 Fresh perspective on popular music; yes, the title is miscast and miscued |
| Review Date: July 4, 2009 |
| Reviewer: Jessica Weissman, Silver Spring, MD USA |
As nearly all other reviewers have noted, this book spends 230 pages on the history of popular music (jazz, dance music, R & B, rock, pop) before the Beatles show up. Yes, the Beatles and the rest of the British Invasion recast rock into a far more segregated thing that it was before their arrival. While I like the Beatles more than Wald does, I agree with this part of his analysis.
Ok, that's out of the way.
The real value of Wald's book is in writing a comprehensive history of the American popular music of the 20th century from the point of view of working musicians and ordinary listeners/dancers. We now think of genres such as jazz and orchestral dance music and rock country and so forth as absolutely separate. They once were not quite so separate.
Before recordings and before radio, musicians played for people to dance to. Working musicians of all kinds had to be adept at many kinds of music (which basically means many kinds of rhythm to Wald), and they mixed them up to keep dancers going.
A popular song was popular no matter who sang it; except for a very tiny group of stars. These days, what we care about is individual performances, individual artists. Radio began to make this change, and records completed it.
One of Wald's more interesting points is that our idea of some of the earlier performers is based on their records, which were almost incidental to them and gave a very partial picture of an artist's work.
Another is that our picture of the evolution of music is based in large part on the opinions of music writers, many of whom were simply not typical in their tastes. What they liked is not necessarily what most listeners liked. Lots of people liked Paul Whiteman. Lots of people liked Bobby Darin. Lots of people liked a lot of things that rock and jazz critics did not. Shaping music history according to critical tastes is distortion, Wald says.
Wald does an excellent job of tracing the changes in how we consume and regard music from the turn of the 20th century to the 70s or so. He paints a clear picture of what working musicians did, and what dancers and listeners did in response.
His style is clear and incisive, and he provides plenty of footnotes if you are interested. They don't get in the way of the text. He is a bit repetitious, but the examples are interesting enough that I for one did not mind.
There are other, far more ponderous, histories of what recording did to change music. Most of them concentrate on star performers. This one's more interesting than those, because of its emphasis.
You can ignore his title and learn from and enjoy his book. I did. |
The Beatles? Who were they?
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| Review Date: January 23, 2010 |
| Reviewer: Lee Hartsfeld, Central Ohio, United States |
I figure I'll get my complaints out of the way first, starting with the terrible title. Yes, the media has pretty much reduced popular music history to (pick one) The Beatles, Elvis Presley, and Frank Sinatra, so it may be that, to get readers, an author has to name-drop one of those three. Imagine if the title had mentioned Earl Fuller, Paul Whiteman, Billy Murray, or Lawrence Welk--the volume might be gathering dust in a Big Lots bin as we speak. Still, "How the Beatles...." is so very misleading as to be a shame. Then again, if it succeeds in grabbing attention, more power to it.
My second major gripe--Wald's assertion that mood music "would have made little sense without long-playing discs" (i.e., prior to 1948), since its main function was "to create a lingering, romantic ambiance." Well, no. Mood music originated as material for silent movies, the musical stage, and early radio, and it proliferated on disc--examples by Paul Whiteman, Erno Rapee, Domenico Savino, and Andre Kostelanetz are common items on eBay. Many of the staples of mood music are 19th and early-20th-century light works that were also staples of early sound recordings--"Narcissus," "To a Wild Rose," "Old Folks at Home," "In a Clock Store," etc.
Finally, I can't help thinking that Wald has exaggerated the gap between early sound recordings and what was happening, performance-wise, outside of the recording studio. Granted, sound recordings provide a limited document, given the particulars of the medium (length, sonic limitations, the use of studio musicians, the recording process' lack of portability, etc.), yet I find no basis for presuming a huge disconnect between what we hear on 78s and what we might have heard "live," especially given that recordings initially followed from (and were necessarily derivative of) other media such as sheet music, pit band orchestrations, music hall sketches, etc.
