How The Beatles Destroyed Rock N Roll

How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll is an alternative history of American music that, instead of recycling the familiar cliches of jazz and rock, looks at what people were playing, hearing and dancing to over the course of the 20th century, using a wealth of original research, curious quotations, and an irreverent fascination with the oft-despised commercial mainstream.

How does rock music impact culture? According to authors B. Lee Cooper and Wayne S. Haney, it is central to the definition of society and has had a great impact on shaping American culture. In Rock Music in American Popular Culture, insightful essays and book reviews explore ways popular culture items can be used to explore American values. This fascinating book is arranged alphabetically for quick and easy reference to specific topics, but the book is equally enjoyable to read straight through. The influence of rock era music is evident throughout the text, demonstrating how various topics in the popular culture field are interconnected. Students in popular culture survey courses and American studies classes will be fascinated by these unique explorations of how family businesses, games, nursery rhymes, rock and roll legends, and other musical ventures shed light on our society and how they have shaped American values over the years.

When Jimi Hendrix died, the idea of a black man playing lead guitar in a rock band seemed exotic. Yet ten years earlier, Chuck Berry had stood among the most influential rock and roll performers. Why did rock and roll become white? Jack Hamilton challenges the racial categories that distort standard histories of rock music and the 60s revolution.

Out of Our Heads is the Rare Book That is Unafraid to celebrate rock'n' roll's druggy good times-before the uptight killjoys and self-righteous reformists came along and spoiled the party.

Modern pop began in 1952 when the first British chart was published and the first 7" singles were released. It ended (perhaps) in 1995 when Robson and Jerome reached the top of the charts with the first number one not to be available on vinyl since 1953. The internet age ushered in the death rites of over 40 years of pop. A Complete History Pop describes the journey that leads from 'Rock Around the Clock' to 'Crazy in Love'. Raw, thrilling, surprising and sometimes downright dangerous, the Pop moment almost always clocks in under 3:30 and is initially, immediately recognised by a teenage listener. Billy Fury. Chuck Berry. Sonny and Cher. The Troggs. Glen Campbell. Bee Gees. Roxy Music. Chic. Slade. Sex Pistols. Adam and the Ants. Pet Shop Boys. New Order. Madonna. Bob Stanley's A Complete History of Pop documents the rich soundtrack of the last six decades as it has been heard on radios and jukeboxes across the land. There have been many books on pop but very few, if any, have attempted to bring the whole story to life from rock n roll to house and techno in all its various sub-permutations. Audacious and addictive, A Complete History of Pop is a one-stop pop shop for the music lover everywhere.

Hundreds of books have been written about The Beatles. Over the last half century, their story has been mythologized and de-mythologized and presented by biographers and journalists as history. Yet many of these works do not strictly qualify as history and the story of how the Beatles' mythology continues to be told has been largely ignored. This book examines the band's historiography, exploring the four major narratives that have developed over time: The semi-whitewashed "Fab Four" account, the acrimonious breakup-era Lennon Remembers version, the biased "Shout!" narrative in the wake of John Lennon's murder, and the current Mark Lewisohn orthodoxy. Drawing on the most influential primary and secondary sources, Beatles history is analyzed using historical methods.

One of the music world’s pre-eminent critics takes a fresh and much-needed look at the day Dylan “went electric” at the Newport Folk Festival, timed to coincide with the event’s fiftieth anniversary. On the evening of July 25, 1965, Bob Dylan took the stage at Newport Folk Festival, backed by an electric band, and roared into his new rock hit, Like a Rolling Stone. The audience of committed folk purists and political activists who had hailed him as their acoustic prophet reacted with a mix of shock, booing, and scattered cheers. It was the shot heard round the world—Dylan’s declaration of musical independence, the end of the folk revival, and the birth of rock as the voice of a generation—and one of the defining moments in twentieth-century music. In Dylan Goes Electric!, Elijah Wald explores the cultural, political and historical context of this seminal event that embodies the transformative decade that was the sixties. Wald delves deep into the folk revival, the rise of rock, and the tensions between traditional and groundbreaking music to provide new insights into Dylan’s artistic evolution, his special affinity to blues, his complex relationship to the folk establishment and his sometime mentor Pete Seeger, and the ways he reshaped popular music forever. Breaking new ground on a story we think we know, Dylan Goes Electric! is a thoughtful, sharp appraisal of the controversial event at Newport and a nuanced, provocative, analysis of why it matters.

The birth of rock 'n roll ignited a firestorm of controversy--one critic called it "musical riots put to a switchblade beat"--but if it generated much sound and fury, what, if anything, did it signify? As Glenn Altschuler reveals in All Shook Up, the rise of rock 'n roll--and the outraged reception to it--in fact can tell us a lot about the values of the United States in the 1950s, a decade that saw a great struggle for the control of popular culture. Altschuler shows, in particular, how rock's "switchblade beat" opened up wide fissures in American society along the fault-lines of family, sexuality, and race. For instance, the birth of rock coincided with the Civil Rights movement and brought "race music" into many white homes for the first time. Elvis freely credited blacks with originating the music he sang and some of the great early rockers were African American, most notably, Little Richard and Chuck Berry. In addition, rock celebrated romance and sex, rattled the reticent by pushing sexuality into the public arena, and mocked deferred gratification and the obsession with work of men in gray flannel suits. And it delighted in the separate world of the teenager and deepened the divide between the generations, helping teenagers differentiate themselves from others. Altschuler includes vivid biographical sketches of the great rock 'n rollers, including Elvis Presley, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Buddy Holly--plus their white-bread doppelgangers such as Pat Boone. Rock 'n roll seemed to be everywhere during the decade, exhilarating, influential, and an outrage to those Americans intent on wishing away all forms of dissent and conflict. As vibrant as the music itself, All Shook Up reveals how rock 'n roll challenged and changed American culture and laid the foundation for the social upheaval of the sixties.