From revered music critic David Hajdu comes a personal, idiosyncratic history of popular music.
David Hajdu begins Love for Sale, his personal history of recorded pop music, in an unexpected placenot with nostalgic reminiscences of the 45s of his youth but with the sheet music era at the end of the nineteenth century. It was not so much the beginning of popular musicmany songs were already popularas it was the beginning of the popular music industry. And if hes going to understand what his 45s meant to him, this is the place to start: the rise of Tin Pan Alley, of minstrelsy, of million-copy sellers and one-hit wonders, and of cultural arbiters decrying the baseness, simplicity, and signs of the end of times in popular music.
From there, Hajdu takes us on more unexpected routes through the history of pop musicback to Alexander Graham Bell and the invention of records and to his grandmothers collection of Italian crooners on shellac records that young Hajdu liberated from her New Jersey basement. And neither Italians nor New Jersey are incidental to his storynot just because of Frank Sinatra but because Hajdus mom, a waitress in a chrome-clad diner on Route 22, helped shape the fate of a budding young music critic by introducing him to one of the diners most prominent patrons, the writer of the timeless song Im from New Jersey.
Love for Sale does ultimately spin through more familiar territorythe Cotton Club, the rise of radio, the battle of disco versus punk for the soul of New York as Hajdu made his chops as a critic, the rise of hip-hop, and the current atomization of the music landscapebut it is always with a unique, insightful, and eloquently presented point of view, as one would expect from one of our most celebrated music critics.
In Composers’ Letters, the voices of the great figures of classical music come alive through their correspondence. Set against the music we know and love, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Wagner, Tchaikovsky and many more talk openly about their m...
Narrator: Jeremy Nicholas, Daniel Philpott, Edward de Souza, with Anton Le Published: 02/01/2000
Amid a background of wars and revolution, the 19th century produced many of the world’s best-loved composers including Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin and Tchaikovsky. Discover Music of the Romantic Era charts the course of music through these turbu...
Since its origins in the sixteenth century, opera has been an extravagant, costly affair, arousing great passions. It has also produced some of the most sublime works of art, from Monteverdi to Wagner. Following the widely acclaimed History of Class...
January 1970: the Beatles assemble one more time to put the finishing touches on Let It Be; Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young are wrapping up Déjà Vu; Simon and Garfunkel are unveiling Bridge Over Troubled Water; James Taylor is an upst...
Cowboys and Indies is the definitive record-business bible, chronicling the pioneers who set the stylus on the most important labels and musical discoveries of the last century. The narrative follows all the musical trends and developments from the ...
When singer Amy Winehouse was found dead at her London home in 2011, the press inducted her into what Kurt Cobain's mother named the 27 Club. "Now he's gone and joined that stupid club," she said in 1994, after being told that her son, the front man...
From the beloved host and creator of NPR’s All Songs Considered and Tiny Desk Concerts comes an essential oral history of modern music, told in the voices of iconic and up-and-coming musicians, including Dave Grohl, Jimmy ...
One of The Telegraph's Best Music Books 2011 Alex Ross's award-winning international bestseller, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, has become a contemporary classic, establishing Ross as one of our most popular and acclaimed cul...
Punk rock and hip-hop, disco and salsa, the loft jazz scene and the downtown composers known as Minimalists-in the mid-1970s, New York City was a laboratory where all the major styles of modern music were reinvented, all at once, from one block to t...
{"id":"1498913","ean":"9781504748148","abr":"Unabridged","title":"Love for Sale: Pop Music in America","subtitle":"Pop Music in America","author":"David Hajdu","rating_average":"0","narrator":"George Newbern","ubr_id":"1498913","abr_id":"0","ubr_price":"19.95","abr_price":"0.00","ubr_memprice":"12.97","abr_memprice":"0.00","ubr_narrator":"George Newbern","abr_narrator":"","ubr_length":"Unabridged: 8 hr","abr_length":"Abridged: "}
