By Keith Walsh
There’s an old saying—“you can’t learn everything from books.” To this I would add “that’s what music is for.” In “Love For Sale – Pop Music In America,” reporter and Columbia journalism professor David Hajdu narrates a history of popular music, with an emphasis on the interplay of music and cultural change, as well as the role it played in his coming of age and growth as a person.
Part history, part memoir, the anecdote-rich narrative refers to hundreds of recordings, along with insights from the many interviews Hajdu conducted in his career as a rock journalist. Starting with sheet music and progressing to the MP3, the volume covers an impressive amount of information in its 243 pages. But perhaps the most entertaining aspects of the book are the personal stories from Hajdu that illustrate the importance of music in his life.
Hajdu got his start in journalism in his high school years, creating an underground newspaper where he promoted his theory that the presence of the soundtrack recording of the original Broadway cast recording of My Fair Lady (on a 33 1/3 vinyl record) in a seeming majority of homes in the U.S. was the result of an alien mind control plot. This sense of humor is evident throughout the book, as Hajdu presents the development of commercial music.
By giving a voice to music’s critics from the very beginning of the book, but ultimately making a case for the importance of popular songs as creators of communities and as instruments of social change, Hajdu’s text spans more than 100 years of pop music’s development, and is packed with plenty of facts along with Hajdu’s attention to small details from his own experiences as a music listener.
From the very beginning in the sheet music era, popular music had no shortage of detractors. Quoting a reporter for The New York Times in 1910, Hajdu suggests that snobbery has been a reactionary response from the start. “The composition of popular songs,’” Hajdu quotes, “whether it be the words or the music, seems to be largely a matter of knack…The greatest hits do not display any considerable degree of literary or musical ability, the words are generally inane and the construction not infrequently ungrammatical. The music is often such a simple tune as a child might conceive.’”
Yet Hajdu holds a broader view, that while writing for commercial gain, songwriters were and remain an integral, vibrant part of culture. He writes: “The Tin Pan Alley tunesmiths made up the first class of professional songwriters in American history. As good professionals, they catered to their market – often expertly, even artfully, however cynically – and were taken to task by the press of their day for pandering to the tastes of the public and for perverting those tastes with their scary urban ideas.” This theme, of the spread of ideas and corruption from urban areas to so-called genteel society, comes into play later as Hajdu describes the growing popularity of jazz in the ‘30s and ‘40s up to the rock era and development of disco, punk, electronica and hip hop.
As Hajdu illustrates the connections between popular songs and the racial integration of U.S. society, as well the role of disco in the LGBT rights movement, we are reminded of the importance of music to social change. In a second thread, Hajdu’s personal experiences are intertwined in an amusing way, as the book follows his adventures with music – from losing hearing in his left ear from surreptitious listening to his transistor radio in bed as a child, to The Beatles’ “Yesterday” playing on the car tape deck for his first kiss, and across the decades as he comes to appreciate the popular music his children listen to, perhaps more than he should, he admits.
Along with its anecdote-rich personal arc, the book is packed with nuggets from the impressive roster of interviews conducted by Hajdu. Interviewees included George Martin, Lena Horne, Smokey Robinson, Billy Eckstine, John Sebastian, Suze Rotolo, Dave Van Ronk, Paul McCartney, Robert Fripp, and even the musical son of Italian Fascist Benito Mussolini, jazz pianist Romano Mussolini. Romano said of his father, “He was very tough. He didn’t care for the music. He brought me the records because he knew they would give me happiness.” Hajdu makes the interesting point that his mother bought him records for the same reasons.[pullquote]“The history of electronic music – in fact, the history of the avant-garde, to a certain degree—is a history of artists getting their hands on something new— it could be a computer, it could be almost anything—and saying ‘ Well, this is interesting. I wonder if I can change the rules with this?” George Lewis [/pullquote]
As he moves across the decades, the book culminates in an analysis of present day music, including thoughtful discussions of musical technology including the Mellotron, The Fairlight CMI, the Akai S900 sampler, and the infamous Auto-Tune, as well as about the various ways music is distributed, from the sonic comprises made in various formats, the rise and fall of Napster, and the devaluation of music in the digital age.
Hajdu’s accepting attitude towards electronic music is a pleasant factor. He quotes composer and laptop electronic artist George Lewis: “The history of electronic music – in fact, the history of the avant-garde, to a certain degree—is a history of artists getting their hands on something new— it could be a computer, it could be almost anything—and saying ‘ Well, this is interesting. I wonder if I can change the rules with this?'”
To illustrate the devaluation of music in a digital age, Hajdu – who still occasionally buys 45 rpm singles, as well as 78s for his wind up Victrola player – addresses his guilt about using, on a daily basis, streaming services that offer very little remuneration to artists. “Using Spotify on my phone, listening with earbuds, I crank the sound up loud enough to drown out my conscience and console myself with the delusion that my commitment to purchasing CDs and vinyl, in small numbers, somehow compensates for my gluttonous consumption of streaming music for next to nothing.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, there is an appropriate insight from Karl Marx related to this. Hajdu writes: “Since Marx, the idea of exchange value had to do with how the perceived worth of a thing changes through a sale; with digital music, the value was contained in the exchange itself. Nothing needed to be sold at all.”
The vice president of Randall Amps, for whom I was employed in the early 80s, once took me aside at the NAMM (National Association of Music Merchants) trade show, warning me: “Music is a good business – but you can’t make any money in it.” This statement perplexed me, for I knew several people who had claimed their fortunes by writing and selling popular songs. Perhaps my boss intended irony, as at that moment we literally stood in the bustling midst of productive musical commerce. More likely, he was describing the relative poverty that most musicians struggled in.
Despite the struggle, as Hajdu points out, it’s all worth it, regardless of commerical success or failure. He writes: “The story of music making by the track-and-hook method is one of human beings involved in the profoundly human activities of invention, collaboration, rivalry, triumph, and disappointment. For all of their efforts, often working obsessively day and night, most of the people making pop today spend most of the time working on music that is never released or falls short of becoming a hit. The ostensible hit makers are engaged, in the most human of acts: failure. ” Hadju’s appreciation of the fact that there are fruits produced, even in the labor of music that fails on a commercial level makes the implied point that it’s all very much worth the efforts made.
“Love For Sale – Pop Music In America” is published by Picador, an imprint of Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, and is available at a retailer near you for $17, and on Amazon Kindle and Google Books for $9.99.
