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List Price: $24.95 | | Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
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Editorial Review:
"There are no definitive histories," writes Elijah Wald, in this provocative reassessment of American popular music, "because the past keeps looking different as the present changes." Earlier musical styles sound different to us today because we hear them through the musical filter of other styles that came after them, all the way through funk and hiphop.
As its blasphemous title suggests, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll rejects the conventional pieties of mainstream jazz and rock history. Rather than concentrating on those traditionally favored styles, the book traces the evolution of popular music through developing tastes, trends and technologies--including the role of records, radio, jukeboxes and television --to give a fuller, more balanced account of the broad variety of music that captivated listeners over the course of the twentieth century. Wald revisits original sources--recordings, period articles, memoirs, and interviews--to highlight how music was actually heard and experienced over the years. And in a refreshing departure from more typical histories, he focuses on the world of working musicians and ordinary listeners rather than stars and specialists. He looks for example at the evolution of jazz as dance music, and rock 'n' roll through the eyes of the screaming, twisting teenage girls who made up the bulk of its early audience. Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and the Beatles are all here, but Wald also discusses less familiar names like Paul Whiteman, Guy Lombardo, Mitch Miller, Jo Stafford, Frankie Avalon, and the Shirelles, who in some cases were far more popular than those bright stars we all know today, and who more accurately represent the mainstream of their times.
Written with verve and style, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll shakes up our staid notions of music history and helps us hear American popular music with new ears.
How the Beatles Destroyed Rock n Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music Reviews:
Great ideas, but needs focus 
2009-11-28 - Wald makes a lot of outrageous claims, such as comparing the influence of Paul Whiteman to that of the Beatles, but in spite of this, Wald puts a narrative together that is always on the cusp of being fascinating, except that it never really comes together.
I'm trying to figure out as I read, What exactly is this book about? Where is the alternative in this history? What is the point. The author is tantalizingly close to having a point by the time he gets to the Swing Era, by which time the book seems to be congealing into a survey of American popular music from the perspective of the popular listener. It is becoming (at this time) a fairly comprehensive guide to who is listening to what, under what circumstances, and why these tastes change over time.
At this point, it had the potential to be a masterwork; but the book breaks down from there, meandering into a series of tangents without finding a point. Bebop is not mentioned, the death of the big-bands and the decline and eventual devastation of jazz is given a cursory treatment, and Wald drowns in an ocean of details that are put into the service of arguing minor points. By the time Wald gets to the Beatles, the reader has ceased to care enough to notice how questionable some of his analysis is.
In effect, Wald wrote half a book when he set out to write four or five. Wald would be an excellent contributer to the following series.
1.) The Rise of the Middle Class and the Dawn of American Popular Music.
2.) Blacks move North and Whites go to the cities: the Ragtime Life Begins.
3.) Louis Armstrong: from Ragtime to Jazz
4.) The Radio and Benny Goodman Swing that Music
5.) Meanwhile, Blues and Country Lurk
6.) Swing Ambushed From All Corners, from Bop on the one hand to Blues and
Country on the other, to the Cabaret Tax and the LP.
7.) R&B and Rock & Roll--and how the Beatles widened the chasm.
8--etc all the stuff that's happened since.
This is not something that can be done in the scope of the Wald book. You need either a huge Tome or a series to truly cover the kind of ground that Wald wants to cover, and indeed, the pace of the last couple of chapters is so frantic that even Wald must have felt like he was writing the last pages of a term paper on the due day. Wald seems like a great guy to do this and it needs to be done.
Well-written, enlightening, easy-to-read, eye-opening book about popular music 
2009-11-20 - "How the Beatles Destroyed Rock n Roll" is well-written and entertaining, as well as educational. It is a fabulous book on many levels. I will focus on three:
1. Music History
2. Music as a Business
3. Race Relations and Music
These 3 main threads are carried through the whole book continuously. It is not as though there is a "section" on music history. But rather, the author takes you on a journey, more or less chronologically, from 1850 to about 1985, discussing these 3 subject areas and how they affected the development of music.
1. Music History
Era by era, the author discusses popular artists of the time, what made them popular, and how certain ones are remembered today as "great influences" while others have been completely forgotten. One of the most important lessons one learns upon reading this book is that the reasons certain artists were immensely popular are very often nothing like what one would imagine. More importantly, the artists who are remembered as "great ones" of a particular style are often not the ones who were most popular at the time. We confuse who is now considered "great" from a particular era with who had the most influence over the course of music during that era.
Even if you are a musician, or a historian with an otherwise very thorough knowledge of music history, you will learn a great deal from the history facet of this book. If you think that the history of rock `n roll is that it derived from jazz and blues, read this book. You'll be surprised. It is nothing so simple.
