Love for Sale: Pop Music in America

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Description

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.

Reviews

"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

Author Bio

David Hajdu is the music critic for The Nation and a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He is the author of three previous books of narrative nonfiction and and one collection of essays. He lives in Manhattan.