How the Beatles Destroyed Rock N Roll An Alternative History of American Popular Music [HC,2009]

by Elijah Wald

How the Beatles Destroyed Rock N An Alternative History of American Popular Music by Elijah Wald. Oxford UP,2009

Genres: Music, History, Nonfiction, Pop Culture, Biography, Sociology, Cultural

Unknown Binding

First published June 1, 2009

About the author

Elijah Wald is a musician and writer, with nine published books. Most are about music (blues, folk, world, and Mexican drug ballads), with one about hitchhiking.
His new book is a revisionist history of popular music, throwing out the usual critical conventions and instead looking at what mainstream pop fans were actually listening and dancing to over the years.
At readings, he also plays guitar and sings...why not?"

Reviews

[Bill Kerwin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sure, the title is deliberately outrageous, something abrasive to catch the book-buyer's attention, but I hope the strategy works because this history of popular music in the United States deserves a wide readership.

Wald begins with the self-evident assumption that such a history should consist of what is popular, not just what music buffs decide is artistically worthy and representative. He argues that it is women who drive popular taste in music because women fill clubs in order to dance, while music historians (almost exclusively men) prefer to listen to records and argue about the merits of particular guitar or horn solos.

Wald attempts to correct this imbalance by paying serious attention to many influential figures neglected in the typical history: John Philip Sousa, the dancers Vernon and Irene Castle, Paul Whiteman, Mitch Miller, Harry Belafonte, Ricky Nelson--to name just a few. He also pays attention to important events in the music business and the effects of technology--the the movement from sheet music to recording, the ASCAP ban and AFM boycott, the different audiences for LP's and 45's--and comes to many interesting and surprising conclusions. In addition, he is not at all concerned with artificial "music wars"--white music versus black music, jazz vs. rock, etc.--and this enables him to establish many unusual and illuminating connections.

This is a wonderful book. I learned something new on almost every page, and I would heartily recommend it.

Now--for those who have read this far--I will summarize the argument behind this book's provocative title. The Beatles transformed rock and roll from a business of hit singles designed for dancing to a business of artistically planned albums designed primarily for listening. In the process, they increased the gap between white music and its poor cousin black music (which, being less prosperous, was by necessity still yoked to the demands of dance) and the decrease of interaction between the two forms of music that inevitably resulted deprived both rock and roll and r & b of the racial cross-pollination that had been the hallmark of American popular music for the 50 plus years preceding "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band."

[Paul Bryant · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a long time coming but finally you get what this catchpenny title actually means. Here we go...

The rock revolution of the 60s, spearheaded by the Beatles, evolved rock & roll into rock and turned it into a form of art (as white musicians tried to do to jazz in the 20s). In so doing, and whilst at the same time it embraced older forms of black music (blues, country blues), rock distanced itself from contemporary black pop which was regarded as still based in teen-angst teen-dance forms (Motown). Up until the mid 60s the pop world (pre-rock) was less segregated with each passing year. But in 1966 the sonic experiments of the Beatles & psychedelic bands and the emphasised lyrics of Dylan and the folk rockers uncoupled white rock from black pop which then seemed mired in repetitive conservative teenage taste and unprogressive attitudes, exemplified by Motown and their Hit Factory conveyor belt Henry Ford approach to music. (Please, this is not me speaking! I heart Motown!)

The white hippies thought the top 40 was irrelevant and dropping out was the goal. Berry Gordy and Smokey Robinson thought the exact opposite. Here's a quote from a black member of the Fifth Dimension :

"Drop out? Wow, man, what we got to drop out of anyway? You don't want your fancy house or your good job? Shit, let me have it, man, cause I've been trying to get something like that all my miserable life. (page 240)

So as for the Beatles, "they were the catalysts for a divide between rock and soul that, rather than being mended in later years, would only grow wider with the emergence of disco and hip-hop."

***

Undoubtedly this is one of the best and most careful histories of popular music in America (I don't think ANYONE has written in detail about American popular music in this way before, it is very good stuff), and when it's not a little too plodding (Elijah is no stylist, unlike his Biblical namesake), and not repeating some (good) points for the third and fourth time, it's crackling with great observations.

Not only is it great music history (from the dawn of jazz to the end of the 60s) it asks what history is, what it's supposed to do, and where we get our received ideas from, so you could apply that to things other than Gene Krupa's haircut.



I do have a beef about one of EW's arguments. EW points out that Paul Whiteman was the most popular artist of the 1920s, as Guy Lombardo and Pat Boone were in the 50s, and all of them are routinely written out of the histories by the music crits who hate their stuff whether or not they ever bother to listen to it. So we get a skewed understanding. Our version of the past is a fabrication in which Billie Holliday, Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong are towering figures, way more towering than they were in real life.

Well, this is true, but Elijah, it's been going on in literature for centuries. It's called establishing the canon. In your courses on 19th century novelists do we find Sabine Baring-Gould, Mary Braddon or Catherine Gore? Not a chance, big sellers though they were.

Whilst labouring this idea he makes many other good points, such as : both Whiteman and the Beatles took black forms of music and remade them into something a whole lot artier, a whole lot whiter, as it were. (Whiteman was the guy who premiered Rhapsody in Blue for instance.) But Whiteman is reviled and the Beatles are revered. Why would that be?

Here's another one of his zingers : history, as we know , is written by the winners... yes? Yes. But MUSICAL history is written by the losers! How- uh - wha..? Wald explains this way :

"The victors tend to be out dancing while the historians sit at their desks assiduously chronicling music they cannot hear on mainstream radio... the people who choose to write about music tend to be far from average consumers and partygoers and often despise the tastes of their more cheerful and numerous peers."


So the losers - meaning the guys whose taste was in the minority, the scorned, the ignored, the whey-faced Billy-no-mates, they are the guys who create our canons of great 20th century music, they are the tastemakers of the fanboys of the future, they are the Velvet Underground and Nico, Astral Weeks and Trout Mask Replica fans.
I think he's right. I see my own face in that mirror.



As I got towards the end of this book, and he hadn't yet mentioned the Beatles, it was like walking down an alleyway expecting to be mugged. Finally there's a glint of metal and a rustle in the darkness:

there is no good reason that we should consider the people who judged Rhapsody in Blue a greater work of art than Dipper Mouth Blues in the 1920s any more racist and shortsighted than those who considered Sgt Pepper a greater work than Papa's got a Brand New bag in the 1960s. [italics added]



That's me then: racist. A forty minute work of melody and harmony and extraordinary new sounds is, I think, greater than an ultra-sharp three minute single which riffed on a single chord and pioneered a new kind of dance music.

But : in conclusion : this is a GREAT argumentative, persuasive, beautiful book about pop music. I like it like that.

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this book up for two reasons: first, I think the Beatles suck and they should be blamed for everything we can possibly blame them for (teen shrieking, botulism, anal warts, anyone?); second, Tom Waits loves this book despite his own exclusion.
Now, the alarmism that the title might engender is shifty, at best and the title misleading. Wald likes the Beatles and he isn't so much laying the blame for the collapse of a pretty interesting state of American music in the early-mid 1960s on the band itself as the phenomenon.
This is a history of popular American music beginning with the dance hall era, the classical holdovers, the rise of Dixieland, jazz, blues, hillbilly music, "folk" music, "pop standards" as we call it now, and Elvis. Rock actually only rears its head in the last few chapters. This is more of a reassessment of the continuum of the development of lots of different kinds of music over the 20th century and the impact that technologies such as the phonograph, the jukebox, radio, and television had on people's listening habits, the weird change in dancing, etc.
The main idea here is that, as Wald looks at what people were actually listening to and saying about the music they liked back then, there was a moment where black and white tastes and developments in music were, if still running parallel, were starting to mesh. The rise of the "hit" and the phenomenon of whiteboy bands like the Beatles basically led to a resegregation of music that set back cross-cultural stuff a few decades, at least until rap, probably.
Wald's a fine writer and he loves the subject, something that doesn't usually shine through. Just don't let the title throw you off.