What I liked, on the other hand, could fill a book. First and foremost, Wald is to be praised for treating popular music as just that--popular music. As in, the music that people listened to, vice the music that critics think people SHOULD HAVE listened to. It's a sad comment on music journalism that it's taken this long for the concept of "popular" to take hold, but late is better than never. That his approach has been received as revolutionary is a bit scary, not least of all because it's true. Again, better late than never.
And his coverage of the impact of rock and roll on jazz, etc. is the savviest account I've yet seen--yes, absolutely, beyond a doubt, rock and roll was seen at the time (by professional musicians, at least) as a triumph of amateurism, which it was to an extent. My jazz-musician father and his friends expressed this view again and again over the years, and even as a kid I could hear the difference in competence between the jazz on my parents' hi-fi and the rock on the radio. My father did surprise me at one point by describing rock and roll as something jazz brought on itself by becoming too remote in its complexity from the popular audience. Wald is also spot-on in his description of Mitch Miller as, more or less, the inventor of modern record production. And I suppose that Paul Whiteman and the Beatles performed similar functions in (what's the best term?) Europeanizing African-American pop music (jazz and R&B, respectively), in making dance-oriented music more a thing to listen to by adding Classical trappings (Ravel, in the case of Whiteman; string quartets and tape loops in the case of the Fab Four).
Greatly appreciated, too, is Wald's emphasis on the sheer, amazing scope of black popular music over the decades, even as PBS and other forces of conventional thinking continue to stereotype same as loud, pounding, and--worst of all--a thing of musical illiteracy, of feeling and instinct over formal accomplishment. Not that white performers haven't been typecast in similar ways--for instance, if Bob Dylan knows the chord changes to "Stardust," the rock press would kill to keep it from coming out--but African Americans are especially the victims of the "natural" cliche--natural rhythm, natural feeling for melody, etc., and never mind that Duke Ellington, James Reese Europe, and Scott Joplin rank among our best-educated and most innovative musicians.
Unlike probably most readers, I came to this volume with a strong orientation in pre-rock pop music--nothing in here is especially "new" to me, but much of the treatment is. Some reviewers have criticized Wald for taking on too much, but he didn't have much of a choice, really, given that basic pop music history is the victim of such neglect. He's taken on a long-overdue task, and there's bound to be a rushed, unfocused quality to some of the text--mainly because he's covering so much new ground. New ground that should not be so. Considering the hugeness of the task, Wald has done a brilliant job. Five well-deserved stars. |
Yeah, yeah, yeah!!
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| Review Date: July 3, 2009 |
| Reviewer: Cecil Bothwell, Asheville, NC USA |
I picked up this book because of the title. I doubted it. Now, to quote one of the bands that followed the Beatles in the dying throes of Rock n' Roll, "I'm a believer."
Elijah Wald not only manages to prove his contrary-seeming title assertion, he delivers a splendid history of American popular music and 20th century popular culture. This is not merely the story of folk, jazz, R&B, rock, folk-rock, soul, and the stirrings of disco, hip-hop and rap, it includes the history of race relations and politics through those decades. Wald has delivered a brilliant tour de force. This is without question one of the three best books I have read this year. (See my reviews of Donella Meadows' Thinking in Systems: A Primer and James Workman's Heart of Dryness: How the Last Bushmen Can Help Us Endure the Coming Age of Permanent Drought for the other two).
If you love music, you will find much to love in this book. If you care about our enduring legacy of racism, you will find deeper understanding in this book. If you still love the Beatles, you will find yourself saying "Aha!" as you read the concluding chapter. Perhaps the most astonishing lesson herein is Wald's explanation of why music became more and more racially segregated at just the time when society was making strides toward integration, and why the Beatles popularity combined with modern technology separated rock from its roots. This one is a keeper. |
Thought-provoking, iconoclastic, debatable
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| Review Date: June 18, 2009 |
| Reviewer: Joe Sixpack -- Slipcue.com, ...in Middle America |
"How The Beatles Destroyed Rock'n'Roll: An Alternative History Of American Popular Music"
by Elijah Wald
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Author-musician Elijah Wald has written quite a few books, and has a sense of how to pick odd topics, frame them well and make readers pay attention. Hence, the slightly sensationalistic title for what is essentially a rather thoughtful, insightful music history book. This book has a lot to offer, as well as a few aspects that I find debatable and irritating.
