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Love for Sale: Pop Music in America

David Hajdu

List price £12.99
Product Details
Format:
Paperback (BC)
ISBN:
9781250141217
Published:
01 Nov 2017
Publisher:
Macmillan [1570]
Dimensions:
320 pages - 210 x 140 x 20mm

Categories:

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 45s 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. 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.
LOVE FOR SALE 9780374170530 (Hardback), THE TEN-CENT PLAGUE 9780374187675 (Hardback) and 9780312428235 (Paperback)
A personal, idiosyncratic history of pop music that also may well be definitive, from the revered music critic.
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