You are a customer walking through a large department store, pushing a cart, browsing the many offerings stacked neatly onto steel shelves and framed by boldly lettered price tags. The aisle is wide and easy to navigate. The floor is clean and decorated with the company's signature color scheme. The air resonates with the soft beeps from the checkout aisle, the rustling of merchandise being shifted on shelves, and the squeak of shoes on a tile floor. These sounds are all blanketed by a generally inoffensive music peppered with produced voice-overs announcing special deals. This is a place you have been before, even if you have never visited this particular location. It is comfortable, familiar, and seemingly transparent. …

After writing a scathing review of Jimmy Buffett's 2018 jukebox musical Escape to Margaritaville, New York Times critic Jesse Green made the uncommon move of penning a follow-up article in response to reader backlash. Claiming "the Parrotheads are after me," Green cites no less a literary titan as Oscar Wilde in defending his "moral duty" to pan a show that is as "objectionable and cynical" as Buffett's musical, which ran for only 124 performances at Broadway's Marquis Theatre between February and July 2018. Comments posted on the original review passionately rush to the defense of not only Buffett but the medium of jukebox musicals on the whole. "Everything doesn't have to be Hamlet or Sondheim," one commenter writes. Another suggests that Green "chill out with a margarita or two." A third launches a more elaborate attack, writing:

Look at the first word in the title "Escape!" It's not supposed to be a high brow stiff collared musical. It is about the dream of the lifestyle for those of us who have to sit at a desk all day doing work we don't like for someone who doesn't care. But I guess you either get it or you don't. Fins Up!

While listening may certainly be abstracted and disambiguated to encompass many different human experiences, all acts of listening entail some human relationship with sound. Sound, which David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny (2015, p. 2) defined as "vibration that is perceived and becomes known through its materiality," has long been a vexing object of study for scholars across the humanities. Sound is material, yet often seems to defy clear description. Think of the tired philosophical maxim: When a tree falls in a forest, does it make a sound? The question calls attention to the fact that sound straddles the ontological line between a material object in space and the experienced phenomenon. While listening is a primary way that humans experience sound, there are innumerable other ways that sound moves and affects bodies in space. Sound studies is a disciplinary home for those who want to consider the sonic world without necessarily privileging one mode of experience over another.

Put simply, sound studies is an interdisciplinary academic genre that deals with sound from numerous perspectives. Unlike disciplines like anthropology which are united by common methods or those like musicology which are united by a specific object of study, attempts to define sound studies necessarily celebrate the breadth of topics and multitudinous approaches employed by its practitioners. Jonathan Sterne (2012), the field's most recognized voice, has described sound studies as less of a centralized discipline and more of an "interdisciplinary ferment that takes sound as its analytical point of departure or arrival" (p. 2).

Working in popular music history can sometimes feel like a canonization effort in progress. Those who teach courses in American popular music, in particular, may recognize this anxiety. As hard as we may try to truly convey the historical chaos of popular music history—where recordings circulate unpredictably, where stories are blurred by stained glass windows of industrial marketing machines, and where discussions of race, gender, and sexuality exist within discussions of taste and feeling—the implicit format of books, course syllabi, magazine articles, and documentaries can sometimes pressurize the chaos into a semi-rigid teleology. To tell a perspicuous story of recorded popular music, historians and educators must make decisions about which moments and connections seem most representative of a given musical object's history. This can end up looking a lot like historical formalism and, for myself, creates a sinking sense of a canon of music, voices, moments, and themes that calcifies despite our best efforts. How might we avoid this? I often encourage my students to consider history as a spider-web, rather than a timeline. The best we can do is pick up a thread and follow it along the seemingly infinite nodes through which it passes.

Eric Weisbard's Hound Dog deftly demonstrates what can be gained by embracing this chaos. He carves out an engaging and unpredictable path through the American popular music canon like a machete-wielding traveler weaving in-and-out of a well-worn forest trail.