Hard to get more provocative than that title, huh? But Wald's comely text isn't throwing scattershot rhetorical bombs here; instead, it's a measured examination of popular music of the 20th Century, a story of artistic serve-and-volley between black and white musicians, swing and jazz, ideas of commerce and "authenticity," the turkey trot and the twist, and much more. And Tom Waits loves it, I guess, which is good. [Trust in Tom.]The rock & roll material (Elvis, Beatles, etc.) is largely saved towards the end of the chronological narrative, and to connect to the title, Wald takes a cursory skip through the career of the Beatles, from the maximum R&B outfit of the German clubs in the early '60s to the full-out Beatlemania period to the Revolver/Sgt. Pepper's retreat to the studio.
It's there that Wald makes his most sad and trenchant point: From that point on, white folks [the U.S./U.K. variety] tried to make their own Pet Sounds, while black folks were symbolically and literally ghettoized into "dance music" strains that were seen as less artistically inclined (yet provided the innovations in funk, disco, and hip-hop that white rock styles failed to elicit).
Of course, this is debatable, given Wald's lack of discussion of various strains of art-rock and the panoply of punk and heavy metal, but he offers plenty of well-written evidence to show that somewhere around the navel-gazing of "Eleanor Rigby" (and I absolutely love love love that song, BTW) that the road of rock forked into "dance" and "non-dance/art" paths. And that we've lost something in our culture because of that division, that important aspects of race and class and social contact were ill-served by this divergence.
Not bad for a book that doesn't mention Sparks once.
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