Editor’s Choice
HOW THE BEATLES DESTROYED ROCK’N’ ROLL: An Alternative History of American Popular Music by Elijah Wald (Oxford University Press, 336 pages, $24.95). Now there’s a title guaranteed to inflame—fighting words, clearly. But Wald isn’t kidding when he says that this brilliant and provocative book presents “an alternative history of American popular music.” To Wald— who has been a performer as well as the author of books about Delta Blues and Mexican music—The Beatles’ hugely influential journey into recording studio art rock and away from public performance not only removed popular music from dancers and live performances but, in effect, resegregated what had been racially melding at a furious rate.
What is so exciting—intellectually —about this book is Wald’s willingness to investigate a full century’s range of genuinely popular music in its time that other music writers now wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot tuning fork. Here, then, are probing considerations of Paul Whiteman’s now-shunned music when he was ridiculously billed as “The King of Jazz;” and Guy Lombardo and the Royal Canadians when they were THE American dance band; and the music that famous rock-basher and dictatorial producer Mitch Miller (of Rochester) made with Frankie Laine, Vaughan Monroe, his “discovery” Guy Mitchell and Tony Bennett (who ultimately and quite thoroughly rejected him.)
This is a book, then, that thinks about American popular music in a radically unconventional way. It isn’t as off the wall or revolutionary as it might seem (and as it is made out to be in the cover blurbs by gender-driven musicologist Susan McClary and Tom Waits, no less). Some of its ideas are clearcut variants of things previously found in Martha Bayles’ “A Hole in Our Soul” and Albert Murray’s “Stomping the Blues,” two of the greatest classics about American popular music. Still, there’s no question that Wald’s book is the most challenging, and head-clearing history of American popular music to be published in decades.
—Jeff Simon
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