[Alan · Rating 3 out of 5]

You say you want a revolution
Well, you know...
—"Revolution," by The Beatles (1968)

Despite that provocative main title—it certainly drew me in—How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll isn't at all about the Beatles. Elijah Wald just doesn't care that much about the Fab Four, whose arrival on American shores has to wait until this book's penultimate chapter. Most of Wald's efforts are dedicated to what his subtitle asserts is "An Alternative History of American Popular Music"—the kinds of music made, and listened to, in the U.S.A. before the Beatles and the rest of the "British Invasion" bleached and bifurcated American rock'n'roll into divergent strands of black and white.

Wald's interested in unearthing the unwritten history of American music, the ubiquitous tunes that were too commonly performed to immortalize on wax, vinyl or tape even after that became possible, the songs that sold millions while their contemporary critics, and those who followed, largely dismissed them as unimportant—often, too black—to write about.

If I understood Wald's thesis correctly, the producers and audiences for these popular tunes, at least up through the first half of the Twentieth Century, were often a significant force for racial integration and cultural cross-fertilization in the U.S. Although that was never uniformly so, of course—as Wald also acknowledges,

The fact that the Nazis were notorious for their racist ideology made the hypocrisy of American racism easier to confront and harder to defend, but that didn't keep the enemies of race-mixing from doing their damnedest.
—p.145

Wald really means popular music, too:

{...} while there are dozens of scholarly discussions of the Velvet Underground, there are virtually none of KC and the Sunshine band.
—p.10

This is exactly where Elijah Wald's coming from: he's fascinated by what Americans were actually listening to, the tunes they bought and played and imitated and sang along with on a daily basis, much more so than by the more rarefied and "significant" music that critics and reviewers were writing about.


How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll does take awhile to get into, and that wasn't helped by its tiny print, which was harder to read for these older eyes even if it did make the book seem slimmer. The introductory material in the first couple of chapters—much of it, anyway—will seem familiar territory as well, if you've already read works like Listen to This by Alex Ross, or David Byrne's How Music Works.

Even early on, though, Wald manages to slip in some telling insights:

{In the 19th and up through the early 20th Century...} in any town big enough to have even a few people who aspired to middle-class status, black or white, the most numerous and in many ways the most influential professional musicians were teachers.
—p.20

Wald also points out how profoundly Prohibition affected musicians, as so many venues closed or went underground...

The problem of making a living in music got more serious in the 1920s with the arrival of Prohibition. The Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution made the sale and public consumption of alcohol illegal throughout the country as of January 16, 1920, and it was not repealed until the end of 1933. Obviously, this had a profound effect on nightlife of all kinds, and the American Federation of Musicians reported that it "resulted in some 56,000 men or two-fifths of the Federation's membership losing their jobs...in hotels, restaurants, resorts and beer gardens." Given this fact, it is startling how little attention has been paid to the effects of Prohibition on popular music. In histories of the period, jazz is routinely mentioned alongside speakeasies and bathtub gin, and it is easy to get the sense that everybody was partying like crazy, drinking more than ever and dancing up a storm. The reality was far more complicated, which is why repeal was greeted with widespread relief even by a lot of people who did not drink.
—p.65

Nuggets like these continue to appear throughout How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll. Wald did assemble a huge amount of detail (sometimes getting bogged down in those details, I think) to bolster his case for just how much worthwhile music went unrecorded and unremarked, even after individual performances could be preserved and listened to again and again.

{...} the more we think we know about a time, the harder it can be to see it clearly. As someone once said, history may repeat itself, but historians repeat other historians.
—p.60

How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll may not live up to its title—I wasn't entirely convinced of the Beatles' guilt myself, even after finishing—but Elijah Wald does contribute a substantial amount to the history of music in the United States, and he tries very hard throughout to give credit where due, to artists and audiences whose efforts have previously gone—heh—unsung.

Speaking of credit where due, though... I'm dedicating this review to an online resource providing information about another group of creators who've been shortchanged by most music histories (including Wald's, I'm afraid): the Women in Rock Project, seen via Metafilter in June 2019.

[Phillip Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finished this a little while ago. As I think I said the title is click(?)bait and this is actually a very interesting look at how the music business worked before Them Four showed up. If nothing else I found it quite comforting; for all we worry about streaming this and TikTok that, music and the biz around it has been constantly morphing, and good tunes have survived the last million swerves - why wouldn't they survive this time?

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

and I'm about halfway through it. I have to say that if you have any interest in popular music history, this book is an absolute must. Although it's written in an acadmic style, it's also very readible, well-documented, and pretty interesting.

Essentially, the author's (Elijah Wald) position is that much of what we "know" about popular music is wrong, not so much in the sense of that it is an outright error but that the emphasis has been put in the wrong places. Part of this is due to the nature of music criticism, itself, but also the very nature of the way we listen to music now as opposed to the way music was actually listened to (and made) in the past.

So, for instance, when you think of music in the 20's and early 30's, for example, you might think of, say, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong,or Bessie Smith, these folks were, whatever their perceived musical genius (in a later era), these were far outside the musical mainstream of the time. The mainstream of the time, the so-called "King of Jazz" was actually Paul Whiteman and, listening to him today (if you can stand it), it is difficult, if not impossible, to figure out how this was possible. But it is a fact. You'll also get to understand why bands like Guy Lombardo (who sold unbelievable quantities of records) and Lawrence Welk, etc not only managed to stick around so long but also to maintain their popularity. He also discusses the genesis of "how" popular taste is what it is (pretty interesting) and how and why it came to be that way (and, I suspect, it isn't all that different today) and his comments will, undoubtedly, hit home to some of us.

I'm currently getting into the 40's and how technology began to change the way music was played, published, and recorded, the rise of ASCAP and BMI (and why), as well as the music unions. It's all placed in a musical context so you don't get bogged down in the politics.

As I said, I haven't gotten to the title's assertion (which, I admit, got me to pay attention to the the book) but I am beginning to see the author laying the groundwork for it (if, in fact, that's what occurs)

While it may not be for everybody (because there are a number of names that you may not be familiar with), if you have any interest in music history, this book is an absolute must-read.

[fonz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Estupenda historia de la música popular norteamericana desde finales del siglo XIX hasta principios de los setenta del siglo XX, cuyo título es un poco clickbait aunque en el último capítulo cobra más sentido. A diferencia de otras historias de la música pop que acaban convirtiéndose en una retahíla de las valoraciones estéticas del autor de turno (el estéril "Yeah, Yeah, Yeah", de Bob Stanley, p.ej.), en este caso el objeto de estudio se presenta desde un punto de vista más historiográfico, prestando atención al gusto popular mayoritario y su evolución, contextualizando en lo social, lo tecnológico y lo económico en lugar de dedicarse a establecer un canon "del buen gusto" típico del pajero aficionado a la música popular. Me ha resultado muy divertido, como siempre, comprobar que todo está inventado; el conflicto entre arte y comercio y alta y baja cultura, la "autenticidad", los árbitros del buen gusto, los hipsters, el elitismo de los aficionados universitarios, el despreciado e importantísimo papel de las mujeres en el gusto más popular, la tremenda importancia del baile, la compleja relación entre música negra/música blanca, etcétera, son cuestiones todas ellas que ya se planteaban en los años veinte, la historia no se repite pero parece que un poco sí que rima.

