Carl Wilson reviews Elijah Wald's "How the Beatles Destroyed Rock n' Roll"
“It’s a book about the whole scope of American pop, from ragtime, swing and foxtrots to teen idols, disco and the Twist - not to mention how nightclubs replaced balls and barn dances; how radio ruined the sheet-music business; how small combos and DJs replaced dance orchestras; and particularly how records slowly became a bigger business than live music.
That switch took most of the 20th century; it was not really complete until the Beatles retired from touring into the studio. (And it might be reversing itself again now.) While dance bands were somewhat interchangeable, records are marketed on novelty and uniqueness, so a pop mentality that once centred on songs (which would often become hits in multiple versions) evolved to focus on individual musicians as artists and celebrities.
The industry resisted each of these changes, just as it fights YouTube and downloading today. But Wald sympathetically illuminates the reasons: As a musician himself, he gives special heed to how styles were shaped by changing conditions of music-making, such as Prohibition (when clubs hired quieter bands so as not to attract cops) or the Depression, not to mention musicians strikes and vinyl shortages.
The result is something of a jukebox version of the social histories of E. P. Thompson (The Making of the English Working Class) or Howard Zinn (A People’s History of the United States), using archival documents (especially old issues of Billboard) to reconstruct what life might have been like for everyday musicians and listeners in eras not so distant and yet radically unlike our own. If all you do is listen to the records, he says, you’ll probably get it wrong.
Every creative “leap forward” is a loss for someone else, the destruction of a previous musical culture. It’s commonplace to say that in the early 1990s, Nirvana jolted rock out of a mascara-blinded slump, for instance - but there are greying 1980s hair-metal fans out there who still hate grunge for ruining all their fun.”
