Alex Harvey and “The Tomahawk Kid”: Mode and Interpretation
Alex Harvey and “The Tomahawk Kid”: Mode and Interpretation David Montgomery Abstract: Alex Harvey and the Sensational Alex Harvey Band achieved only marginal popularity during Harvey’s lifetime. Yet an examination of Harvey’s “The Tomahawk Kid,” based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, shows an idiosyncratic musical style that combines rock and Scottish Celtic influences, subtle textual interpretation, unique compositional choices, and modal tonalities. Introduction The academic study of popular music oscillates between two preoccupations. On one hand, the dogmas of sub-cultural theory still influence popular music discourse and general cultural theory to a great degree. On the other hand, this discourse cannot escape the parameters of its label— popular. In essence, the two poles may be staked as cultural theory versus popular appreciation; but in a way difficult to describe, the application of critical theory has begun to seem more like an attempt to avoid an aesthetic conundrum— a kind of elevation of the demotic artefact to a height it cannot bear. Ever resourceful, the practitioners of popular music studies have wriggled out of this quandary and into the at least temporarily secure embrace of post feminist studies, world pop, and the ethnography of locale; in other words, into areas where inquiry is either of self-evident importance, exotic, or comfortably esoteric. Even if the locale is no more exotic than Glasgow, Scotland or Montgomery, Alabama, or the object mundane, the conceit of the critical stance has proven sufficient. Things change, canons crumble, time has done its work. The difficult “aesthetics” of popular music studies, the indeterminate nature of its aims, is a nagging problem.
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