the margins of academic musicology, popular music studies in the 1990s finally reached a point where a single-artist project such as Fast's could be possible, as well as a useful contribution to the field. In many ways In the Houses of the Holy is a watershed and a compendium, summarizing the issues of popular music studies at the end of the twentieth century. Paradoxically, even as the concept of a single artist's career as the dominant investigative pole of scholarly music studies has been greatly devalued from within more traditional areas of musicology, it has remained important for the development of popular music studies. And this is where Fast's book really succeeds. It is not simply a stylistic biography of a single artist, blithely replicating the academic fetish for individual greatness. Rather, In the Houses of the Holy focuses on Led Zeppelin but ultimately aims toward usefulness well beyond that band. It is by no means the first scholarly book on a single popular music artist, but it is Fast who most usefully (and most interestingly) succeeds in this kind of project. Moreover, in doing so Fast generally remains cognizant of the successful methodologies and ideas that have come before, and which have even enabled her book to be written in the first place. With the above comments in mind, I was somewhat surprised at how little time Fast spends discussing how a book on a single artist should work when many of the ideas regarding the primacy of individual creators (understood through the metaphors of "genius" and "canon") have been so thoroughly deconstructed (largely by popular music scholars). She quite clearly sees In the Houses of the Holy along some familiar scholarly lines: celebrating Led Zeppelin's music and carving out a place among rock's "elite" by rescuing the band from misguided rock critics and misinformed musicologists. Both of those lines are perhaps understandable. After all, why write about something if you're not passionate about it? Moreover, setting the record straight is always important. Still, Fast largely neglects contextualizing her version of "celebration" as distinct from that of the non-academic presses. The result of this missing context allows a stamp of musicologicai objectivity ("Musicologist Explains Led Zeppelin") to linger throughout her text. That Fast uncritically begins the Introduction to In the Houses of the Holy with a statement by one fan "so happy that after years of being put down for worshipping such a 'declasse' band ... someone like you is giving their oeuvre the deserved attention of an academic" (p. 3) is a remarkable move: it continues the image of the academy as the final legitimizing authority for cultural content. The ultimate danger, therefore, in Fast's particular approach toward celebrating Led Zeppelin is to allow familiar ideologies regarding music, musicians, and academics to remain unchallenged. Each of the five chapters of In the Houses of the Holy circles around a single song or group of songs, approaching them from a wide range of areas. Fast has availed herself of useful writings across a range of cultural studies, and the perspectives she introduces are informative to the degree that the example given by In the Houses of the Holy provides important guides for future studies in rock music. Moreover, Fast provides extremely close readings of Led Zeppelin's music, of which she obviously has an exceedingly intimate knowledge. The content is rich and elegantly written as Fast moves through theories of textuality/intertextuality, myth/epic, appropriation/exoticism, the body/representation, etc. …

canadian university music review

Susan Fast. In the Houses of the Holy: Led Zeppelin and the Power of Rock Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. vii, 247 pp. ISBN 0-195-14723-5 (paperback)