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Bring the Noise is the very first release of the ambitious (and highly promising) Barrelhouse Books, the D.C.-based magazine’s venture into indie publishing. I was drawn to the anthology in the hopes it would explain my unhealthy obsession with Jersey Shore (my working theory centers on the gravitational pull of JWoww’s chest). What I found instead, via the book’s strongest essays, was a sense of camaraderie: for better or worse, pop culture reflects where we are as a society now, and in hating or loving it—in examining what we hate or love about it—we figure out who we really are.
Comprised mostly of essays that previously appeared in Barrelhouse (five of the 18 are previously unpublished), the anthology is a potluck of voices and themes. It stretches the definition of pop culture to mean almost anything that could end up on TV or heard on the radio: from pro-wrestling, The Hills, the Chicago Cubs, and that creepy Wizard of Oz sequel (which I’d blocked from my memory almost entirely until this essay brought it back in vivid, nightmare-friendly detail), to Bob Dylan, payphones, and Pearl Jam. The range of these essays, however, is a reminder that pop culture isn’t always ubiquitous on a national scale, and so the tall order for a pop culture anthology—if it’s going to feel like the book it promises to be rather than, say, an issue of a journal—is that it be as robust and inclusive as possible.
In that sense, Bring the Noise falls short: none of the book’s essays, for instance, focus on any aspect of rap, R&B, or hip-hop (despite the book’s title sharing a name with a Public Enemy song—a fact the introduction doesn’t mention). But this omission isn’t nearly as glaring as the one that leads readers to assume that the version of pop culture under discussion in Bring the Noise is largely male: 13 of the 18 essays are by men. And the book is largely about men (and feels oftentimes like it’s for men: in one piece, the female partner of the speaker gets referred to simply as “Girlfriend”). It’s disappointing, considering that the editors had years of material to choose from, that there isn’t a more balanced range of voices.
What’s ironic about this oversight is that some of the book’s best essays portray pop culture as the “way in” for the societally neglected—pop culture as a unifying force with the potential to bring each of us into the fold. “Irish on Both Sides” by Tom Williams, ostensibly about the author’s obsession with the band Thin Lizzy, is really about what it means to grow up biracial, about the complicated forces that may or may not lead someone to pass for white. Chad Simpson’s very lovely “Home of the Poor and Unknown” examines the contradictions of class mobility via his allegiance to the Chicago Cubs. “For the Love of Good TV” is essentially Melanie Springer Mock’s thoughtful and well-crafted love letter to shows like The Love Boat and Seinfeld for providing her “a community of TV-believers” with whom she found a common ground within the more confined worlds of religion and, later, academia. Leslie Jill Patterson’s “We Know the Drill,” arguably the book’s most masterful essay, weaves personal narrative with threads about All in the Family, Lorena Bobbitt, and the portrayal of heterosexual marriage in television: it’s a powerhouse of an essay, more relevant—even prescient, in light of the Steubenville rape case—now more than ever.
A few essays in Bring the Noise aren’t afraid to take on the anthology’s own premise—that pop culture matters—and in doing so transcend the ephemeral nature of pop culture. Patrick Brown’s essay on The Hills asks outright: “So what am I doing watching [this]?” It’s a refreshing and smart examination of why we might be drawn to reality shows (and comes the closest to helping me figure out my Jersey Shore problem). Nic Brown’s essay “Drumming” also tackles the paradox of pop culture head on: In a moment on stage playing a gig, with “a sea of bouncing heads” before him, he confesses, “I look out at the crowd and, in my least charitable moment, ask, Why are any of you people here? I feel like anyone who wants to dance to the music I am playing is someone with whom I can never spend time.” It’s an astounding confession, one that makes up the backbeat of this collection’s best moments.
J. Capó Crucet is the author of How to Leave Hialeah, which won the Iowa Short Fiction Award and some other stuff. Stories and reviews have appeared in The PEN/O. Henry Prize Anthology, The Rumpus, Guernica, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, The L Magazine, and other places.