How The Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music

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More About This Book

Overview


Overthrowing the conventional pieties of mainstream jazz and rock history, Elijah Wald 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. 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 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.

"Wald's book is suave, soulful, ebullient and will blow out your speakers."
--Tom Waits

"Wald is a meticulous researcher, a graceful writer and a committed contrarian.... An impressive accomplishment."
--Peter Keepnews, New York Times Book Review

"One of those rare books that aims to upend received wisdom and actually succeeds."
--Kirkus Reviews

"It is as an alternative, corrective history of American music that Wald's book is invaluable. It forces us to see that only by studying the good with the bad--and by seeing that the good and bad can't be pulled apart--can we truly grasp the greatness of our cultural legacy."
--Malcolm Jones, Newsweek

"Wald wears his scholarship lightly, but his ideas and insights are substantial.... The attention-grabbing title, for all its counterintuitive appeal, gives scant indication of the book's ambitions and achievements."
--David Suisman, The Sixties

Editorial Reviews

Mark Athitakis
In How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll, Elijah Wald constructs a history of pop that challenges received wisdom. He resists the bomb-throwing tone of the title and, like many scholars, routinely qualifies his assertions. But his version of history is provocative in several ways.
—The Washington Post
Peter Keepnews
…cheerfully iconoclastic…if you're looking, as Wald's subtitle has it, for "an alternative history of American popular music"—specifically from the turn of the 20th century to roughly the mid-1970s—you've found it. And if you're up for some good arguments, you've found those too…Wald is a meticulous researcher, a graceful writer and a committed contrarian.
—The New York Times
More Reviews (2) Fewer Reviews
Library Journal

Although the provocative title of Wald's latest suggested to this reviewer another "why the Rolling Stones were more important than the Beatles" tome, this, like Wald's Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues, is an alternative view of history. Unlike most studies that include Tin Pan Alley, ragtime, jazz, blues, pop, country, rock, R&B, soul, disco, and other genres, Wald's history of American popular music from the late 19th century to the 1970s contains significant discussions of the likes of Paul Whiteman, Mitch Miller, Guy Lombardo, and others who, despite being well known and influential in their times, tend to be ignored today. Wald explains musical and recording techniques and sociological phenomena in an engaging style accessible to a wide range of readers. Throughout, he makes a compelling case for why the figures most historians have disregarded or footnoted need to be considered in order to understand the totality of American popular music. This is an ideal companion to the plethora of standard histories available. Highly recommended.
—James E. Perone

Kirkus Reviews
A bracing, inclusive look at the dramatic transformation in the way music was produced and listened to during the 20th century. It wasn't always something you heard at home or through an earpiece, writes music historian and journalist Wald (Riding with Strangers: A Hitchhiker's Journey, 2006, etc.). "Until recording, music did not exist without someone playing it, and as a result music listening was necessarily social." People went out to listen to bands, bought sheet music of the songs they liked and played it with family and friends. Even after the arrival of commercial phonograph recordings, people still went out, because they wanted to dance. Radio made professional music available at home and completed the change records had begun. Now musicians' names were associated with popular songs, and people used to hearing a particular version on the air wanted to hear it when they went dancing as well. Wald emphasizes the important role of technology, which had at least as much impact as changing musical styles. In fact, he argues, jazz and rock 'n' roll were not the apocalyptic breaks with the past depicted in conventional accounts. Female fans in particular tended to be receptive to new sounds, especially when embodied by a hot swing band or sexy, hip-swiveling Elvis, without feeling the need to throw out their Glenn Miller or Perry Como records. Wald rejects the purists' disdain for popularizers like Paul Whiteman and the Beatles, who polished rough-hewn art forms and made them palatable to the mainstream. He doesn't offer much truly new material, but he puts it together in fresh ways, with wonderful nuggets about the recording ban of the early 1940s and the impact of long-playing albums.It's a shame the narrative essentially stops in the early '70s, since Wald surely would have interesting insights about the fragmented, DIY world of MP3 players and musicians selling their product online. One of those rare books that aims to upend received wisdom and actually succeeds.

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780199756971
  • Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
  • Publication date: 10/1/2011
  • Pages: 336
  • Sales rank: 335,228
  • Product dimensions: 6.00 (w) x 9.10 (h) x 0.90 (d)

Meet the Author

Elijah Wald is a musician, writer and historian, whose books include Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues; Narcocorrido, about the modern Mexican ballads of drug trafficking; The Mayor of MacDougal Street (with Dave Van Ronk), and Global Minstrels: Voices of World Music. He has taught music history at UCLA, and written for a variety of newspapers and magazines.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction
1. Amateurs and Executants
2. The Ragtime Life
3. Everybody's Doin' It
4. Alexander's Got a Jazz Band Now
5. Cake Eaters and Hooch Drinkers
6. The King of Jazz
7. The Record, the Song and the Radio
8. Sons of Whiteman
9. Swing that Music
10. Technology and Its Discontents
11. Walking Floors and Jumpin' Jive
12. Selling the American Ballad
13. Rock the Joint
14. Big Records for Adults
15. Teen Idyll
16. Twisting Girls Change the World
17. Say You Want a RevolutionEL Epilogue: The Rock Blot and the Disco Diagram Bibliography Index

Customer Reviews

Average Rating 3.5
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Sort by: Showing all of 3 Customer Reviews

  • Anonymous

    Posted January 21, 2012

    WHAT!!!!

    I want a fun book to read. So i found this and the tittle is disturbing to me. What do they mean by the beatles destroyed rock 'n roll? I am a true blue swadde shoe beatle fan and i wanna know what is going on.

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Anonymous

    Posted December 31, 2011

    Recommended

    I haven't actually read this book - I bought it as a gift for someone. It was highly recommended by a college professor of music.

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Posted February 28, 2010

    Can't Put It Down

    Always a lover of all musical styles and genres, I had thought that there was one, true history of how American music came to be. With this very entertaining and informing book, I now realize that the lines are not clear and there is so much overlap and mixing between regions, styles and cultures and that our country is very lucky to have had it turn out this way. I especially enjoyed the early sections of the book where musical entertainment was up to players in homes and community gathering places (with sheet music) and how technology and changes in recording impacted the entire industry. I plan on giving this book to my musical friends as gifts throughout this year. Well done Mr. Wald!

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.
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