Love for Sale
eBook - ePub

Love for Sale

Pop Music in America

  1. 321 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Love for Sale

Pop Music in America

About this book

Named a Must-Read by Vanity Fair and BBC. "One of our sharpest music critics . . . recounts a life immersed in pop music. An engaging history." — The Wall Street Journal

In  Love for Sale, David Hajdu—one of the most respected critics and music historians of our time—draws on a lifetime of listening, playing, and writing about music to show how pop has done much more than peddle fantasies of love and sex to teenagers. From vaudeville singer Eva Tanguay, the "I Don't Care Girl" who upended Victorian conceptions of feminine propriety to become one of the biggest stars of her day to the scandal of Blondie playing disco at CBGB, Hajdu presents an incisive and idiosyncratic history of a form that has repeatedly upset social and cultural expectations.
Exhaustively researched and rich with fresh insights,  Love for Sale is unbound by the usual tropes of pop music history. Hajdu, for instance, gives a star turn to Bessie Smith and the "blues queens" of the 1920s, who brought wildly transgressive sexuality to American audience decades before rock and roll. And there is 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. And then there are today's practitioners of Electronic Dance Music, who Hajdu celebrates for carrying the pop revolution to heretofore unimaginable frontiers. At every turn, Hajdu surprises and challenges readers to think about our most familiar art in unexpected ways.

Masterly and impassioned, authoritative and at times deeply personal,  Love for Sale is a book of critical history informed by its writer's own unique history as a besotted fan and lifelong student of pop.

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Yes, you can access Love for Sale by David Hajdu in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Media & Performing Arts & Social Science Biographies. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright Notice
  4. Dedication
  5. Introduction
  6. 1. The Sheet Music Era: The Zenith of the Popular Music Craze
  7. 2. The Rise of Records: Whispering
  8. 3. The Cotton Club: Jungle Nights in Harlem
  9. 4. The Charts: Make-Believe Island
  10. 5. Going West: Hollywood Barn Dance
  11. 6. Rock and Roll: They Went Ca-raaaaazy for It!
  12. 7. The Transistor: Mine Completely
  13. 8. Singers and Songwriters: Potty About Dylan
  14. 9. The Album: A Pair of Twenty-Minute Things
  15. 10. Punk Versus Disco: Who Needs Love?
  16. 11. Video: Moonwalkers
  17. 12. Hip-Hop: Beats Want to Be Free
  18. 13. Digitization: The Immaterial World
  19. Coda
  20. Notes
  21. Acknowledgments
  22. Index
  23. Also by David Hajdu
  24. A Note About the Author
  25. Newsletter Sign-up
  26. Contents
  27. Copyright