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How The Beatles Destroyed Rock N Roll
Elijah Wald
An Alternative History Of American Popular Music
Oxford University Press, USA
June 2009
On Sale: June 1, 2009
336 pages
ISBN: 0195341546
EAN: 9780195341546
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
"There are no definitive histories," writes Elijah Wald, in
this provocative reassessment of American popular music,
"because the past keeps looking different as the present
changes." Earlier musical styles sound different to us today
because we hear them through the musical filter of other
styles that came after them, all the way through funk and
hiphop. As its blasphemous title suggests, How the Beatles Destroyed
Rock 'n' Roll rejects the conventional pieties of mainstream
jazz and rock history. Rather than concentrating on those
traditionally favored styles, the book traces the evolution
of popular music through developing tastes, trends and
technologies—including the role of records, radio, jukeboxes
and television —to give a fuller, more balanced account of
the broad variety of music that captivated listeners over
the course of the twentieth century. Wald revisits original
sources—recordings, period articles, memoirs, and
interviews—to highlight how music was actually heard and
experienced over the years. And in a refreshing departure
from more typical histories, he focuses on the world of
working musicians and ordinary listeners rather than stars
and specialists. He looks for example at the evolution of
jazz as dance music, and rock 'n' roll through the eyes of
the screaming, twisting teenage girls who made up the bulk
of its early audience. Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Frank
Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and the Beatles are all
here, but Wald also discusses less familiar names like Paul
Whiteman, Guy Lombardo, Mitch Miller, Jo Stafford, Frankie
Avalon, and the Shirelles, who in some cases were far more
popular than those bright starswe all know today, and who
more accurately represent the mainstream of their times. Written with verve and style, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock
'n' Roll shakes up our staid notions of music history and
helps us hear American popular music with new ears.
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