A highly learned pleasure for music and pop-culture buffs.
Strolling through the archives of pop music history with an experienced guide.
There are no grand theses or postmodern theoretical turns here. Instead, Nation music critic Hajdu (Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics, and Culture, 2009, etc.) approaches the vast stretch of pop history as a particularly tasteful exercise in picking tunes from an impossibly well-stocked jukebox, very much personally curated and with each choice well defended. Thus, as he notes near the opening, he can probably do without hearing “Yesterday” again (“I can barely still hear qualities I heard in the song at various times in the past”), preferring instead to spin the Beatles’ little-heard contemporary tune “Tell Me What You See,” because, in addition to its musical qualities, it conjures up a kiss from a high school girlfriend. That personal approach would not work if Hajdu were not so well-versed on his pop history firsthand. When he writes of the early history of music videos, it helps that he was one of the earliest video journalists, just as when he writes of one-hit wonders like the New Jersey band Looking Glass, of “Brandy” fame, it helps that he was on the scene, ears wide open, when the song came out. The author’s ears extend beyond his own time span, though; he writes with knowledgeable appreciation of Frank Sinatra, Marni Nixon, and Billy Strayhorn—not to mention contemporary hip-hop. The center of his world, though, is the period when Brian Wilson, Ray Davies, Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, and their musical kin were making albums to set the world on fire. He even works in a quiet appreciation for disco, and with good humor: “Without getting too Ken Burns–ish about this, I’ll point out the significance of the first dance craze of the twentieth century, the vogue for the fox-trot, in cross-fertilizing cultural values and democratizing social life (within the limits of racial segregation) for young people of the day.” And so he does.
A highly learned pleasure for music and pop-culture buffs.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-374-17053-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
PROFILES
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
