How the Beatles Destroyed Rock n Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music [Hardcover]

Accusing one of the greatest bands in history of destroying rock and roll is a bold statement. However this book doesn't really focus on that notion at all. How the Beatles Destroyed Rock n Roll focuses more on the history of music with greater attention focused on lesser known bands that Wald felt were relevant to music. The book has heavy emphasis on Jazz and ragtime so if that isn't your cup of tea then this book is not really for you.

The book reads like Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States but from a music perspective. Wald throws out popular notions of who was relevant to the formation of modern day music and explores the lesser known bands. This makes for a pretty interesting historical perspective on something we all know and love but it wasn't what I was expecting from the book. In fact the Beatles are rarely mentioned at all in it.

To make a long story short if you're a fan of music historiography then you'll enjoy How the Beatles Destroyed Rock n Roll. If you're looking for an book that focuses on the darker side of the fab four however, you're out of luck.

As I understand it, Wald's principal thesis, which is reflected in the somewhat provocative main title, is the following: As rock/pop performers -- of which the Beatles were the most conspicuous example -- began to see themselves more as "artists", they consciously aspired to create "high" or "serious" art and in the process divorced themselves and their music from entertainment and, especially, from dancing. At the same time, in part because it is easier to write about "art" than "entertainment," the media pushed the notion that these self-conscious, auteur-ish, studio products were indeed "art", something to be taken and discussed seriously. The two impulses fed and reinforced one another, pushing white rock/pop music further and further away from entertainment, dancing, and (for the first time in 20th-Century popular music) black music. By 1969, "[r]ock had become a white genre."

Whether or not you agree with that thesis (and Wald does marshal enough points and arguments in support of it that I come away willing to accord it some measure of validity), HOW THE BEATLES DESTROYED ROCK 'N' ROLL is still quite valuable as a history of American popular music in the 20th Century (or, ragtime through disco). Especially interesting to me were the discussions of how technological changes -- including recording itself, then advances in recording and developments in the methods of "delivery", such as radio, television, and LPs -- affected popular music. Other influences were economic in nature (the Depression) or political (Prohibition, World War II). I also appreciated the profiles, many of which are several pages in length, of key figures of American pop music, such as Paul Whiteman, Guy Lombardo, Benny Goodman, Mitch Miller, Frank Sinatra, and Harry Belafonte.

Wald is pragmatic and instructive on the blurred dividing lines of genres. For example: "[M]ost of our modern musical genres [are] at root simply marketing categories--that is, we call something jazz or rock less because of any inherent musical characteristics than because we think it will be of interest to people who consider themselves jazz or rock fans." Wald is sensitive to, and intelligently discusses (without letting the matter take over his book), the many manifestations of racial prejudice in the last century of American pop music. Best of all, the book reflects a mature perspective on the very exercise of musical history and criticism. For example, he introduces his book by quoting Charles Rosen (a distinguished classical pianist and critic) to the effect that a music critic does not have to love a work of art or a style in order to write about it critically, but the critic must at least recognize and allow for the fact that other people do love that work or style. In addition, Wald also recognizes that most of those who write music criticism are not the average music fans: "It is often said that history is written by the victors, but in the case of pop music that is rarely true. The victors tend to be out dancing, while the historians sit at their desks, assiduously chronicling music they cannot hear on mainstream radio."

On the negative side, the book drags at times, and some points seem belabored or over-illustrated. I also sense that it could have been organized better. Perhaps shorter chapters or periodic "sign-post" headings would have helped. (But then again, it is published by Oxford University Press, so those kinds of reader-friendly devices might violate the house style.) Whatever the reason was, I could only read a chapter or two at a time. I therefore give the book 4.5 stars and round down to four. Still, whatever you think of the book's title and the thesis that gave rise to it, HOW THE BEATLES DESTROYED ROCK 'N' ROLL is a fine book.