[Francypants45 Pants · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hey this book was great!

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this about ten years ago but was sufficiently impressed to want a re-read. Wald juggles a lot - how recording changed music, music as a business, how musicians from different backgrounds influenced each other, the impact of race, the highbrow/lowbrow divide, the imperative of providing dance music, and what women looked for in music. Dance and the tastes of women are the poor stepchildren of music criticism, so the author deserves kudos if only for that. (Wald gives a shout-out to the great Ellen Willis, who wrote provocatively on those topics.) There are a lot of juicy paragraphs and soundbites here that a more careful reviewer than me could quote in their entirety, and the author's inversion of the usual music-book artistic genius focus was a winning formula. This book will change how you think about music.

[Aaron Arnold · Rating 4 out of 5]

First of all, kudos for the ballsy, if somewhat tongue-in-cheek title. I probably wouldn't have picked up this "alternative history of American popular music", as the slightly more accurate subtitle labels it, if the book had been called something else. There's a lot of very interesting discussion of trends in music composition, recording, consumption, and evolution in here, and although the book drags a bit in the middle when it's documenting a lot of obscure performers in obscure styles, its core thesis - that the watershed moment in the mid-Sixties when The Beatles and their contemporaries transformed the music industry had downsides as well as upsides - is well-argued and very thought-provoking.

One of the things that Rolling Stone magazine does from time to time that's guaranteed to provoke smiles from younger readers is to compile a list of Top Fifty Whatevers (songs, guitarists, singers, etc.), that that is somehow mysteriously loaded with representatives from the era when Jann Wenner and everyone else who works there were young, i.e. the Sixties. There's a Tom the Dancing Bug strip that says something along the lines of "pop culture was best when you were a teeanger", and indeed most people retain a lasting and almost irrational affection for the music they heard when they were growing up due to the incredible power of nostalgia. However, when it comes to determining "the canon" of great works from the past, somehow we have an extremely selective memory; some very popular bands (e.g. The Monkees) get retroactively dismissed on the grounds of unseriousness or what have you, while bands that nobody cared about at the time are retrospectively lauded (e.g. The Velvet Underground). This isn't just a rock thing, this happens with all music styles as well, as seen by the lasting respect accorded Duke Ellington versus the almost total unperson-ness of his contemporary Paul Whiteman.

Wald's explanation for this was something I'd vaguely considered before, but never thought to put quite this way: "It is often said that history is written by the victors, but in the case of pop music that is rarely true. The victors tend to be out dancing, while the historians sit at their desks, assiduously chronicling music they cannot hear on mainstream radio. And it is not just historians: The people who choose to write about popular music, even while it is happening, tend to be far from average consumers and partygoers and often despise the tastes and behavior of their more cheerful and numerous peers." That rang very true to me; every serious music fan I've ever spoken to has varying levels of contempt for pop, club, and dance music, even though it's all you hear when you go out. Far better the kind of avant-garde art music that you listen to at home, alone, in headphones, that invites serious attention and inspires rapturous multi-paragraph reviews. Music writers are overwhelmingly white, male, and nerdy, and this has had a big impact on how black, female, and more pop-oriented artists have been appraised over the years.

As the majority of the book shows, while the division between high-brow and low-brow is certainly not unique to the rock age, a lot of technological, social, and musical changes happened to produce the peculiar musical culture we have today. Wald goes through the history of jazz, blues, ragtime, country & western, and other genres with an eye on the interplay of forces that both spurred innovation and slowed down change. In particular, his short discussion of the effects of the triple shock of Prohibition, the Great Depression, and World War II on musicians and their audiences left me wishing for more, but he also had a great analysis of how big of an effect the invention of recorded music had on fields as disparate as movie soundtracks and dance clubs, as well as its contribution to the essential disappearance of what's been called the "American songbook" of folk songs in favor of the creation of specific ties between a song and one particular artist. Bob Dylan is a good example of a transitional figure: whereas it was once the norm for songs to not be associated so much with one particular person, and Dylan in fact had several of his earlier songs become hits for other people first, the Sixties were really when the idea of a song "belonging" to the original artist became the norm.

The title's relevance does not really come into its own until the very last chapter, after an at times almost interminable litany of artists working in one pre-Sixties genre or another. The thesis is that while segregation was much more harsh before The Beatles than after, the mid-Sixties marked an important dividing line in music between an era when white and black musicians played each other's music and engaged in a creative dialogue with each other; and an era when different groups stopped listening to each other. There are numerous objections you could raise to this idea (e.g. what about hip hop?), but I think Wald is onto something when he says that James Brown's "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" is in its own way just as revolutionary as most of what The Beatles put out, and that the world has lost something when genres like funk, soul, R&B, and so forth are artistically segregated from whiter, artier genres. Whether you agree with him or not, though, he's got a lot of great material in this book, and his points about the artificiality of the canon are sadly all too true.

[Bruce · Rating 4 out of 5]

I fear this review may turn into a lengthy diatribe on copyright regime change and music industry business models, so I’ll begin with an abstract of what I’m thinking about before bloviating.

First, Wald’s written a bang-up, fantastic, fascinating book that surveys the history and evolution of pop music from John Philip Sousa to 1967. He more or less stops with Sgt. Pepper, excusing himself on the grounds that “The time has come to turn off my computer, get up from my desk, and go out and play some music.” (p. 254) I’m very much hoping that when he finishes playing, Wald comes back to his desk to bring his survey up to the present date. If so, this book will make a fine companion volume to Alex Ross’ The Rest is Noise. Despite leaving the reader wanting more, Wald’s Alternative History of American Popular Music is still a great book for what it is, and I plan to comment in more detail below (along with some more extensive examples of Wald’s writing).

Second, I react to a recent pair of NPR stories by advocating for compulsory licensing of digital media in exchange for strict enforcement of attribution transparency (original works’ and their authors must respectively be accurately labeled and identified), with royalty payments metered by usage to be paid out of a collective pool by collection services such as ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, and SoundExchange. The mechanism I describe eliminates piracy by moving the locus of payment from those end users who do not directly pay for streaming, downloading, and/or synch rights to regulated taxpayer- and commercially-funded royalty pools, on the basis of monthly aggregated data collection and reporting. While the extension of compulsory licensing sacrifices some artistic independence and control, I will argue that doing so both fulfills the intent of copyright to “promote the useful arts” and increase and diffuse knowledge while also acknowledging the reality that nonarbitrary, cost-effective enforcement is impractical (if not impossible) in the digital age. I will conclude by explaining why dreams for such a regime must remain futile if entrenched commercial interests (the RIAA and the major labels they represent along with their Pandoras, Rdios, and Spotifys, to say nothing of the MPAA and the big five media conglomerates) cannot be coopted to participate in adoption.