There are amazing statistics in this book that will challenge what you thought was true about music popularity. For example, Paul Simon's debut album out-sold every single Rolling Stones album except one. While both artists are well-known and were certainly "major influences", it is surprising to see that the Rolling Stones (popular as they were) virtually never managed to put out that big a seller, yet Paul Simon did. The book is full of fascinating information like this. More importantly, the author didn't just fill up a book with "gee whiz" anecdotes. These facts are always included as evidence to make a critical point about music history and popularity.
2. The Business of Selling Music
The author does a wonderful job of explaining how music as a money-making business migrated from being dominated by sheet-music sales, to generating dance-hall revenue, to recorded music. A very thorough discussion is included of how technology (records, portable amplifiers and microphones, television, radio) massively affected how music was sold and distributed. Even more importantly, these things affected the kind of music people listened to, where they listened to it, how much they would pay for it, and how that impacted the lives of working musicians and music distributors and publishing companies. The end product of all this was that the direction of modern music through the decades was changed by these physical everyday devices and by how money could be made in the music business.
3. Race Relations and Music
A good deal of the book, in section after section, era after era, is devoted to discussing how people of different races worked together, or for each other, in the music business. The book talks about the origins of music predominantly played and written by blacks, and that by whites, and how they merged and influenced each other, to the common benefit of both, through the decades. There is a lot of discussion of racism and the difficulties experienced by black musicians being respected, hired, paid, or even being in the "public eye" as good artists.
It is in this context that the title, about the Beatles "ruining" rock `n roll, is explained deep in the book. I won't ruin the book or steal the author's thunder by explaining all that here. But suffice it to say, you will again be delighted and surprised by what the writer means by "ruin", and once again, he has a brilliant and insightful point to make.
SUMMARY:
In short, whether you think you know all there is to know about the history of music, or you are just a new student to the subject, you will find this book entertaining and enlightening. The influences that made certain artists famous, or infamous, will astound you. The reasons music took the turns that it did, stylistically, at various points in history, will surprise you. I have been an amateur musician for over 30 years. I have listened to and played everything from Beethoven to opera, ragtime, 40s swing, rock-a-billy, The Beatles, folk rock, punk, grunge, and more. And STILL, there was something to learn on practically every page of this book.
It will change the way you look at artists, old and new. It will change the way you think about how music is written and sold. It will change how you see music, in general. It is a stunning book.
You Won't Like the Whole Book 
2009-11-07 - It's difficult to decide whether this book is worth recommending or not. As other reviewers here have pointed out, the title is an entirely misleading gimmick designed, I guess, to lure fans of the Stones, but there's no disputing that this book is a superbly-researched, accurate, and detailed history of popular music in the USA during the twentieth century. Elijah Wald must've read every liner note, every top-ten list, and every copy of every old trade paper ever printed. He quotes from "Billboard," "Cashbox" (the periodical about jukeboxes which ceased publication in 1996), and something called "Talking Machine Journal." Only someone with genuine love and devotion for pop music would be so obsessed as to spend years researching all aspects of it.
That's the good part.
Alas, it is my unhappy duty to report that the quality of writing is stilted, tedious and, for someone shown posing with a guitar, entirely unmusical. Getting through the entire book without skipping whole chapters is a rough slog. I suppose that Wald is following the concept that, to give something as common as pop music an intellectual patina, it is necessary to write in an academic style, and this book reads like someone's Ph.D. thesis. Naturally, there's the expected rumination over the contrast between high art and popular culture that's been chewed for decades, but Professor Wald proposes several startling hypotheses as well!
As everyone knows, the history of popular music in the twentieth century is basically the story of white musicians copying the style and innovations of black musicians. But wait! Professor Wald demonstrates that black musicians in turn admired white music, and he repeats several times how Louis Armstrong liked the music of Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians. Isn't that nice?
I guess that the main premise of the book is that live music that people dance to is superior to music with a pretense of being art. For one thing, it keeps more musicians employed, and it's a good thing that live dance musicians are versatile enough to play in various styles. See, that's where the Beatles thing comes in. The Fab Four were, in Professor Wald's view, great while they were a live performing act who could handily play covers of a wide variety of music, but when they became strictly an "artistic" studio group, something was lost. I think that's what Wald's basic point is, but by that juncture in the book I was so bored that I stopped paying attention. (I guess I fail his course.)
The fundamental problem with "How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'N' Roll: An Alternative History of American Pop Music" is that the actual content of the book covers too wide an era and is too general. The mention of the Beatles in the title is likely to attract those of the Baby-Boom generation who came of age during the group's popularity, but most of those readers will have scant interest in discussions of much earlier music such as the debt the Andrews Sisters owe to the Boswell Sisters or who Illinois Jacquet played with or who bought the arrangements of Fletcher Henderson.
