Love for Sale

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

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

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

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

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

1301788080
Love for Sale

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

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

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

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

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

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Love for Sale

Love for Sale

by DAVID HAJDU
Love for Sale

Love for Sale

by DAVID HAJDU

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Overview

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

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

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

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

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


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781250141217
Publisher: St. Martins Press-3PL
Publication date: 10/10/2017
Pages: 318
Product dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.71(d)

About the Author

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

Table of Contents

Introduction 3

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

2 The Rise of Records: Whispering 29

3 The Cotton Club: Jungle Nights in Harlem 45

4 The Charts: Make-Believe Island 63

5 Going West: Hollywood Barn Dance 79

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

7 The Transistor: Mine Completely 123

8 Singers and Songwriters: Potty About Dylan 135

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

10 Punk Versus Disco: Who Needs Love? 171

11 Video: Moonwalkers 185

12 Hip-Hop: Beats Want to be Free 197

13 Digitization: The Immaterial World 211

Coda 237

Notes 245

Acknowledgments 289

Index 291

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