Let’s start with the work under review, however. Wald’s thesis is that the late ‘60s marked a broad racial division in pop music between white acts pursuing various arts (of studio recording technique, virtuosity, musical structure, or lyrical invention) for benefit of concert audiences and stereophiles and black performers continually evolving along rhythm-centric lines for the benefit of club aficionados and social dancers, musical styles manifest first in disco, then rap, and ultimately hip-hop. However, in quitting with the Beatles’ Pepper album as the most visible starting point of this division, Wald admits to assuming rather than proving his thesis. At p. 252, Wald recants, ”The segregation of American popular music that began with the British Invasion... is a simplification, and if I were carrying this story forward rather than wrapping it up I would be drawing a far more complicated picture.” He then offers a tantalizing glimpse at what might have been over the next page and a half of counter-examples and second thoughts.

Whence the segregation that split the commercial unity of rock ‘n’ roll into separate markets of “rock” and “soul?”

Until the mid-1960s, white and black rock’n’roll styles had evolved more or less in tandem, whether it was Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis, the Drifters and the Belmonts, Hank Ballard and Joey Dee, Ray Charles and Bobby Darin, or the Crystals and the Shangri-Las. The black artists may have pioneered more new styles than the white ones, and their share of the rewards was frequently incommensurate with their talents, but they were competing for the same radio and record audiences and appearing in a lot of the same clubs, concert packages, and TV showcases.... That blend of musical and racial integration had defined rock ‘n’ roll since [radio deejay, talent-finder, and ultimately “rock ‘n’ roll” namer and promoter] Alan Freed’s time, but the stream divided with the arrival of “folk rock” (or “rock folk,” as it was often called at first), which stressed poetic or socially conscious lyrics over dance rhythms, and the sonic explorations of the Beatles, the Byrds, the Beach Boys, and the San Francisco groups. (p. 239)

One of the reasons I loved reading Wald’s book so much is that I agree with his argument that taxonomies of music which seek to separate art from commerce are arbitrary. You can talk about what you like to listen to and under what conditions. You can talk about the cultural context for a given piece, the influences on and of its authors, and the formal structure of its composition or arrangement, but you should not conflate stylistic differences with quality. There is as much densely-layered, sophisticated crapola as there is simple four-on-the-floor genius, and vice-versa. (Actually, there’s always far more bad music than good, for the simple reason that “good” is as hard to hit upon as it is to universalize and define.) Wald encapsulates this ethos perfectly.

As for art, it seems to be a given that any music intended primarily for [mass social] dancing is, ipso facto, not accepted as serious art. By contrast, classical music -- even mediocre classical music -- is the quintessence of seriousness for most pop listeners, and by the fall of 1965 the number one song in the United States was “Yesterday,” featuring Paul McCartney accompanied by a string quartet.... [T]his did not excite the interest of many highbrow critics, but… with its romantically world-weary lyric, soothing melody, and mild variation of the conventional thirty-two bar song structure... [t]he song was quickly covered by every old-line orchestra leader and vocalist who dreamed of being more than a nostalgia act, and by August 1966 Billboard proclaimed it a modern standard, noting that there were already over 175 versions on the market, including recordings by Lawrence Welk, Xavier Cugat, and Mantovani, as well as by country singers, cabaret artists, and the Supremes.... That breadth of appeal was what set the Beatles apart from their contemporaries. (p. 233)

So if you want to be taken seriously, you should get your showtune stylings arranged for strings, not because there’s actually something inherently serious about a quartet of musicians (the Beatles were already that), but because of the semiotics of a cello and viola coupled with two violins we’ve Pavloved from Franz Joseph Haydn.

The author strikes a curiously defensive tone about his chosen outlook, however.

One thing I want to stress is that I am trying to write history, not criticism -- that is, to look at some of the most influential movements and stars of the twentieth century and explore what links and divides them without worrying about whether they were marvelous or pernicious, geniuses or frauds, or whether I personally enjoy their work.... As it happens, that is how most histories of popular music are written: We tend to leave classical and symphonic styles out of the story, as if they existed in a separate world, just as historians of classical styles tend to give at best a glancing nod to pop trends. In a choice that seems odd to an outsider, the classical music historians also tend to regard most of the new, classically based orchestral compositions of the twentieth century -- radio, film, and television scores, easy listening and mood music, the orchestral sections of Sgt. Pepper -- as falling outside their field. And, equally oddly, the jazz and rock canons tend to mimic the classical canon in this respect, ...hav[ing] no more interest in Paul Weston, Nelson Riddle, and Henry Mancini than classical historians have, and only minimally more interest in Glenn Miller. And while there are dozens of scholarly discussions of the Velvet Underground, there are virtually none of KC and the Sunshine Band. (p. 10)

Whoah, whoah, whoah. Easy there, big guy. Your ears have undertaken an experiential smorgasbord not borne by many a published music writer. There’s much more pride than shame in keeping an open, if not uncritical, mind.

Wald’s title’s a cheat of course, made worse by a borrowed bourgeois distinction between “rock’n’roll” and “rock” a la Ellen Willis, that the author doesn’t really believe in.

As with jazz, [rock ‘n’ roll] was not defined in musical terms. [Just as there were distinctions from piano ragtime, Dixieland, big band swing, bebop, and into later jazz styles, t]here were clear rhythmic differences between the way Haley’s Comets played “Shake, Rattle and Roll” and the way it was played by the black rhythm and blues veterans who backed Big Joe Turner’s version of the song, and I have no problem with historians who consider those differences a musical dividing line between R&B and rock ‘n’ roll. But that semantic distinction was not made in the 1950s.... In 1956, when “rock ‘n’ roll” had become a common phrase, it was also used for both artists, as well as for gospel-flavored vocal groups, hiccuping hillbilly singers, and airbrushed teen idols. (p. 170)

However, one big difference between Wald and Willis is that Wald seems willing to baldly expose his own contradictions. The book’s title is unforgiveable. Had it not been for Bill Kerwin’s advocacy, it would have kept me from enjoying the author’s scholarship. So a big shout-out to Bill for helping me see through to the subtitle and thereafter to the book’s contents.

While Wald impressively tracks and explains the evolution of 80 or so years of pop music, he falls far short of giving technology its influential due. The author mainly focuses on the shift from live performance to recordings and 78s to LPs:

Indeed, jazz -- in our modern sense of the term -- had a special relationship to recording.... Unlike printed music, records made it possible to mass-produce a unique performance, and in that way they were not just different from sheet music but its exact opposite. The whole point of written music is to help a wide variety of performers to play the same thing, but records preserve what is different in the way a particular performer sounds. So, to the extent that we think of jazz as a music of improvisation and personal touch, it can survive only through recordings. Without recording... [Louis] Armstrong’s genius would exist only in legend. (p. 90)

By extension, unless an aspiring musician has a transcription of a particular improvisatory solo, the only way to reproduce it is to listen to that recording closely and repeatedly. What’s more, Wald observes, audiences who become overly familiar with a particular performance are more likely to prefer it, and therefore to demand it be reproduced in live performance. However, this tends to undermine the very spontaneity that inspired the original production, inevitably rendering the live product in many respects inferior to the recording. It’s a vicious cycle.

This is fascinating, but there’s so much more to the pop music technology story that Wald omits. For example, influences and changes to instrumentation -- electric guitar, amplification, distortion, synthesizer, computer loops and samples -- you won’t find much mention of Les Paul and none whatever of Robert Moog or any of the descendants of the mellotron (used to such great effect by the Beatles’ Strawberry Fields Forever) that have driven so many of the changes in the contemporary pop scene.

