Love for Sale

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Chronicles pop music's evolution through personal lens.

If you're someone who's captivated by the rich tapestry of pop music and how it intertwines with personal experiences, "Love for Sale" would resonate with you. David Hajdu melds historical narrative with the warmth of personal memoir, giving the evolution of pop music a deeply human touch that's rare in music histories. It's for those who appreciate not just the music, but the intimate stories behind their favorite tunes.

Note: While we do our best to ensure the accuracy of cover images, ISBNs may at times be reused for different editions of the same title which may hence appear as a different cover.

Love for Sale

Regular price $10.90
Unit price
per
ISBN: 9780374170530
Authors: David Hajdu
Date of Publication: 2016-10-18
Format: Hardcover
Related Collections: Creative Nonfiction, Music, History
Related Topics: Essays, History, Pop Culture
Goodreads rating: 3.71
(rated by 197 readers)

Description

A personal, idiosyncratic history of popular music that also may well be definitive, from the revered music critic. From the age of song sheets in the late nineteenth century to the contemporary era of digital streaming, pop music has been our most influential laboratory for social and aesthetic experimentation, changing the world three minutes at a time. In Love for Sale, David Hajdu—one of the most respected critics and music historians of our time—draws on a lifetime of listening, playing, and writing about music to show how pop has done much more than peddle fantasies of love and sex to teenagers. From vaudeville singer Eva Tanguay, the “I Don’t Care Girl” who upended Victorian conceptions of feminine propriety to become one of the biggest stars of her day to the scandal of Blondie playing disco at CBGB, Hajdu presents an incisive and idiosyncratic history of a form that has repeatedly upset social and cultural expectations. Exhaustively researched and rich with fresh insights, Love for Sale is unbound by the usual tropes of pop music history. Hajdu, for instance, gives a star turn to Bessie Smith and the “blues queens” of the 1920s, who brought wildly transgressive sexuality to American audiences decades before rock and roll. And there is Jimmie Rodgers, a former blackface minstrel performer, who created country music from the songs of rural whites
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Chronicles pop music's evolution through personal lens.

If you're someone who's captivated by the rich tapestry of pop music and how it intertwines with personal experiences, "Love for Sale" would resonate with you. David Hajdu melds historical narrative with the warmth of personal memoir, giving the evolution of pop music a deeply human touch that's rare in music histories. It's for those who appreciate not just the music, but the intimate stories behind their favorite tunes.

Note: While we do our best to ensure the accuracy of cover images, ISBNs may at times be reused for different editions of the same title which may hence appear as a different cover.