"Growing in tandem with each other, pop music and the business of creating and distributing it have become a relationship that defines modern cultural history. This book not only charts the music that we all know and love but also reveals our active participation in its development throughout generations"--

"What were Prince's politics? What did he believe about God? And did he really forsake the subject -- sex -- that once made him the most subversive superstar of the Reagan era? In this illuminating, thematic biography, Joseph Vogel explores the issues that made PRince one of the late 20th century's most unique, controversial, and fascinating artists"--Jacket.

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. Hajdu shows how pop has done much more than peddle fantasies of love and sex to teenagers. Exhaustively researched and rich with fresh insights, Love for Sale details pop music from Eva Tanguay, who upended Victorian...

An acclaimed cultural historian--drawing on previously untapped archival sources and interviews with such voices as Randy Newman, Jimmy Webb, Linda Ronstadt, and Herb Alpert--presents a social history of the great American songwriting era. "Everybody knows and loves the American Songbook. But it's a bit less widely understood that in about 1950, this stream of great songs more or less dried up. All of a sudden, what came over the radio wasn't Gershwin,...

""Not since the late Leonard Bernstein has classical music had a combination salesman-teacher as irresistible as Kapilow."--Kansas City Star. Few people in recent memory have dedicated themselves as devotedly to the story of twentieth-century American music as Rob Kapilow, the composer, conductor, and host of the hit NPR music radio program, What makes it great? Now, in Listening for America, he turns his keen ear to the great American songbook, bringing...

For over half of a century, Pete Seeger's life and music cut across the major issues of the day. A tireless supporter of union organization in the 1930s and 1940s, he joined the Communist Party, performing his songs with banjo and guitar accompaniment to promote worker solidarity. He sang out against American involvement in World War II in the early 1940s, only to change his tune after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He enlisted in the Army and,...