Wald’s exposition of distribution technology is likewise telescoped to his pre-1970’s dissertation. He talks about how the emerging dominance of radio as a national platform for promulgating music in conjunction with increasing substitution of recordings whose over-the-air fidelity made them newly comptetitive with live performances created a temporary crisis in the music publishing (primarily sheet music) industry and a permanent problem for journeymen professional musicians. In response, the American Society for Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP, which represented most songwriters with works still under copyright) and the American Federation of Musicians (AFM, the musicians’ trade union) both sought higher royalties than broadcasters were prepared to pay. ASCAP demanded unprecedented fees, while AFM chose to withhold their talent from recording booths. However, each was a response geared to protect their institutional goals (maintaining the status quo) rather than repositioning/rethinking the endgame or negotiating on the basis of constituent needs (securing long-term, steady, and industry equitable revenue streams for composers and musicians based on changing market usage). Rather than go with the flow, they sought to hold back the tide (or at least divert it into known channels). The outcome was utterly predictable to any historian. “The networks responded by forming a parallel organization, Broadcast Music, Incorporated (BMI), and announcing that as of December 31, 1940, they would cease to use any ASCAP material.” Folks eventually settled (and formerly snubbed rural songwriters and small ensembles found new advocates and markets), but as Pete Townshend sang, “the sea refuses no river;” the new course of the industry, already charted, remained unchanged.

The clear winners in the ASCAP fight were neither the Society nor the networks but BMI and the jukebox industry. BMI shortly became independent of the radio czars who had established it -- antimonopoly laws made that imperative -- and it has been ASCAP’s main competition ever since.... On the whole, though, the main thing the ban proved was that songwriting and publishing were not really threatened by new technologies; they just needed to iron out the fine points of royalty payments, then could continue business more or less as usual. (pp. 130-2)

I think this bit of history has obvious parallels to the new normal that the internet imposed on a foolishly luddite recording industry in the first decade of the 21st century. So I’ll spin off from this quote into the tangent that forms my second main takeaway from reading Wald and like content at the intersection of art, technology, and seemingly outdated law. Since the 1998 infliction of the Sonny Bono copyright extension (life plus 70 years! but blame the Europeans for first adopting it, not Mickey’s corporate parents) and the Digital Millenium Copyright Act fiasco (imposing criminal penalties for technological circumvention of DRM, whether fair use or not!), copyright law has been well lambasted -- without effecting change -- by critics ranging from Matt Mason to the Electronic Frontier Foundation to Lawrence Lessig to Cory Doctorow to... pretty much everyone who cares about the dissemination and creation of new ideas (so, not the RIAA). The DMCA was partly a reaction to both Napster and the DeCSS movement. The former was an early peer-sharing site that encouraged online distribution of files (primarily unlicensed MP3s). The latter was a methodology for decrypting DVD content to enable discs bought in one geographic “Zone” (say, Sweden) to be playable in another (say, Japan). Both technologies enabled and promoted copyright infringement outside of the existing home recording exemption (which had basically re-legalized homemade mixtapes for personal use), by facilitating digital copying and distribution. Did the new laws make the technologies go away? No. They had the wholly predictable effect of pouring water on a nascent grease fire (accelerated by the RIAA’s and MPAA’s joint refusal to promote competing technologies that would facilitate legal, royalty-paying online exchanges of digital content). Instead of suppressing or outcompeting illegal uses, they simply pushed them less visibly underground and into myriad venues with less accountability or scruples.

As I’ve noted, despite the widespread bellyaching, there’s no real push to reform the law itself, the principles of which remain sound, if unsoundly overstretched and applied. The king is dead, long live the king. That said, there’s something to be said for retaining the relevance of laws we keep on the books. While intellectual property law has not fallen to the constitutionally stupid level exemplified by Prohibition, the truism remains that unenforceable laws breed contempt for law. Thus has the entertainment industry perversely fostered the commonplace of piracy.

My expounded solution to that is too extensive to be contained here and so has been published elsewhere. Rather than try to reproduce the argument in this space (it is in any case abstracted at the top of this review), I will close with a postscript taken from Wald:

[The historian Charles] Rosen notes that one of the things that makes it hard for us to appreciate new and unfamiliar styles is that they demand that we accept not only sounds that are strange to us but also the absence of qualities that we consider necessary. One reason that the music of [Paul] Whiteman and the Beatles was so phenomenally popular was that it blended styles that older listeners found abrasive and unmusical with familiar elements, so those listeners could enjoy it without abandoning their previous standards and feel broadminded and modern without essentially changing their tastes. But as Rosen writes, ‘The appreciation of a new style is as much an effort of renunciation as of acceptance.’ And the same holds true for any idea, old or new, that is drastically different from our own.(p. 11)

Hear, hear! Music to my ears.

[Steve · Rating 3 out of 5]

Deep dive into music history, sometimes too much data and information than was warranted. I would have appreciated more to -the - point focus on the big ideas, rather than the detailed supporting discussion of each section, that tended to obscure rather than illuminate the topic. Overall, the teaser title got me into the book, and it was a worthwhile read.

[Emico Salum · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excelente livro em inglês para quem gosta de história da música (do pop americano) desde 1880 até 1970 . E não , o autor fica longe de fazer os Beatles destruírem o rock!!

[David Streb · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am still not sure how the Beatles destroyed rock ‘n’ roll, but I did find this history of music, interesting, particularly the early years.

[Hilary "Fox" · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was a very interesting read, and I covered a lot of the topics that it mentioned through my status updates. Having finished the book, for those of you that are curious about the title and its premise (and want a more in depth explanation than I offer without reading the whole book) I'd recommend reading the last chapter and the epilogue, both sum up the explanation of the title rather well.

All of that having been said, it would be more accurate for the title and the subtitle to be switched. "An Alternative History of American Popular Music: How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll" or something similar. The book is indeed an alternative history of American popular music, and it covers eighty years of history ending in the 1970s.

The book reads a bit like a dissertation or a thesis paper, and I don't mean that in a negative way. Each chapter covers a very particular subject in history, and in the end it all seems to tie together pretty nicely. In the epilogue Elijah Wald does admit exceptions to his theory, and attempts to bring it all up to modern day.

The essence of his theory is that when the British Invasion happened the Beatles (and other such British bands) covered a great deal of rhythm and blues songs, and the American audience ate it up. The British Invasion solidified the fact that white musicians were dominating the rock world, which they continue to do today, and eliminated the musical integration that had happened previously.

Jazz, blues, pop, etc. all took lessons from the black community and traditions - the dance steps nearly all originated from the black gospel churches. The composers and musicians essentially all get filed under rhythm and blues and/or soul even if they write rock records (Ike and Tina Turner's River Deep - Mountain High was here mentioned) which unduly ruins their chances of climbing to the top of the charts.

While all of this I found interesting, I ultimately disagreed with the conclusion that he came to. While it might have been true in the context of the times this happened, I don't believe that it really extends into today. I can think of too many exceptions to the "certain genres are dominated by certain races" rule, and I don't believe the bulk of any population is prejudiced against any particular artist being any particular thing. Gay musicians make it to the top of the charts, as do artists of any race. Heck, looking at the last.fm records of any person can kind of guarantee that you're getting a huge mix.

Essentially, I'd recommend this book as a truly great history, but it hasn't changed my mind about the Beatles influence, impact, and legacy. Everyone does build off what has come before, but I think that they pretty well acknowledged their own influences, as I feel that Bob Dylan acknowledged his.