On the plus side, I like that Wald is standing up for music that members of the pop culture hipoisie consider to be uncool, mainly the Depression-era "sweet band" jazz of artists such as Paul Whiteman. Sweet band is a style that I like a lot. I've written about it on my own music website, and I value its simplicity, catchiness and utter squareness. I like melodic music, and a history that goes back and gives credence to the pure pop music of the 1920s is alright by me. I also like that Wald is willing to take on the received wisdom of the pop music timeline that all rock fans have been taught: that society music and blues begat ragtime, ragtime begat jazz, jazz begat bebop; blues begat R&B, R&B begat rock, etc. etc. As Wald rightly points out, pop culture isn't completely linear and there's a lot of give and take in all directions, and there isn't necessarily an evolutionary progression from point A to points B, C and D. This is all good stuff, especially since the idea of a linear progression from one fad to the other so easily lends itself to the idea that one kind of music is "better" or "more important" than another.
Where I have problems with Wald's work is the degree to which he himself remains mired in the same pop-history mythology that he so boldly confronts. Wald readily admits his own cultural and personal biases, clearly stating how he is a product of his own times, a white American kid who came culturally aware in the early 1960s, whose own touchstones were the echoes of the first wave of rock'n'roll, including the wild, energetic bursts of the first few Beatles albums. Like many people of that time, he viewed rock music as revolutionary and cathartic, and invested a big chunk of his psyche in determining what was cool and authentic, etc. While he is honest in laying out his personal frame of reference, he doesn't entirely transcend it.
Specifically, Wald is still very much tethered to the whole black-white dichotomy that shrouds the minds of music fans of the 1950s,'60s and '70s (and subsequent decades). In this particular cosmology, the dogma is that "black" music (music made by African Americans) is more vital and authentic than that of whites, and that white musicians are, by genetic definition, more effete and tend to be mere imitators (and appropriators) of the innovations of black music. There is truth to this, of course, but it is hardly an absolute truth, and it sells both whites and blacks short, in a big, big way.
Using the Beatles as a cultural fulcrum, Wald posits that the hallmark of their rock revolution was to transform rock into an "art music", that is, to denude it of its vitality and morph it into something tame and overly ornate. When he was a kid, Wald loved the band's early R&B covers; he never really got into "Rubber Soul" or "Sgt. Peppers." Wald sees an unbroken link between the "art music" pioneered by the Beatles and the wanky pretentiousness of (largely unidentified) '70s pop -- let's assume he means groups like Yes, Crosby Stills & Nash, and every "white" AOR group that hit the Top 40 from 1970-79. Obviously this leaves a lot out. For one thing, the Beatles didn't just pioneer melodic art songs ("Eleanor Rigby," etc.) they completely redefined the sonic template of rock and pop music, and even, on songs such as "Helter Skelter," set the tone for the punk rock of the following decade. The Beatles never abandoned their rock roots; they just expanded their frame of reference, and as they did so, they also helped expand the musical vocabulary of the world.
Beatles-bashing is a faddish pastime that came into vogue during the early punk scene, a quick way to bait older, "squarer" music fans ("old hippies") and make them sputter with indignation. Obviously, it's silly and gimmicky, and in this instance, not really that useful as a cultural descriptor. Besides, this debate isn't really about the Beatles. Like any musician or musical group, they are not sui generis -- their music is part of a continuum that flows in multiple directions, they took ideas and emotions from all sorts of places, including British musichall and sweet jazz, as well as American rock, R&B and country. The synthesis they came up with was taken up by countless thousands of other musicians, and these musicians had their own multiple sources of music to draw on, and they came up with all kinds of new ideas themselves.
