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Rhythms of change
By Peter Keepnews |
July 12, 2009, Sunday
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If you're looking to be convinced that the Beatles destroyed rock 'n' roll, then strangely enough, "How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll" is not for you. The title is a come-on: the Beatles are among the many subjects Elijah Wald addresses in this cheerfully iconoclastic book, but they are not what it is about.
On the other hand, if you're looking, as Wald's subtitle has it, for "an alternative history of American popular music" -- specifically from the turn of the 20th century to roughly the mid-1970s -- you've found it. And if you're up for some good arguments, you've found those too.
"How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll" contains some arguments that will have you slapping your forehead and exclaiming "Of course!" and some that will have you scratching your head and saying "Huh?" The one that gives the book its name may have you doing both.
While Wald never says in so many words that the Beatles destroyed rock 'n' roll, he does take a stance several degrees removed from standard-issue Beatles worship. He suggests that their ambitious later work, widely hailed as a step forward for rock, instead helped turn it from a triumphantly mongrel dance music that smashed racial barriers into a rhythmically inert art music made mostly by, and for, white people. Whether you agree or disagree, you have to admit that's a provocative assertion.
This book is full of similarly provocative claims, always supported by copious evidence even when the conclusions are debatable. Wald is a meticulous researcher, a graceful writer and a committed contrarian.
He is best known as the author of "Escaping the Delta," which was basically (I exaggerate only a little) a book-length attempt to deflate the exalted reputation of the bluesman Robert Johnson. In his new book he once again challenges the conventional wisdom, this time on a much broader scale.
He has set himself a deceptively simple task: to write about the popular music of the last century by concentrating on what was actually popular, and to figure out why people -- not critics or historians but the people who bought the sheet music and the records, listened to the songs on the radio and went to the dances -- liked it.
In doing so he ends up taking aim, for example, at the notion that mainstream pop music in the early 1950s was mired in white-bread mediocrity, as embodied by the likes of Perry Como, until Elvis Presley and company came along to rescue it. He doesn't deny that rock 'n' roll delivered a new energy and a new attitude, but he maintains that Elvis and Perry had more than a little in common -- and he notes that plenty of teenage record buyers liked them both.
He also makes a case for the importance, and the lasting influence, of artists like Paul Whiteman, a bandleader who was phenomenally successful in the 1920s and 1930s but has rarely received anything more than grudging respect from music historians, and has more often been either attacked or ignored.
In his heyday the appropriately named Whiteman was billed as the King of Jazz, which in artistic terms he clearly wasn't; Wald acknowledges that his often syrupy music is less interesting than Fletcher Henderson's or Duke Ellington's. But he also says that no matter how corny it may sound to contemporary ears, it deserves to be taken seriously -- not least because Whiteman's admirers included, among many others, Henderson and Ellington. (While white musicians have long drawn inspiration from black musicians, he points out, the inspiration has sometimes flowed in the other direction as well.)
And he finds parallels between Whiteman -- who commissioned "Rhapsody in Blue" and whose quasi-symphonic approach was said, in the unfortunate terminology of the time, to have made an honest woman out of jazz -- and the Beatles. Whiteman, he explains, took a music that had been seen as rough and uncouth and made it respectable to a wide audience; the Beatles did the same thing with the string-quartet elegance of "Yesterday" and the operatic grandiosity of "Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band."
Wald admits that the analogy is far from perfect, which saves me the trouble of saying so myself. But it works well enough to allow him to ask an uncomfortable question: why is it that the Beatles and others who "built on the work of black precursors but took the music in new directions" in the 1960s have been routinely praised for accomplishing this feat, while Whiteman has been roundly condemned for doing essentially the same thing 40 years earlier?
I don't have a good answer to that question. I also don't have a sudden urge to trade my copy of "Revolver" for a Paul Whiteman reissue. But on this and other subjects, "How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll" has given me plenty to think about -- and for a book that devotes so much attention to so many people who have never been on my personal hit parade, that's an impressive accomplishment.
On the other hand, if you're looking, as Wald's subtitle has it, for "an alternative history of American popular music" -- specifically from the turn of the 20th century to roughly the mid-1970s -- you've found it. And if you're up for some good arguments, you've found those too.
"How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll" contains some arguments that will have you slapping your forehead and exclaiming "Of course!" and some that will have you scratching your head and saying "Huh?" The one that gives the book its name may have you doing both.
While Wald never says in so many words that the Beatles destroyed rock 'n' roll, he does take a stance several degrees removed from standard-issue Beatles worship. He suggests that their ambitious later work, widely hailed as a step forward for rock, instead helped turn it from a triumphantly mongrel dance music that smashed racial barriers into a rhythmically inert art music made mostly by, and for, white people. Whether you agree or disagree, you have to admit that's a provocative assertion.
This book is full of similarly provocative claims, always supported by copious evidence even when the conclusions are debatable. Wald is a meticulous researcher, a graceful writer and a committed contrarian.
He is best known as the author of "Escaping the Delta," which was basically (I exaggerate only a little) a book-length attempt to deflate the exalted reputation of the bluesman Robert Johnson. In his new book he once again challenges the conventional wisdom, this time on a much broader scale.
He has set himself a deceptively simple task: to write about the popular music of the last century by concentrating on what was actually popular, and to figure out why people -- not critics or historians but the people who bought the sheet music and the records, listened to the songs on the radio and went to the dances -- liked it.
In doing so he ends up taking aim, for example, at the notion that mainstream pop music in the early 1950s was mired in white-bread mediocrity, as embodied by the likes of Perry Como, until Elvis Presley and company came along to rescue it. He doesn't deny that rock 'n' roll delivered a new energy and a new attitude, but he maintains that Elvis and Perry had more than a little in common -- and he notes that plenty of teenage record buyers liked them both.
He also makes a case for the importance, and the lasting influence, of artists like Paul Whiteman, a bandleader who was phenomenally successful in the 1920s and 1930s but has rarely received anything more than grudging respect from music historians, and has more often been either attacked or ignored.
In his heyday the appropriately named Whiteman was billed as the King of Jazz, which in artistic terms he clearly wasn't; Wald acknowledges that his often syrupy music is less interesting than Fletcher Henderson's or Duke Ellington's. But he also says that no matter how corny it may sound to contemporary ears, it deserves to be taken seriously -- not least because Whiteman's admirers included, among many others, Henderson and Ellington. (While white musicians have long drawn inspiration from black musicians, he points out, the inspiration has sometimes flowed in the other direction as well.)
And he finds parallels between Whiteman -- who commissioned "Rhapsody in Blue" and whose quasi-symphonic approach was said, in the unfortunate terminology of the time, to have made an honest woman out of jazz -- and the Beatles. Whiteman, he explains, took a music that had been seen as rough and uncouth and made it respectable to a wide audience; the Beatles did the same thing with the string-quartet elegance of "Yesterday" and the operatic grandiosity of "Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band."
Wald admits that the analogy is far from perfect, which saves me the trouble of saying so myself. But it works well enough to allow him to ask an uncomfortable question: why is it that the Beatles and others who "built on the work of black precursors but took the music in new directions" in the 1960s have been routinely praised for accomplishing this feat, while Whiteman has been roundly condemned for doing essentially the same thing 40 years earlier?
I don't have a good answer to that question. I also don't have a sudden urge to trade my copy of "Revolver" for a Paul Whiteman reissue. But on this and other subjects, "How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll" has given me plenty to think about -- and for a book that devotes so much attention to so many people who have never been on my personal hit parade, that's an impressive accomplishment.
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