A provocative, consistently engaging counternarrative to the conventional wisdom that rock ’n’ roll killed Tin Pan Alley.
The latest from Yagoda (Journalism/Delaware Univ.; How to Not Write Bad, 2013, etc.) shows good ears, strong critical instincts and an unabashed love for a variety of music, including the rock ’n’ roll that supposedly closed the pages on the Great American Songbook—the few hundred standards that have endured through a wide variety of distinctive interpretations.
“The songs were composed with sundry goals in mind, producing great art rarely being one of them,” writes the author. “But the songs…took on lives of their own: it turned out they lent themselves to being interpreted in different styles and with different approaches by a range of singers and musicians. They became a repertoire, a canon, repeatedly redefined by distinctive performances.” They had their heyday in the first half of the 20th century, and they were the work of the likes of Irving Berlin, Cole Porter and dozens of others. In a conversational style and using an anecdotal approach, Yagoda traces the effects of the broadening from a New York–centric concentration to a wider expanse of vernacular popular music, the shift from sheet music to records and radio, the battle between ASCAP and BMI for licensing, the popular dominance of jazz during the big band and swing eras and its decline with bebop, the ascendance of the singer (who had once been a bit player in the jazz band) and, ultimately, the rock revolution in which songwriter and performer were often the same artist. He makes a convincing case that songwriting was on the decline (and production gimmickry on the rise) before rock and that rock performers have not only helped keep the standards alive, but have extended sophisticated songwriting through the likes of Randy Newman, Jimmy Webb and many others. “The final page had been turned on one songbook,” he concludes. “Another was just starting to be written.” Yagoda appreciates both.
A provocative, consistently engaging counternarrative to the conventional wisdom that rock ’n’ roll killed Tin Pan Alley.Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2015
ISBN: 978-1594488498
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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