How The Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll by Elijah Wald

The Moment: (You say) you want a revolution

by K. Ross Hoffman

(CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

How The Beatles Destroyed Rock & Roll
by Elijah Wald

As catchy and compelling as a great pop single, this revisionist retelling is provocative, profound and utterly necessary. Beginning before the dawn of audio recording, progressing through the ragtime era, jazz, swing, R&B and rock 'n' roll, Wald doesn't even get to the Fab Four until his final chapter. By positioning The Beatles as, effectively, the end point of a historical narrative, emphasizing cultural and stylistic continuities rather than the radical rupture of rock's familiar origin myth, he lets us reconsider both the 1960s and the half-century that preceded them, drawing, for instance, broad and thought-provoking parallels between The Beatles and Paul Whiteman, the erstwhile "King of Jazz," a now much-derided (and largely forgotten) figure who was by far the most popular, influential and innovative artist of the 1920s.

Throughout, Wald's focus is on popular music as it actually related to the populace: He considers how changing historical realities, new technologies (radio, jukeboxes, television and recorded formats from wax cylinders to 78s to LPs) and the shifting currents of social dance culture affected the development of the music and the experience of different segments of the mass audience (especially the usually underrepresented female fans) and ordinary working musicians. He takes in the oft-overlooked roles played by romantic ballads, hillbilly music, rumba, polka, calypso, mood music and exotica, and the consistently complex, always-relevant implications of race, gender and commerce. Clearly the product of years of passionate research, it's so rife with references and surprising anecdotes that it's potentially overwhelming, but Wald makes a superlative tour guide — frank, funny and generous but judicious with his inclusions — and his book is a beguiling, blasphemous breeze.

Oxford U Press, 336 pp., $24.95, June 1