Of course, the whole I-don't-really-like-the-Beatles thing is kind of a red herring. What's significant in Wald's version is how he uses it to reinforce the whole blacks=innovators, whites=imitators paradigm, which he explores at great length in this book, and while he gives it much more thoughtful consideration than your average pop music snob, he still can't get over it.
If we back up a ways, before the Beatles and before their idols (the '50s rock pioneers), we can see the vigorous intersection of "white" and "black" culture in the uptempo R&B scene and -- just as importantly -- in the rougher end of the country music spectrum. Wald does discuss the crosspollination of these styles and acknowledges its role in the birth of rock and roll. But, like many Afrocentic rock fans, he discounts the vitality of the country musicians, saying that country musicians covered blues songs because they were popular and that's what them labels wanted them to do. There is a huge discussion of Al Dexter's pop/country crossover hit, "Pistol Packin' Mama," and Wald talks about Gene Autry's pop chops, but he sees country music primarily as an outgrowth of "folk" music, and not as a wellspring of wild, unruly, primal, rough-and-rugged American culture. Roy Acuff and Gene Autry make it into the index listings; Hank Penny and Cliff Carlisle do not. America's white country musicians, the working musicians who weren't national stars, were every bit as earthy and raw as their counterparts in the blues and R&B scenes: they worked at hard jobs, drank in rough bars and like to get loaded, have sex, and dance to fun music.
Like the black musicians of the post-WWII era, country artists came to the same fork in the road when big band music died and jazz began to stagnate: they made their music rougher, louder and more powerful. "Jump blues" R&B (which gets one tiny mention in this book) and "hillbilly boogie" country both developed around the same time -- in the late 1940s and early '50s -- and they were both essentially the same response to the same set of circumstances -- audiences wanted something new, and amplification made loud, hard music possible in a way that was revolutionary and exciting. Wald doesn't entirely discount the influence of country music, but he also doesn't seem to recognize its innate chaotic volatility: the wildness of early rock music stems just as much from white traditions as from black. Like jazz, rock is a true cultural middleground, and seeing it as a "black" style that was stolen or misappropriated by whites is just silly.
I thought there was a lot about this book to admire, but the continued perseveration about white music, black music, white music, black music, blah blah blah really got on my nerves after a while. It continues into the epilogue, where Wald muses about disco as a "black" artform that deserves reevaluation now that the '70s are so far behind us. The discussion of how he perceived this once-oppressive style is interesting (he had fun dancing to it, but thought a lot of it was musically boring) but too short. Similarly, Wald drops a mention of hip-hop early in the book, but doesn't follow up on it in the final chapters -- if he is looking to validate or reexamine the popularity of uncool but popular stars such as Paul Whiteman or Pat Boone, what about more modern examples such as Mary Blige or John Legend? Yeah, I know, he had to end the book somewhere (just like I have to end this review...) but it still seems like he doesn't quite follow his own logic to its ultimate conclusions...
In sum, a good book, providing a relatively unique perspective to the history of 20th Century popular music. Parts of it might piss you off a little, but that's a good thing. It's worth checking out. (Joe Sixpack, Slipcue Music Guide) |
Unfortunate title, really great book
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| Review Date: March 5, 2010 |
| Reviewer: SomeGuy, Virginia |
This is the best book I've read on music history since Alex Ross's "The Rest is Noise." It has fascinating insights about the Beatles (I never noticed the surf band influence on their first few singles before; it seems so obvious now) but considering what a small percentage of the book covers them, the book's main title is going to attract the wrong readers. The subtitle implies that Wald puts some weird spin on the traditional story, but his meticulous research (and I kept two bookmarks when I read this book: one to show where I left off reading and one to follow along with the footnotes) shows that the pieces of his story fit together very well indeed.
For readers interested in a very well-written account of the interplay between economics and culture in the history of 20th-century American, this will become the crucial book to read. It sent me back to listen to a lot of music that I had heard of but never heard, and it helped me to understand music I had been listening to much better. I'm sure I'll be rereading the entire book within a few years.
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September 7th, 2009 | Author: admin
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