[Neil White · Rating 4 out of 5]

Blasphemy! How dare a rock critic speak ill of the Fab Four? Short answer: Calm down, he doesn't. Regardless of a title that's clearly manufactured controversy, he does have a point though. A long answer will involve reading the book, though.

Basically, Wald contends that the Beatles and their contemporaries 'destroyed' rock and roll (as it was thought of in the early days) by turning it into an art form, much in the same way jazz was years after it's heyday as a popular form of dance music. He spends the bulk of this book bringing the reader from the earliest forms of 20th century pop music - ragtime, jazz, dance-hall, Glenn Miller, big band orchestras, etc., and how these were viewed at the time, which is often extremely different from how we view them now. For instance, when I mention the word "jazz" now, it conjures up the imagine of serious artists - Miles Davis, Thelonius Monk, John Coltrane, etc. However, the most popular jazz artist of the day in terms of records sold was a man I'd never heard of named Paul Whiteman, the "King of Jazz" at the time.

Point being, history isn't always what we think it is.

Wald skillfully dissects and turns over a lot of assumptions, and pains a very different version of popular music than we're used to hearing, and while he spends most of his time talking about music that is decidedly NOT rock and roll (The Beatles are barely mentioned until the last chapter, in fact), the reader gets a sense of where he's going, and why exactly The Beatles "destroyed" rock and roll.

Spoiler alert time: They didn't, really. But Wald's closing arguments are indeed that music itself, and rock and roll, were never really the same afterwards. By isolating themselves in the studio and creating "art" in album form, rather than creating singles to boost sales (Sgt. Peppers famously had no singles), they branched away from live music as well as 'dance music', both of which had been inextricably tied to what was popular in the given era. This split, as Wald demonstrates, had in some ways been on its way already, but the Fab Four and their peers, and those who followed after them, changed everything.

So if you're a hater looking for an anti-Beatles manifesto, this is not the book for you.* But it is a well-written, well-researched and fascinating look at music in the 20th century, cramming a lot of eye-opening detail into a short 250-odd pages.

*Also, you should be ashamed of yourself, really. Who doesn't like the Beatles, come on!

[Sandra Ross · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is probably the best big-picture book I've read on the history of American popular music in the 20th century.

It's certainly written from an angle I've never seen in similar books, but it actually captures what I miss most now that regular radio has genre'd music to death and if you listen to a regular radio station because you have no other choice, all you hear is a very narrow definition of what whoever-decided-this believes fits into that genre and nothing else.

Like everything else in society, regular radio has specialized into tight niches that literally act as though nothing else exists outside of them. When we lose the big picture, we lose a lot. But most of all, we lose connections, we lose perspective, and we lose history. In other words, we become shallow and myopic, because we have no idea how this moment fits into all the other moments in time.

Wald takes us on the fascinating journey of connecting the dots between the styles of music that developed during the 20th century. He shows the background between why they developed and then why they changed (there were things here that will make you take a look at your own life and perhaps make some changes - I will when I'm able).

But he also shows all the influences that continued to coalesce to make the thread that ran through these various styles. He shows how what was going on historically, culturally, legally, economically, and personally led to the popularity of certain styles that would have remained regional and never seen the light of day had these factors not existed.

Wald is a musician and music historian, so he brings that expertise to this book, giving it a depth and credibility that is often lacking in books like this.

I highly recommend it.

[Danny · Rating 4 out of 5]

You can (and should) ignore the silly and sensationalist title. The Beatles only come into the picture towards the very end of the book, and more as a culmination of forces that had already been at play for decades rather than something new in of themselves.

This book is far richer and more nuanced than the title lets on. It covers an astonishing range of musical artists and genres and comes closer to avoiding the condescension of posterity than just about any other musical history I've read. Wald is happy to admit where his own artistic tastes lie but does an admirable job setting those aside to consider American popular music of different eras in its own terms. A short review can't do justice to the complexity of Wald's argument, so I'll just highlight two of his major themes: the massive impact that recording technology had on live performers and how received critical wisdom had largely been shaped by grown men who have been all too willing to dismiss the judgment of the teenage girls who were major consumers of pop music (in all its guises) throughout the twentieth century.

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

History may repeat but historians repeat other historians, says Elijah Wald. The history of American pop music was written by music snobs, political ax-grinders, and wall-flowers, so Wald goes back & checks what people were really listening to in the various eras: a lot of crowd-pleasing dance music, it turns out. Having just read this book a third time I finally feel like I understand the big picture: prior to the triumph of recorded music and solo dancing (The Twist!) musicians had to play often to earn a living, and they had to play a variety of songs from a variety of musical styles demanded by their audiences of dancers. The Beatles (who, despite the book's title, appear only briefly near the end) started out in this tradition, playing long hours of varied music (girl group, rockabilly, pop, etc.) in Hamburg, and ended up as makers of no-dancing, careful-listening recording studio productions -- a turning point.

This is a must-read for those interested in the history of US pop music.

[Blaze-Pascal · Rating 2 out of 5]

What I am beginning to gather as I read about the history of music, is there is usually a lack of theoretical capacity from the authors of these types of books, but a very strong interest in music. The method shouldn't be, listen to a bunch of records, and create a story, rather the method should be create a history and then show how the records tell that story. I'm sure this author enjoys music very much, but when I was reading this, the lack of depth with regards to historical theory made me want to throw it across the room. Poor choice of evidence... and he falls into standard tropes of music and culture while claiming that it is an "alternative history of american pop music". If alternative means, alternative to history and falling into a pop history (privileged white male) of pop music, then it is quite alternative.

[Robin · Rating 3 out of 5]

An “Alternative” History For Sure

Gets 3 stars because it’s relatively well-written and it definitely gave me an alternative perspective.

That perspective is that this book completely whitewashes the history of American music, mostly from ragtime to the present, making the case that white bandleaders and musicians made various innovations primarily for commercial success. The author repeatedly asks why only unique or spectacular musicians are remembered or picked up by labels, and not the mediocre musicians playing from sheet music in their homes.

Don’t let the title fool you. Very little of this book is actually about The Beatles of rock and roll.

[John Marr · Rating 5 out of 5]

An outstanding history of American popular music that transcends the competition by focusing on popular music, not just the records beloved by record geeks. Although his personal prejudices render his ultimate thesis shaky, he successfully destorys many of the myths that continue to be prepetuated to this day. Absolutely mandatory read for any serious fan of pop music.

[Tad Richards · Rating 5 out of 5]

On my very small shelf of exceptional surveys of 20th Century music, next to Nelson George's The Death of Rhythm and Blues and everything by Arnold Shaw. Wald offers a genuinely revisionist and genuinely convincing history of popular music, and is always readable,
I might have wished he'd given it a different title.

[Silvio111 · Rating 4 out of 5]

I would have given this book 3 stars except that it was so well researched.
The title is completely misleading. The author does not even MENTION the Beatles until page 230 and does not discuss them at all until the final chapter of the substantial book.
The premise that the Beatles destroyed rock & roll is absurd.

However, I can see where Wald wanted to go with this because he traces how Black musicians and their styles as well as Black dance trends consistently influenced and interacted with white music from the early 20th century. Working his way through popular music, including swing, jazz, and later "pop" and disco, he traces the recreational habits of the public. Before radio, records, and jukeboxes, the necessity for live bands kept musicians working. The various demands of populations for different types of dance music and the needs of bands to keep working meant that a live band needed to be flexible and fluent in playing different types of music.

