Follow the money. It is this advice that John C. Hajduk has taken to heart in his new study of the politics behind the popular music economy in the mid-20th century US. Sitting comfortably on the bookshelf between classics such as Russell Sanjek's American Popular Music and Its Business and more recent works like Michael James Roberts's Tell Tchaikovsky the News: Rock ’n’ Roll, the Labor Question, and the Musicians’ Union, Hajduk's monograph examines a series of financial disputes in the music industry in the 1940s and 1950s. Using economics as a compass, rather than destination, Hajduk guides the reader through the ways in which the rhetoric used in these disputes interacted with wider challenges to the structures of race, class and nationalism in the US during this period.
Hajduk's first chapter asks where power lay in the music industry prior to 1940, with the central argument that the business was relatively hegemonic in terms of the music itself and those who profited from it. While some readers may question this claim, the chapter adequately sets the scene for a series of more culturally impactful battles in the music industry in the 1940s and 1950s. Chapter two focuses on the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP), which in 1941 prohibited radio stations from broadcasting its members’ songs. Hajduk demonstrates that each side of the conflict ‘cast music as an important medium for the expression of core ideals’ (p. 21). Hajduk argues that this ostensibly economic dispute inspired its own discourse concerned with American values such as democracy and equality. Increasing recognition of the hypocrisy of such arguments in a business and society plagued by antidemocratic structures and inequality led, somewhat unintentionally, to the opening up of the industry to previously marginalised artists, particularly Black and working-class Americans, and new styles, such as R&B and country music. In Chapter three, Hajduk does a similar analysis of the American Federation of Musicians recording ban of 1943, during which debates about music were imbued with actual wartime rhetoric. Both chapters constitute useful summaries of some of the key events and players in these game-changing conflicts.
In the next three chapters, Hajduk moves the story forward to the postwar era, when both external and internal ‘threats’ began to further challenge what music meant. Although the Red Scare impacted the music industry less than it did cinema, Hajduk shows in Chapter three how race politics and the business of music, for artists as distinct as Artie Shaw and Paul Robeson, became intertwined with fears about communism. This was an industry struggling to come to terms with the fact that a band like the Weavers, made up of radical left-wingers, could record hugely popular hits. In Chapter four, Hajduk analyses the moral panics surrounding the ascendance of rock ’n’ roll in the 1950s (the ‘threat from within’), which leads neatly into a final chapter on the famous payola scandal of 1959. Hajduk argues that the contemporary charges that deejays were accepting bribes to play rock records were not solely moral accusations about ‘fair’ competition, but more accurately attacks on the very essence of ‘rock ’n’ roll culture’, taken in this text to mean subversive activities and beliefs associated with racial mixing and overt sexuality. Hajduk concludes that by 1960 the distribution of power in the music industry had more or less re-stabilised, but the legacy of these economic disputes was the idea that music matters, a belief which would have profound effects in the years to come.
These historical episodes will likely be familiar to many readers of Popular Music. Rarely, however, have they been examined collectively in such an accessible single text. More importantly, it is refreshing to see these economic conflicts reconsidered in the context of wider tensions in this period about American values. Hajduk expertly shows how power struggles in popular music were influenced by, and helped shape, the increasingly prominent discourses about ‘Americanism’ that evolved in response to the Second World War, the Cold War, and the related shifts in American economics, demographics and race dynamics over these decades. Attacks on ‘upstarts’ in the music economy – including broadcasters, jukebox manufacturers, independent record labels and deejays – regularly entailed a deeply politicised vocabulary. Amidst battles to decide who should profit from music lay a deeper struggle to determine what kind of music (and values) Americans should be exposed to.
Hajduk writes with a commendable objectivity and awareness of historical contingencies when assessing the claims on each side of these disputes. In the case of the ASCAP/radio feud, Hajduk argues that ASCAP was demanding broadcasters pay a prohibitively high fee to use its members’ music; at the same time, composers had a fair claim to compensation considering music was so obviously central to the advertising dollars flooding into the new medium of radio. However, it is the rhetoric that Hajduk returns to, and he unearths some nuggets along the way, such as the outlandish defence of National Association of Broadcasters that radios emitted ‘electrical energy’ rather than ‘music’, so stations should be exempt from paying dues to composers; or the equally wild accusation from one critic that ASCAP might as well be called ASCAPO (to rhyme with Gestapo). Equally, while Hajduk is concerned with a war of words, he crunches plenty of numbers along the way. Compared with other studies on the business of music, Music Wars is a welcomingly penetrable summary of some of the fees and percentages that caused so much legal drama and rhetorical doomsaying.
Hajduk also does well to draw connections between each of these confrontations. The fleeting reappearance of certain players – such as Frank Sinatra, who supported the AFM ban (but carried on recording nonetheless), received McCarthyite accusations for being ‘pink’, and finally became a symbol of ‘good music’ for the old guard in the rock ’n’ roll era – is emblematic of Hadjuk's ability to tie together the disparate threads of his story. One weakness with Music Wars is the occasional lack of clarity about how we interpret ‘American values’ or ‘rock ’n’ roll culture’. Likewise, sometimes the factor of race is discussed rather simplistically, with Hadjuk skimming over some key developments, not least the emergence of various Latin American styles, or the interplay of race with notions of gender or generational identity. Nevertheless, in a field dominated by niche biographies, institutional histories and multi-volume tomes, it is refreshing to read an accessible text on the money behind music that has a clear and concise message. Music Wars should be essential reading for researchers, teachers and students of 20th-century popular music.
