Love for Sale: Pop Music in America

by David Hajdu

Overview

Pop Music: Our Most Influential Laboratory for Social and Aesthetic Experimentation—Changing the World Three Minutes at a Time

Named a Must-Read by Vanity Fair and the BBC as well as a Best Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly

In Love for Sale: Pop Music in America, from the vaudeville singer Eva Tanguay, the “‘I Don’t Care’ Girl,” who upended Victorian conceptions of feminine property to become one of the biggest stars of her day, to the scandal of Blondie playing disco at CBGB, David Hajdu—one of the most respected music historians of our time—presents an incisive and idiosyncratic history of a form that has repeatedly upset social and cultural expectations.

Hajdu, unbound by the usual tropes of pop music history, gives a star turn to Bessie Smith and the blues queens of the 1920s who brought wildly transgressive sexuality to American audiences decades before rock and roll. And Jimmie Rodgers, a former blackface minstrel performer, who created country music from the songs of rural whites and blacks...entwined with the sound of the Swiss yodel.

Surveying the late-nineteenth century to the present era of digital streaming, Love for Sale is as authoritative as it is impassioned, drawing from the critic’s unique history as a besotted fan and lifelong student of pop.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250141217
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	10/10/2017
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.70(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

David Hajdu is the music critic for The Nation and a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He is the author of Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn (1996), Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña, and Richard Fariña (2001), The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America (2008), and Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics, and Culture (2009). He lives in Manhattan.

Table of Contents

Introduction 3

1 The Sheet Music Era: The Zenith of the Popular Music Craze 13

2 The Rise of Records: Whispering 29

3 The Cotton Club: Jungle Nights in Harlem 45

4 The Charts: Make-Believe Island 63

5 Going West: Hollywood Barn Dance 79

6 Rock and Roll: They Went CA-Raaaaazy For It! 101

7 The Transistor: Mine Completely 123

8 Singers and Songwriters: Potty About Dylan 135

9 The Album: A Pair of Twenty-Minute Things 151

10 Punk Versus Disco: Who Needs Love? 171

11 Video: Moonwalkers 185

12 Hip-Hop: Beats Want to be Free 197

13 Digitization: The Immaterial World 211

Coda 237

Notes 245

Acknowledgments 289

Index 291

Editorial Reviews

"Love for Sale: Pop Music in America is easy to devour for anyone who still feels a pang of nostalgia or despair when walking past a bank branch where a record store used to be." —The New York Times Book Review

"One of our sharpest music critics." —The Wall Street Journal

"No, this is not just a standard history of “Pop Music in America.” This is a very personal and utterly wonderful book about the subject." —Buffalo News

" Writing in graceful prose, Hajdu nicely balances brisk historical narrative, shrewd cultural analysis, and opinionated personal reflection in an absorbing account of shifting musical landscapes." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"A highly learned pleasure for music and pop-culture buffs." —Kirkus Reviews

"This beautifully told history of popular music, like a great pop song, is full of memorable lines." —Library Journal

"Pop music is often dismissed as light, frivolous and artistically bankrupt. But in his new book Love for Sale, music critic David Hajdu argues that it’s one of the most meaningful forms of expression in American culture." —Time Magazine

"A blend of history, criticism, and autobiography...it does touch on most major developments in how pop music has been produced and consumed in the United States from the 1890s through the present." —Los Angeles Review of Books

From the Publisher

David Hajdu is a considerate writer more interested in taking care of his readers than in baiting them. In this regard he is unlike a majority of pop music critics, who are always looking for a fight. His fifth book, Love for Sale: Pop Music in America, is easy to devour for anyone who still feels a pang of nostalgia or despair when walking past a bank branch where a record store used to be…Hajdu…traces the history of pop from the sheet-music past to the streaming present with the friendly authority of a favorite teacher…his critical observations are measured and nuanced…[Love for Sale is] educational and entertaining.

The New York Times Book Review - Jim Windolf

★ 08/22/2016
Romance, social bonding, and self-definition are readily available for the price of a Victrola cylinder, record, CD, or iTunes download, posits music critic Hajdu in this illuminating, idiosyncratic history of pop music. Hajdu (Positively Fourth Street) goes back to Tin Pan Alley sheet-music hits, then forward through jazz and swing, Elvis and rock, disco, rap, and electronica, along with many quirky detours down forgotten byroads. (Singing movie cowboys Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, he contends, held a profound sway over later country-western innovators such as Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson.) There’s a modicum of influence-tracing here to explain the evolution of pop styles, leavened with the author’s colorful reminiscences of stars he has interviewed and his presence at the birth of the 1970s New York punk scene at CBGB. But Hajdu is more interested in how changes in music and musical technology affect listeners—the transistor radio, he writes in a tour de force section, turned listening to music into a solitary, ruminative pursuit rather than a social pastime—and how songs shape teens’ memories and tribal mores. Writing in graceful prose, Hajdu nicely balances brisk historical narrative, shrewd cultural analysis, and opinionated personal reflection in an absorbing account of shifting musical landscapes. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

09/01/2016
This latest offering by music fan, professor, established critic, and author Hajdu (Positively 4th Street; Lush Life) marvels at the history of popular music bolstered by interviews with major artists conducted over the years, personal experiences, and a wide range of supporting research. The author discusses how the publishing of sheet music in the late 1800s made songs accessible to millions and turned the genre into a commodity that could be bought and sold, thereby starting a "music industry." Also covered are evolutions of a variety of types of popular music (with African American artists almost always breaking new ground and leading the way), with related trips through performance, recording, dance, and video. The author demonstrates technology's contribution to shifts in the delivery of pop music as well as its creation. For example, records originally focused on the reproduction of live performances, then the artistic role of the producer grew, playing a greater part in sonic creations and manipulations. VERDICT This beautifully told history of popular music, like a great pop song, is full of memorable lines. [See Prepub Alert, 4/18/16.]—Lani Smith, Ohone Coll. Lib., Fremont, CA

Library Journal

2016-08-02
Strolling through the archives of pop music history with an experienced guide.There are no grand theses or postmodern theoretical turns here. Instead, Nation music critic Hajdu (Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics, and Culture, 2009, etc.) approaches the vast stretch of pop history as a particularly tasteful exercise in picking tunes from an impossibly well-stocked jukebox, very much personally curated and with each choice well defended. Thus, as he notes near the opening, he can probably do without hearing “Yesterday” again (“I can barely still hear qualities I heard in the song at various times in the past”), preferring instead to spin the Beatles’ little-heard contemporary tune “Tell Me What You See,” because, in addition to its musical qualities, it conjures up a kiss from a high school girlfriend. That personal approach would not work if Hajdu were not so well-versed on his pop history firsthand. When he writes of the early history of music videos, it helps that he was one of the earliest video journalists, just as when he writes of one-hit wonders like the New Jersey band Looking Glass, of “Brandy” fame, it helps that he was on the scene, ears wide open, when the song came out. The author’s ears extend beyond his own time span, though; he writes with knowledgeable appreciation of Frank Sinatra, Marni Nixon, and Billy Strayhorn—not to mention contemporary hip-hop. The center of his world, though, is the period when Brian Wilson, Ray Davies, Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, and their musical kin were making albums to set the world on fire. He even works in a quiet appreciation for disco, and with good humor: “Without getting too Ken Burns–ish about this, I’ll point out the significance of the first dance craze of the twentieth century, the vogue for the fox-trot, in cross-fertilizing cultural values and democratizing social life (within the limits of racial segregation) for young people of the day.” And so he does. A highly learned pleasure for music and pop-culture buffs.

Kirkus Review