His explanation that the invention of recording technology, records available for sale, and jukeboxes in bars lessened the demand for live music in dance halls, parties, bars, and homes is plausible and actually fascinating.

However, when this quite exhaustive account of 50 years of music entertainment arrives at the point where Motown and other R&B diverge from rock because Motown gladly focused on creating commercial hits while rock (starting with the Beatles, according to Wald) took pride in expressing their individual vision without regard for whether it would sell, that is where I am dubious about his conclusions.

He claims that most musicians who played live were accomplished in various genres of music and most had either classical or jazz formal training. Later artists (singers) who were plucked from obscurity by producers in order to create hits to be played on radio and recorded for sale on records often had no such background. I think this is plausible. But the Beatles were quite versatile musicians in their early days before the Sergeant Pepper years when their recordings were no longer replicable live.

If Wald's complaint is that rock musicians who were creative in the studio killed live music, I disagree.

His point that the emphasis on recording rather than being a journeyman band that could adapt to dance preferences of their audience reduced interaction between Black and white musicians seemed a bit odd to me also because segregation was pretty consistent with a few exceptions until the '60s, except for a few jazz bands.

The discussions of artists such as Sinatra, Connie Francis, Rosemary Clooney and others and how they were compelled to record songs that were really not their preferred genre was very interesting. I remember the "Sing Along with Mitch (Miller)" albums that popularized old folk songs in a generic way for the lowest common denominator. I also remember the early '60s when you could turn on your radio and hear a wide spectrum, from pop to country to jazzy "easy listening."

[An aside: if you watched Beyonce accept her Grammy award this week for Country Album of the Year, in her acceptance speech she said, "Genre is just a cold way to keep people in their place." Even though the '50s and '60s Billboard statistics lists were compiled strictly by genre, the radio stations themselves tended to mix genres quite a bit.]

I appreciated his analysis of how women tended to prefer music they could dance to but critiques of bands and orchestras have typically been written by men, who are more interested in technical discussions of individual musicians' technique (very much like bicyclists like to talk about their gears and tech bros like to talk about their software...sound familiar, ladies?)


My biggest complaint about this book is that it purports to discuss "how the Beatles destroyed rock & roll" and then never really discusses it at all.

I do give Elijah Wald credit for his extensive research. He obviously has a passion for dissecting all the trends from the 1910's forward, and I did enjoy reading about all the dance crazes, but I think he bit off more than he could chew. I think he should have ended with the 1950s and written an entirely different book that picks up from there.

I did enjoy his book, THE MAYOR OF MACDOUGAL STREET about Dave Van Ronk and the Village. I would like to read some of his other books. But I cannot understand why his editor and publisher let him name this book the way they did.

[Sunil · Rating 4 out of 5]

After having spent over a year immersing myself in decades of music I hadn't been exposed to growing up and then falling hard for a little-known band called the Beatles, I was mighty curious to hear how they DESTROYED ROCK 'N' ROLL. It's a provocative title that does Elijah Wald's pretty mindblowing book a disservice by making it sound like a hatchet job on a sacred cow. The subtitle, An Alternative History of American Popular Music, points to the true purpose of the book, which is to challenge the traditional narrative of music by going straight to the source and exploring what music was actually popular at the time and how people talked about it then, rather than apply our own modern perspectives to craft a clean story. At the heart of the book—and the thesis that gives the book its title—is the interplay between black musicians and white musicians, which Wald describes as more of a back-and-forth than we might have thought, and how the evolution of music was somewhat desegregated until the Beatles blew it all apart and caused a permanent split.

I want to write an in-depth review of this book but that would require, essentially, summarizing the whole thing and that would be exhausting. Suffice it to say this book is fucking fascinating and it gave me a whole new perspective on music and art and popular culture and race relations. Wald begins around the turn of the century to describe the birth of "popular music," which was at one point, like, music by John Philip Sousa. You know, the marching band guy. Then he seizes on ragtime and jazz as the origin of everything, and we're off the races, and I was already interested because it turns out jazz was, like, popular music before it became all artsy and highbrow. These are, of course, musical styles originated by black musicians, but Wald is determined to restore Paul Whiteman's place in jazz history. Paul Whiteman is, well, a white man, and in an amusing reversal, it's he who has been forgotten as the King of Jazz, at one point the most popular musician in the country and namechecked by Duke Ellington himself as an influence. At times, the book does feel like an excuse to give Paul Whiteman a tonguebath, but Wald is not a white man standing up for this poor forgotten white man, he's a musician and historian attempting to paint a more accurate picture.

This is a dense fucking book, and I never knew how many of these names or songs I was actually supposed to be familiar with, and how many were people who had big hits but whose influence and place in music history has been forgotten. I often felt like there were paragraphs of nothing more than "Look at all this exhaustive research I did," but they were only ever paragraphs, not pages, which allowed me to follow the overarching narrative of how popular music evolved. Through dance, as that was the sole reason for music at all initially. Through technological innovations, as music had to adapt as the primary method of consumption changed from live bands to live radio to radio to jukeboxes to records to albums. Through a shifting perception of what constituted Art. Through an age gap. Through covers, through a mixing of styles, through movies, this is a dense fucking book. It spends the vast majority of its time getting to the fifties, and unfortunately kind of zooms through the fifties and sixties without the granular detail of previous decades, which doesn't entirely feel right as it doesn't properly set the stage for the musical scene and seismic shift of the Beatles. But by that time my brain was like a fried egg so I'm not sure how much more I could take, my whole conception of popular music had been blown apart.

How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music provides a meticulously detailed yet rip-roaring history of American popular music. It's rare to read something that so thoroughly upends everything you thought you knew, but Elijah Wald did it in 254 pages.

[Robert Garrett · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book's title generates buzz but proves misleading. Author Wald gives us a history of American popular music - from roughly the beginning of the ragtime era (i.e., the late nineteenth century) to just after the 1960s British Invasion. The Beatles really don't figure into the narrative until the last chapter. This will undoubtedly annoy some Beatles fans taken in by false advertising, but readers who do know what they're getting here should be delighted. The book is quite good and surprisingly readable, and I learned a lot from it.

Wald's premise is that most music histories focus on artists and recordings highly regarded by modern music scholars but don't properly convey how contemporary listeners actually experienced and reacted to the music of their respective eras. He attempts to do the latter here and his efforts do provide food for thought. He notes, for example, that early twentieth century music listeners wouldn't see any recording as a "definitive" performance of a song, as people do today and that the musicians themselves typically didn't see their recordings as a significant part of their income. He explains that people would go to see bands who would play what the audience wanted to hear, and no one, until much later in the twentieth century, expected an act to duplicate what listeners heard on a record. According to Wald, the earliest recordings were typically sorted in stores by the instruments heard on them rather than by artists. Wald tells us that singers weren't big stars in the early 1900s, as you typically couldn't hear them above the instruments, anyway. He notes that microphones made singers more prominent and that record producers eventually realized that a sole singer would be cheaper and easier to market - and manipulate - then a full orchestra with a band leader in charge (Thus explaining the death of the "big band era.").

The book is chock full of "Did you know....?" type facts and anecdotes that could fuel party conversations for hours. Wald describes, for example, how the jukebox revolutionized the music industry - not only because it contributed to a greater focus on recorded music, but also because it put so many musicians out of work (Wald explains that establishments could actually MAKE MONEY on a jukebox rather than pay a band to draw customers.). Wald details the beginning of the l.p. and how it was initially marketed toward adults while youth continued to buy smaller singles for many years...and how artists wouldn't be expected to put singles hits on an l.p. Through Wald's history, we can also trace the career paths of certain artists - seeing, for example, how Frank Sinatra went from a heart throb who appealed primarily to 1940s teen girls to - a decade later - an artist who appealed more to adult men, thanks largely to his l.p. sales.

