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Daniel J. Levitin's This is Your Brain on Music reads like a pop culture apologetic. If music is the voice of the culture, than Levitin is both its Talmudic scholar and scientist. He pores over every note of the Beatle's "Yesterday" to point out the song's brilliant seven-measure phrase, leaving no doubt that the Beatles were every bit as brilliant as Beethoven. While most music criticism tries to explain why music is important, Levitin is like the religious leader positing God's existence from an apple. See how perfectly it was created? Amazing!

Circumventing Frank Zappa's oft-quoted critique of music writers - "Writing about music is like dancing to architecture" - Levitin writes about music's timbres, meters, pitch and scales, rather than the music itself. The effect is oddly disconcerting, like reading a play review that only discusses the clothing and completely ignores the acting.

Levitin begins by breaking every piece of music down into numerous distinctive categories, from tone to harmony. He undresses songs for the readers, using examples from pop culture to illustrate a point. To show the effectiveness of exotic music, he points to the first three notes of David Bowie's "China Girl." The notes "instantly convey a rich and foreign musical context," he writes, like a slaver tapping on the song's legs with a ruler to show their strength. The essential problem of Levitin's conceit is how crude it reads. In order to save music criticism, he seems content to suck the mystery out it.

Here's another example of the same problem: "Maybe the only reason I'm drawn to Avril Lavigne's "Sk8ter Boi" is because it sets up anticipation for the second measure to be resolved and then subverts that expectation." Sure it's written well, but can you read that last sentence without yawning? Levitin describes much of our taste as firing neurons, finding patterns we already enjoy in music - which is to say that if I like Bowie's "Starman," it may be because it reminds me of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." Greil Marcus would have used that insight to discuss Bowie's androgyny, Judy Garland and homosexuality. Unfortunately, because Levitin is tethered to science, he never gets that far.

Therein lies the rub. For generating insights into music, or giving a listener new ears, This is Your Brain on Music is a gem. It contains a language with which to write about music. As a replacement for traditional music criticism, though, it gives no new insight into culture, or why certain kinds of music become popular. In the book sleeve, it promises to show where the power of music comes from - why jingles get stuck in your head, or why the USSR banned the Beatles. But the Beatles weren't banned for their historic use of counter-melodies. They were banned because of all the baggage of youth culture they brought with them.

Like the Reagen-era anti-drug campaign that its title parodies, This is Your Brain on Music cracks an egg over a frying pan, heats it over a flame and serves it to the reader. Except instead of showing said egg to the audience and intoning that "this is your brain on drugs," he straps headphones to the scrambled eggs and cranks up The Clash until breakfast explodes. Just like Bill Nye the Science Guy could explain how the sulfate exploded but not why explosions entice teenagers, Levitin can only explain how our brains respond when we turn the stereo up to 11. Not why.

Still it's clear that Levitin's intention is not to kill music dead. His book is full of his favorite songs, and anecdotes about his stereo system catching fire while playing Abbey Road. Unfortunately, the rest of the time the cold clinical aura of science interrupts his swooning over Elvis. Maybe that's for the best. This is Your Brain on Music works best as a primer. And as its title indicates, in the end it's really about your brain and not about the music.

by Mordechai Shinefield

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