Love for sale : pop music in America
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Love for sale : pop music in America
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016
1st ed
- : cloth
Available at 3 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
David Hajdu begins Love for Sale, his personal history of pop music, in an unexpected place - not 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 music - many songs were already popular - as it was the beginning of the popular music industry. And if he's going to understand what his 453 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 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 music - back to Alexander Graham Bell and the invention of records ...and to his grandmother's 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 story - not just because of Frank Sinatra but because Hajdu's 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 diner's most prominent patrons, the writer of the timeless song "I'm from New Jersey." Love for Sale does ultimately spin through more familiar territory - the 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 atomisation of the music landscape but 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.
by "Nielsen BookData"