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List Price: $24.95 | | Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Salesrank: 6177
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| Our Price: $14.78 |
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| Media: Hardcover |
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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:
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.
More music, more dancing: excellent!
2009-09-28 - I'll start with a disclaimer-I know Elijah personally, and have worked with him at music festivals, where his presentations on popular music history have always impressed me as intelligent, witty and based on the facts, without the hero worship or mythology that distorts popular music writing. The title of the book is a reference to the kind of commercialized myth-making that has given musicians like the Beatles and Robert Johnson such out-sized importance to the present; of course the Beatles didn't destroy popular music: they were part of an historical process that changed it profoundly, and this book examines that process.
Much music we listen to is totally divorced from it's natural environment. Folk music originally made by drunk people for drunk people is played in Unitarian coffeehouses. Religious music is played at gospel brunchs that serve champagne. To profound effect on the sound of the music, dance music is played where people never get up and dance. Music and dance together provide a social cohesion that has gone missing from our lives in the last 50 years, and this book is a fascinating look at how it happened.
Elijah's smart, light tone combined with his open ears and curiosity make this a great read. Every reader, me included, will have some preconceptions smashed reading this book, but the mix of fact and personality makes it a very lively reading experience, and I found his view of our music history made me go out and get some records I didn't pay much attention to before. And I'm definately going to learn the fox-trot.
Beatles Fans will buy anything with their name on it....
2009-09-24 - Beatles fans beware, the Beatles are not even mentioned until the last chapter of this book. This is not a book about the Beatles, rather it is a book about the author's view of the history modern popular music. Starting out with jazz, Blues and Big Band as it rightly should, Mr. Wald describes the evolution of rock describing how Paul Whitman"s Orchestra made the blues popular by playing it to a white audience up through the beginnings of R&B, rockabilly, the teen idol years and how we tend to listen to music through a filter, which is indeed true. One example is how a pop vocalist like Pat Boone would cover an R&B song and it would be a hit, yet the original barely charted.
This book can be tedious to read at times, pleasant at other times. The print is tiny but overall I enjoyed its content. It was a good history lesson, but as far as the title goes, I'm not convinced - the author has pulled a bait and switch to sell books and for that I think this author lacks some credibility. This book should have just been called "An Alternative History of American Popular Music" - and that's all!