Of course, none of Wald's facts invalidate other music histories or the long-term influence of certain artists and recordings, and Wald isn't out to do that, anyway. Rather, his book serves as a reminder that our view of history is often distorted through our filter of the present and that it's sometimes good to step back and try to view events in a wider context. As such, HOW THE BEATLES DESTROYED ROCK N' ROLL is a must read, I feel, for anyone with a strong interest in its topic.

My score: 10/10

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

I finished this a while back and feel like I'll be reading it again to try and fix the details in my head: to remember the details of the musician's union strikes that shifted the whole road of recorded music; also to try and actually make myself listen to Paul Whiteman and Tommy Dorsey and so on. These names perhaps a clue to how mistitled this book is; it's both less combative and less focused on the 50s-to-60s moment than that title suggests. To some extent the book's thesis that the historiography of popular music is wrong: that it's very strange that we dismiss Whiteman in favour of 'real' jazz (Ellington didn't) but we accept what the Beatles wrought as an advance on the rock music that served teenybopper purposes. To call it a thesis rather than a recurring theme is probably the issue; rather it's an idea he reminds you of every couple of chapters.

The other recurring theme is that for the first half of the century our recorded history of music is a much distorted portrait of what was popular in the sense of 'what most of the people were listening to most of the time': Armstrong played hundreds of gigs with unrecorded orchestras but the Hot Five never played outside a studio, and all that. Wald (a musician before he was a writer, I think?) is committed to the idea that musics have a natural audience, and that audience is the audience who has a functional use for them, going to see bands play, dancing, and so forth; this overlaps with a sort of soft Bourdieu-ism in which there's no hierarchy between crying to a Paul Anka record and listening for the triple-tonguing in a Buddy Bolden solo*; his commitment to this mode is clearly more notional.

The real argument (and the thing linking the two points above) is that the shift to recorded media is the actual profound transformation in how we conceptualise pop music (perhaps especially in how we formulate it in terms of aesthetic value rather than use-value.) Along with the examples cited above also note how Frank Sinatra's voice was for a generation more familiar as the singer of the most popular songs of the day on the radio show Hit Parade, and that the LPs we think of as his classic period were for audiences of the time a late-career reflorescence. (Wald also, cheekily, points out how much they align with the 'mood music' boom of that moment, itself only imaginable due to the increased length and fidelity of the LP format.) Wald reduces everything after the 60s to an extended postscript, admitting he doesn't feel like he has the antennae for what to discuss afterwards; that the separation of white and black audiences, and post-60s boxing-off of 'art' popular musics and 'use' popular musics for him reduces the interest in either. Not for the first time I wished he'd been a little more--pugilistic?--in his aesthetic judgements; I'm not actually all that convinced that the reason we value the Beatles more than Whiteman is that the Beatles's records are better; on the other hand, that's probably more my failing than Wald's.

* this example is from an Eddie Campbell comic, not this book

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

It changed the way I listen to just about everything now: a much smarter and funnier and stranger way of thinking about musical production, reception, and technology than anything else I've read. It's a little slow at times and if you're not familiar with a lot of the big hits of the 1940's and 1950's like I am now because of Andrew Hickey's 500 Songs Project/Podcast, then it's definitely not going to work as well. But anytime someone talks about poptimism/rockism or Spotify or musicians getting ripped off or racism/sexism in the music industry, they are unknowingly (because almost no one's read this book!) referencing the tensions that Wald lays out so brilliantly.
The simple version: while rock n'roll was united the northern, southern, and western United States, black and white, rural and urban music into one rich stew of rebellion against boring big band dance music (see: Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Sam Phillips, Hank Williams, Little Ricard Sister Rosetta Tharpe, etc.), what rock n'roll turned into because of the invention of the album and the invention of the Beatles was something that no longer united teenagers and hipcat adults together in live concerts where they screamed and shook all together or on the radio/jukebox where you listened to it with your friends and family. Instead, it was something that the Beatles made in the studio and sold to you at home, and you listened to it on headphones. And this led to the takeover of rock n'roll by (increasingly wealthier and better-connected) white men, because they were the ones that the music industry was willing to take a chance on and fund the production of lavish albums and big tours (because the music industry was run by those same white men). A musical tradition that was made up of black and white men and women, most of whom were from working class roots, who toured a huge number of tiny venues all over the U.S., became one made up nearly entirely of middle-class and up white men (and a few women) who bought rock instruments, practiced in their garages, and then auditioned for big music labels in the hope of getting a record deal and a chance at making a "great album." They didn't tour tiny venues, and they didn't play live as the basis for their music.
Now, of course there was a backlash against this, and Wald writes at the end of the book about the tremendous power of disco to bring people back together to dance (this was part of why nerdy rock critics who loved the Beatles mostly hated disco) and about the rebellion against major labels and insistence on live sounds and independent all-ages concerts that punk represented. Still, "classic rock" is a strange phenomenon: it's an art that was created by rebellion that then destroyed nearly all of the traces of its rebellion. Wald brings all those traces back.

[Garrett Cash · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading any Elijah Wald book is like going to a music masterclass with someone who has managed to see outside of all the mythological mumbo jumbo and oft-retold apocrypha to get at something like the truth. His books on Robert Johnson and Bob Dylan/Newport were both eye-opening reads, but this book with a deliberately inflammatory title might be his masterpiece.

Wald covers the development of twentieth century popular music from its roots in the 19th century through to the ragtime and Sousa era, Paul Whiteman's dominance in the jazz age, the emergence of swing, the adult pop and mood music market, and ultimately the teen-driven rock n' roll era that ended (at least symbolically) roughly as soon as The Beatles arrived in 1964.

Throughout the book Wald challenges the conventional narratives in popular music histories and puts his microscope on musical forms and artists that are often ignored by later chroniclers. As someone who has read far and wide on the history of early twentieth century music I cannot overemphasis how radical and fresh Wald's perspective is. He puts to words the thoughts I have as I listen to this music and process my own opinions on it that often run counter to the "official" narratives.

If you have any interest in the history of twentieth century music, this book can be a dense and heavy read that will have you looking up a lot of songs that you've never heard before, but I assure you that your perspective on music history will never be the same.

[John Gillies · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book's title is very misleading, since it's actually a fascinating history of how important dance music has been in the development of American popular music, from the time of ragtime (and even earlier). The author makes a strong case about how performing musicians, in order to earn a living, had to be aware of, and be able to play for customers, a range of musical styles, beyond the particular style the musician considered his or her focus (jazz, country, etc.).

Among the interesting points he makes is that music historians, who tend to be predominantly male, tend to focus on "interesting" music, in other words, music that is interesting to them, and neglect music that was more generally popular than they acknowledge, particularly for female listeners. He notes that even into the 1960s, there were rarely clear lines between the types of music that people listened to. For example, many fans of Elvis were also fans of Perry Como.

The title reflects his belief that, with the Beatles, music performers no longer had to focus on ensuring that they played music that people would dance to, resulting in a splintering of music into various factions where the intent is just to be listened to.

The author does an excellent job of looking carefully at musical trends and putting together facts in a way that runs counter to much accepted criticism.

His is a very refreshing look at American popular music.