On the other hand, I favor old music from before my time, so I enjoyed the first half of the book and learned a lot from it, but by the second half of the book I cared nothing about how many singers did covers of "Shout" or (another of Wald's deep revelations) how easy-listening albums actually outsold rock & roll records or who the first group to perform The Twist in the White House was. Chubby Checker, of course, was was given that name in imitation of Fats Domino (at the time Mad magazine predicted that the next R&B star would be "Porky Parcheesi"), but this book goes into excruciating detail about the development and evolution of The Twist. It seems unlikely that anyone seriously interested in The Twist's history would also be fascinated by Wald's discussion of how Irving Berlin's 1911 song "Alexander's Ragtime Band" does not qualify as genuine ragtime or how many versions of "After the Ball" (a waltz Wald seems weirdly obsessed with) there were.
In brief, it's a fine reference book, but reading the entire thing will cause your Eyes to Glaze Over.
Interesting Tidbits, But Overall Misses The Mark
2009-09-29 - [...] I scan the liner notes of some often-played recordings, but no hit. "I know this name from somewhere" and it's driving me nuts.
Wald's premise in "How the Beatles Destroyed Rock and Roll" is that what we perceive today as popular music, as well as what history tells us was popular in decades past, is often shaped by misleading or incomplete benchmarks, whose original meanings have long since evolved.
In our current age of recorded and even semi-recorded "live" music, Wald asks us to consider a time when records were regarded as mementos and sales tools for a band or artist's live performances. For an industry today in the throws of tumultuous change, it's fascinating to read about the economics of sheet music versus record music production, Prohibition and Wartime rationing, labor conflicts involving musician's unions and publishers, not to mention demographics and evolving social mores and how they all influenced the environment for both live and recorded music and its subsequent evolution into the mass-pop-culture we're living in today.
Beginning with ragtime, which the author identifies as the first mainstream popular music in America, Wald traces more a parallel history of popular music than an alternate one. While he presents a steady stream of ironic and interesting subplots and twists, much of the overriding story in which he couches his insights is the stuff of standard jazz and pop music history, well-covered in other books and even in abridgements such as Ken Burns' series. If you've never read a history of jazz, Wald's narrative may seem strangely selective and arbitrary, but I suspect that's part of his point about history itself.
Unfortunately, somewhere just past the middle of the book, Wald's premise morphs into
a fairly ordinary and un-ironic evolution of rock music from blues, R&B and the remnants of swing, along with an attempt at 50's pop revisionism. Aside from an interesting digression on the birth of the LP and derivation of the term "Album", most of this is standard 50's lore and I didn't detect much new.
The title of the book is particularly unfortunate and I suspect more than one reader will wonder half way through, having barely scratched the 1940's, whether "How Paul Whiteman Destroyed Jazz" or "Mitch Miller: The Real King of Pop" might have been more appropriate, though certainly less appealing titles to younger generations of readers. "How Dick Clark Destroyed New Year's Eve" would make a fine sequel, tying up all those Guy Lombardo references.
Another repeated annoyance is the author's jarring tendency to step out of third-person narrative and into first, as in:
"...the dislocations and population shifts of World War II all had roles in breaking up the big dance orchestras' dominance of popular music, but most of the records I just mentioned..."
The jacket bio states Wald has been teaching at UCLA; I fear he may be reading too many student papers.
But the real disappointment in "How the Beatles Destroyed Rock and Roll" is the concluding chapter on the Fab Four where Wald's grand
thesis amounts to: The Beatles, as part of the British Invasion, were somehow responsible
for divorcing white American kids from the dance-esthetic at the core of all good popular music when they abandoned public performance and began making records that amounted to "audio novels". Thus began the irreproachable chasm between white and black musics that has not healed, even today.
If you buy that, and are willing to ignore a great deal of what's emerged as popular music in the past 30 years, not to mention hoards of white suburban kids embracing hip-hop culture, you'll find Wald's book a sympathetic read.
[...]
A Brilliant Earful
2009-09-28 - Elijah Wald has written a social history of American pop music that, in its own way, ranks alongside books like David Hajdu's "Lush Life," Will Friedwald's "Jazz Singing," and Jonathan Gould's "Can't Buy Me Love." Yes, the title is a bit of a teaser. But the story Wald tells, and the argument he makes -- that rock music after the Beatles implied a very different set of relations among black and white musicians, music as a form of socialization, the music industry, technology, and the individual listener -- are superbly executed and, to my mind, rather convincing. His research not only reveals how early 20th century music -- beginning, he argues, with ragtime -- became something we now call "pop culture," but uncovers as well much of the bias we bring to our assessment of earlier musical styles and tastes. That Wald eschews technical descriptions -- scales, chord progressions, etc. -- in favor of exploring the archive of popular writing on music is, I think, a plus. The quotes he pulls from old music magazines and trade journals give the reader a real sense of how the music of the past was received and understood and argued about by contemporaries -- and the quotes are also incredibly fun to read. Ultimately, Wald's book is both an objective, if carefully selected, cultural history and a complaint. What makes the book so valuable is that you can disagree with the complaint and still learn a great deal from the history. Brilliant, indispensable; will make you listen to the pop music of the past with a new, better ear.
