Rock Roll

Elvis Presley and Bill Haley. Sam Cooke and the Shirelles. The Crows and the Chords. American Bandstand and Motown. From its first rumblings in the outland alphabet soup of R&B and C&W, rock & roll music promised to change the world--and did it. Combining social history with a treasure trove of trivia, Richard Aquila unleashes the excitement of rock's first decade and shows how the music reflected American life from the mid-1950s through the dawn of Beatlemania. His year-by-year timelines and a photo essay place the music in historical perspective by linking artists and their hits to the news stories, movies, TV shows, fads, and lifestyles. In addition, he provides a concise biographical dictionary of the performers who made the charts between 1954 and 1963, along with the label and chart position of each of their hit songs.

"There are no definitive histories," writes Elijah Wald, in this provocative reassessment of American popular music, "because the past keeps looking different as the present changes." Earlier musical styles sound different to us today because we hear them through the musical filter of other styles that came after them, all the way through funk and hip hop. As its blasphemous title suggests, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll rejects the conventional pieties of mainstream jazz and rock history. Rather than concentrating on those traditionally favored styles, the book traces the evolution of popular music through developing tastes, trends and technologies--including the role of records, radio, jukeboxes and television --to give a fuller, more balanced account of the broad variety of music that captivated listeners over the course of the twentieth century. Wald revisits original sources--recordings, period articles, memoirs, and interviews--to highlight how music was actually heard and experienced over the years. And in a refreshing departure from more typical histories, he focuses on the world of working musicians and ordinary listeners rather than stars and specialists. He looks for example at the evolution of jazz as dance music, and rock 'n' roll through the eyes of the screaming, twisting teenage girls who made up the bulk of its early audience. Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and the Beatles are all here, but Wald also discusses less familiar names like Paul Whiteman, Guy Lombardo, Mitch Miller, Jo Stafford, Frankie Avalon, and the Shirelles, who in some cases were far more popular than those bright stars we all know today, and who more accurately represent the mainstream of their times. Written with verve and style, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll shakes up our staid notions of music history and helps us hear American popular music with new ears.

A raucous cultural history of rock’s relationship with the moving image. When rock ’n’ roll burst into life in the 1950s, the shockwaves echoed around the world, amplified by images of untamed youth projected on cinema screens. But for the performers themselves, corporate showbusiness remained very much in control, contriving a series of cash-in movies to exploit the new musical fad. In this riveting cultural history, John Scanlan explores rock’s relationship with the moving image over seven decades in cinema, television, music videos, advertising, and YouTube. Along the way, he shows how rock was exploited, how it inspired film pioneers, and, not least, the film transformations it caused over more than half a century. From Elvis Presley to David Bowie, and from Scorpio Rising to the films of Scorsese and DIY documentarists like Don Letts, this is a unique retelling of the story of rock—from birth to old age—through its onscreen life.

A reissue of Ian F. Svenonius’s cult-classic debut essay collection, including brand-new writing in this expanded edition. “Everything author-slash-punk-icon Ian Svenonius says is interesting, and this book of satirical essays—originally published in 2006, now back in print—proves it . . . You’ll laugh until you cry.” —Washington Post A new, expanded collection of essays and articles from one of the mainstays of the Washington, DC, underground rock and roll scene, The Psychic Soviet is Ian F. Svenonius’s groundbreaking first book of writings. The selections are written in a lettered yet engaging style, filled with parody and biting humor that subvert capitalist culture, and cover such topics as the ascent of the DJ as a star, the “cosmic depression” that followed the defeat of the USSR, how Seinfeld caused the bankruptcy of modern pop culture, and the status of rock and roll as a religion. The pocket-sized book is bound with a durable bright-pink plastic cover, recalling the aesthetics of Mao’s Little Red Book, and perfect for carrying into the fray of street battle, classroom, or lunch-counter argument.

Robert Palmer, a preeminent rock critic and musician who was the chief advisor for the public television series, explores the complex creative processes that have allowed rock music to endure as a living art, fed from sources deep within nonconformist, anti-mainstream, often multiethnic American culture.

This richly detailed examination of two forms of American entertainment focuses on the various ways that radio stations and air personalities have been depicted in motion pictures, from 1926's The Radio Detective to more recent films like 2022's Halloween Ends. Newly updated and revised chapters cover the cinematic portrayals of various aspects of radio, including disc jockeys, sports broadcasts, religious programs and abnormal personalities on the air. Such films as The Big Broadcast (1932), Reveille with Beverly (1943), Mister Rock and Roll (1957), WUSA (1970), Radio Days (1987), Private Parts (1997), We Are Marshall (2006) and Straight Outta Compton (2015) provide fascinating insights into not only their own times but also the historical eras that some of these films have attempted to recreate.

Includes index.

The Hungarian city of Sztálinváros, or "Stalin-City," was intended to be the paradigmatic urban community of the new communist society in the 1950s. In Stalinism Reloaded, Sándor Horváth explores how Stalin-City and the socialist regime were built and stabilized not only by the state but also by the people who came there with hope for a better future. By focusing on the everyday experiences of citizens, Horváth considers the contradictions in the Stalinist policies and the strategies these bricklayers, bureaucrats, shop girls, and even children put in place in order to cope with and shape the expectations of the state. Stalinism Reloaded reveals how the state influenced marriage patterns, family structure, and gender relations. While the devastating effects of this regime are considered, a convincing case is made that ordinary citizens had significant agency in shaping the political policies that governed them.