I figure I'll get my complaints out of the way first, starting with the terrible title. Yes, the media has pretty much reduced popular music history to (pick one) The Beatles, Elvis Presley, and Frank Sinatra, so it may be that, to get readers, an author has to name-drop one of those three. Imagine if the title had mentioned Earl Fuller, Paul Whiteman, Billy Murray, or Lawrence Welk--the volume might be gathering dust in a Big Lots bin as we speak. Still, "How the Beatles...." is so very misleading as to be a shame. Then again, if it succeeds in grabbing attention, more power to it.

My second major gripe--Wald's assertion that mood music "would have made little sense without long-playing discs" (i.e., prior to 1948), since its main function was "to create a lingering, romantic ambiance." Well, no. Mood music originated as material for silent movies, the musical stage, and early radio, and it proliferated on disc--examples by Paul Whiteman, Erno Rapee, Domenico Savino, and Andre Kostelanetz are common items on eBay. Many of the staples of mood music are 19th and early-20th-century light works that were also staples of early sound recordings--"Narcissus," "To a Wild Rose," "Old Folks at Home," "In a Clock Store," etc.

Finally, I can't help thinking that Wald has exaggerated the gap between early sound recordings and what was happening, performance-wise, outside of the recording studio. Granted, sound recordings provide a limited document, given the particulars of the medium (length, sonic limitations, the use of studio musicians, the recording process' lack of portability, etc.), yet I find no basis for presuming a huge disconnect between what we hear on 78s and what we might have heard "live," especially given that recordings initially followed from (and were necessarily derivative of) other media such as sheet music, pit band orchestrations, music hall sketches, etc.

What I liked, on the other hand, could fill a book. First and foremost, Wald is to be praised for treating popular music as just that--popular music. As in, the music that people listened to, vice the music that critics think people SHOULD HAVE listened to. It's a sad comment on music journalism that it's taken this long for the concept of "popular" to take hold, but late is better than never. That his approach has been received as revolutionary is a bit scary, not least of all because it's true. Again, better late than never.

And his coverage of the impact of rock and roll on jazz, etc. is the savviest account I've yet seen--yes, absolutely, beyond a doubt, rock and roll was seen at the time (by professional musicians, at least) as a triumph of amateurism, which it was to an extent. My jazz-musician father and his friends expressed this view again and again over the years, and even as a kid I could hear the difference in competence between the jazz on my parents' hi-fi and the rock on the radio. My father did surprise me at one point by describing rock and roll as something jazz brought on itself by becoming too remote in its complexity from the popular audience. Wald is also spot-on in his description of Mitch Miller as, more or less, the inventor of modern record production. And I suppose that Paul Whiteman and the Beatles performed similar functions in (what's the best term?) Europeanizing African-American pop music (jazz and R&B, respectively), in making dance-oriented music more a thing to listen to by adding Classical trappings (Ravel, in the case of Whiteman; string quartets and tape loops in the case of the Fab Four).

Greatly appreciated, too, is Wald's emphasis on the sheer, amazing scope of black popular music over the decades, even as PBS and other forces of conventional thinking continue to stereotype same as loud, pounding, and--worst of all--a thing of musical illiteracy, of feeling and instinct over formal accomplishment. Not that white performers haven't been typecast in similar ways--for instance, if Bob Dylan knows the chord changes to "Stardust," the rock press would kill to keep it from coming out--but African Americans are especially the victims of the "natural" cliche--natural rhythm, natural feeling for melody, etc., and never mind that Duke Ellington, James Reese Europe, and Scott Joplin rank among our best-educated and most innovative musicians.

Unlike probably most readers, I came to this volume with a strong orientation in pre-rock pop music--nothing in here is especially "new" to me, but much of the treatment is. Some reviewers have criticized Wald for taking on too much, but he didn't have much of a choice, really, given that basic pop music history is the victim of such neglect. He's taken on a long-overdue task, and there's bound to be a rushed, unfocused quality to some of the text--mainly because he's covering so much new ground. New ground that should not be so. Considering the hugeness of the task, Wald has done a brilliant job. Five well-deserved stars.