Love for Sale: Pop Music in America

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 atomization 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.

• | Author: David Hajdu
• | Publisher: Picador
• | Publication Date: Oct 10, 2017
• | Number of Pages: 320 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback/Music
• | ISBN-10: 1250141214
• | ISBN-13: 9781250141217