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The co-op bookstore for avid readers
Love for Sale
Critic Reviews
Good
Based on 5 reviews on
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.
Book Details
- Publisher: St. Martins Press-3PL
- Publish Date: Oct 10th, 2017
- Pages: 320
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 8.70in - 5.40in - 0.90in - 0.79lb
- EAN: 9781250141217
- Categories: • History & Criticism - General• Genres & Styles - Pop Vocal
More books to explore
About the Author
David Hajdu is the music critic for The Nation and a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Before joining The Nation in January 2015, he served for more than ten years as the music critic for The New Republic. He is the author of three books of narrative nonfiction and and one collection of essays: Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn (FSG, 1996), Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariña (FSG, 2001), The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America (FSG, 2008), and Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics, and Culture (2009). Lush Life, Positively 4th Street, and Heroes and Villians were all finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award. The Ten-Cent Plague was a finalist for the Eisner award, and the editors of Amazon named it the #1 Best Book of the Year on the arts.
Hajdu is married to the singer and actor Karen Oberlin and is the father of three. He lives in Manhattan with his family.
More books by David Hajdu
What people are saying
prop me up beside the jukebox if i die / https://t.co/ou4ScEZqug / she/her / natalie.l.weiner@gmail.com / subscribe to https://t.co/bnfzZbwTRn
pop music has been about putting oneself at the center of a song (to the exclusion of the artist) almost since it's existed, tiktok just makes it more literal - liked david hajdu's love for sale on this particular lineage of pop music history https://t.co/0tDAHb4tKF
Critics’ reviews
Praise for this book
"Love for Sale: Pop Music in America is easy to devour for anyone who still feels a pang of nostalgia or despair when walking past a bank branch where a record store used to be." --The New York Times Book Review
"One of our sharpest music critics." --The Wall Street Journal
"No, this is not just a standard history of "Pop Music in America." This is a very personal and utterly wonderful book about the subject." --Buffalo News
" Writing in graceful prose, Hajdu nicely balances brisk historical narrative, shrewd cultural analysis, and opinionated personal reflection in an absorbing account of shifting musical landscapes." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A highly learned pleasure for music and pop-culture buffs." --Kirkus Reviews
"This beautifully told history of popular music, like a great pop song, is full of memorable lines." --Library Journal
"Pop music is often dismissed as light, frivolous and artistically bankrupt. But in his new book Love for Sale, music critic David Hajdu argues that it's one of the most meaningful forms of expression in American culture." --Time Magazine
"A blend of history, criticism, and autobiography...it does touch on most major developments in how pop music has been produced and consumed in the United States from the 1890s through the present." --Los Angeles Review of Books
What people are saying
prop me up beside the jukebox if i die / https://t.co/ou4ScEZqug / she/her / natalie.l.weiner@gmail.com / subscribe to https://t.co/bnfzZbwTRn
pop music has been about putting oneself at the center of a song (to the exclusion of the artist) almost since it's existed, tiktok just makes it more literal - liked david hajdu's love for sale on this particular lineage of pop music history https://t.co/0tDAHb4tKF
