Hole in Our Soul looks at popular music from the early days of jazz, blues, country and gospel through the rise of rock 'n' roll and the excesses of the MTV era. Martha Bayles defends the hardy, affirmative spirit of Afro-American music against the anarchistic, nihilistic impulses of the European avant-garde, which, she argues, were grafted onto rock in the late 1960s and led to a cult of brutality and obscenity in subsequent genres like heavy metal, punk and rap.