Over the last decade Elijah Wald has established himself as one of the leading contemporary historians of the blues. His acclaimed revisionist critical biographies of Robert Johnson and Josh White carefully sought to demythologize the genre by stressing the gap between the stories told by (largely rock) critics and the multiple ways in which the blues itself was disseminated and experienced by those who performed and heard it. In How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n’ Roll Wald extends this approach to the evolution of American popular music more generally in the twentieth century. The result is a necessarily provocative book with an unnecessarily provocative title.

Wald looks long and hard at figures neglected in popular music scholarship such as early jazz orchestra leader Paul Whiteman. Admired by Schoenberg and Rachmaninoff as well as Duke Ellington among his contemporaries, Whiteman nonetheless came to be regarded with suspicion by later critics for reconstituting jazz as “white art music.” One of the key questions that puzzles Wald, however, is, “why have the Beatles been applauded for doing the same thing to rock?”

Wald hears more innovation, fusion and dynamism in pre-Sergeant Pepper artists due to the fact that earlier bands of all types made their money mainly by performing rather than by recording (not unlike our own digital era in many ways). Bandleaders from Whiteman to Guy Lombardo to Bill Haley were forced to respond to the commercial and cultural energies unleashed by the dissemination of music via radio and the growth of large dancehalls that required big sounds from live performers. This went for popular solo artists in the 1950s too, from Pat Boone reshaping Little Richard numbers to Elvis Presley crooning “Love Me Tender.” Even Marvin Gaye, Wald wryly notes, was as enamoured by Perry Como as he was by rhythm 'n’ blues.

Put at its most simple, Wald's view is that popular tastes were more eclectic than is commonly documented by music historians; such eclecticism served as both cause and effect, ensuring that “every working band had to master the full range of pop styles … [forcing] everyone to adapt and stretch.” This is convincingly argued and more than justifies the book's subtitle. Yet did the Beatles signal such rupture and subsequent decline as the book's title suggests? Did they prompt a division along racial as well as musical lines, between “rock and soul, listening and dance music,” that ultimately destroyed rock 'n’ roll? Wald only once mentions in passing the two biggest-selling American artists of the 1980s – Michael Jackson and Prince – both of whom undeniably bridged rock and dance genres. They are acknowledged as indulged, black “auteur” exceptions that prove the rule, but given the scale of their commercial success – and this is a study of popular music – they surely go at least some way to disproving it too.