The nationwide debate over popular music’s influence on character is both furious and confused. Conservatives complain primarily about lyrics, appealing to open public decency and security. Liberals, swift to the protection of any self-expression, concurrently celebrate rock’s liberating ethos and deny its cultural influence. Carson Holloway is out to shatter the assumptions of pop’s critics and defenders as well, showing that music is usually more helpful than we think.

Plato and Aristotle, Holloway finds, were aware that music can either inflame the soul with interest or can awaken it to cause and help cultivate temperance. What Holloway proposes-a rediscovery from the musical intelligence of Plato and Aristotle-will totally change the way we think about music.