Yet the acquisition of anything is never purely a matter of personal will. That is to say, it was disc purchasers who made songs into hits the privilege of hit making was theirs. On the radio, meanwhile, the “Your” in the title of the show Your Hit Parade served to reinforce the proposition that buying a record was an assertion of individual judgment-a democratic act.

The underlying principle was taken as a given: that the purchase of a record was an exercise of aesthetic will, a statement of personal taste- I like that song, and here’s the proof: I paid money for it. (This text courtesy of Farrar, Straus & Giroux.)īy an almost-scientific method, the first Billboard chart purported to assess the popularity of a song by measuring record sales. Masterly and impassioned, authoritative and at times deeply personal, Love for Sale is a book of critical history informed by its writer's own unique history as a besotted fan and lifelong student of pop. At every turn, Hajdu surprises and challenges readers to think about our most familiar art in unexpected ways. And then there are today’s practitioners of Electronic Dance Music, who Hajdu celebrates for carrying the pop revolution to heretofore unimaginable frontiers. entwined with the sound of the Swiss yodel. And there is Jimmie Rodgers, a former blackface minstrel performer, who created country music from the songs of rural white and blacks. Hajdu, for instance, gives a star turn to Bessie Smith and the “blues queens” of the 1920s, who brought wildly transgressive sexuality to American audience decades before rock and roll. 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.Įxhaustively researched and rich with fresh insights, Love for Sale is unbound by the usual tropes of pop music history. 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 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.

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