Along with most of the people who have observed me reading this book, you may be wondering how the Beatles could have destroyed Rock & Roll. Alas, reading the book does not provide a clear answer to that question. The closest approximation comes in its first few lines, where the author remembers his childhood. At six, he fell in love with Meet the Beatles, but at eight he couldn't get into Sgt Pepper (p. 1). Apparently, the title of this book is the author's revenge for that disappointment.
I say the title, because the book itself has almost nothing more to say about the Beatles' alleged destruction of what remains in this book, something undefined – and it's a good thing, too. On the whole, How the Beatles is an informative and enjoyable history of 20th-century popular music in the US. It manages to be both a significant scholarly contribution and a good read at the same time. Because it combines readability with solid historiography, it lends itself to course adoption, especially if used in conjunction with another history.
As the subtitle indicates, this is an ‘alternative history’. What Wald is doing here is a version of what scholars in literature and other fields have been doing for the past three or four decades, recovering the past that canon formation has obscured. As Wald himself observes, history is written by the winners (p. 97); alternative histories help us to remember who the losers were and why they mattered. Among the losers who had been left out of most histories were women, most subjugated peoples and dominated classes. In literary histories, the losers who get left out or denigrated also include many works that were best-sellers – in other words, winners who became losers.
Wald's losers are mostly of this type, but apparently not having remembered his Bourdieu, he doesn't think of them as losers. Just like the bestselling novelists of yesteryear that no one reads anymore, the most popular musicians are often only victors in the short term. As critics and historians begin to replace fans as arbiters of taste and significance, what Bourdieu (Reference Bourdieu1993: p. 39) called the ‘generalized game of “loser wins”’ governs the value of popular music as a field of cultural production. Wald insists on an opposition of history and criticism, but the effective history of cultural forms always includes the criticism of them and the value they have developed (or failed to hold) over time.
Wald's favourite example of a winner who lost out in cultural memory is Paul Whiteman. His interest in Whiteman and others like him is based on the assumption ‘that in order to understand the music of any period, you have to be aware of the major artists of the time’ (p. 2). This assumption is unimpeachable, and no historian would disagree. The problem, of course, lies in what is meant by ‘major’. Paul Whiteman's ‘orchestra was … the most popular band of the 1920s’ (p. 2), but today we prefer to remember Louis Armstrong's Hot Fives and Sevens, recordings that sound more modern to us today. Because of this, according to Wald, in histories Whiteman is ‘ignored’ or ‘mentioned only in the negative’ (ibid).
I am not convinced that Whiteman has ever been ‘ignored’ by historians to the degree that Wald suggests, though they are often critical of him. In another telling remark, Wald admits that, despite having written about the music of the 1920s for years, he had never listened to a Whiteman record until the moment when the idea for this book was emerging (p. 2), leading one to think maybe Wald argued more with a former self than with anyone else. One of the weaknesses of Wald's crossover-oriented book is that that he doesn't cite which works are guilty of omitting Whiteman, nor acknowledge those who do include him. Most histories of popular music with which I'm familiar both recognise – and lament – Whiteman's popularity.
Wald's recovery of Whiteman is not based merely on popularity, however, but on his influence, and here the case is more genuinely revisionist and persuasive. Whiteman was the era's great promoter of jazz made respectable by the addition of classical techniques. This worked because, as Wald observes in a characteristic sentence from the book, ‘It is easy to forget the extent to which most Americans in the 1920s, and especially musicians, respected and listened to classical music’ (p. 76). Musicians and critics often heard early jazz as ‘noise’ and Whiteman found a way to allow it to be heard as music. He was so successful that, until the 1950s, the dominant form of popular music was rooted in this combination. Moreover, it was Whiteman who pioneered the role of the vocalist in the dance band, and who introduced Bing Crosby to the world.
Wald is at his best when he is explaining the changing conditions of the production and reception of music. We tend to remember the music past based on available recordings, but Wald observes that modern American popular music was first distributed primarily as sheet music, and was heard in live performances by professionals and amateurs. Songs, as he notes, remained the primary popular musical work until records replaced them in the late 1950s. The recordings from earlier eras that have survived do not always accurately represent the music that was popular at the time. Because of prohibition, small jazz groups could not find work during the 1920s and early 1930s and, as result, many of the era's ‘most exciting jazz groups never performed in public. … Armstrong's Hot Fives and Sevens, Morton's Red Hot Peppers, and the Beiderbecke-Trumbauer groups … existed only for those recording sessions’ (p. 69). These musicians made a living playing in large dance bands, which is the form in which most people heard them. But when the Beatles ‘became purely a recording group, they pointed the way toward a future in which where there need be no unifying styles, as a band can play whatever they like in the privacy of the studio, and we can choose which to listen to in the privacy of our clubs, our homes, or, finally, our heads’ (p. 247).
Where Wald is weaker is on the characteristics of the music and, especially, the lyrics of the performers he discusses, and on the broader cultural significance of the works and artists. Of course something had to be left out, and it is often not a problem that these elements are absent. But it is because they are missing that Wald can treat the Beatles as the second coming of Paul Whiteman. The basic claim is that, like Whiteman, the Beatles whitened a previously black cultural form by adding musical elements from the classical and pop traditions into their albums from Rubber Soul onwards. That some of the Beatles music did make use of these traditions is beyond dispute. They were, as Wald acknowledges, there from the beginning.
What Wald doesn't acknowledge is that the cultural hybridity practised by Whiteman and the Beatles had very different meanings and effects. Whiteman repackaged jazz in the familiar European tradition and made it seem safe. This repackaging would be, as Wald shows, the dominant form of American popular music until the 1950s. Whiteman began by combining two clearly distinct musical practices. The Beatles began with rock 'n' roll, which was already the combination of numerous previous musical traditions and forms, and they added numerous others. If the result of some of these influences was music that recalled either classical or familiar pre-rock pop, much of the new material sounded as strange as Jerry Lee Lewis or Bo Diddley had sounded in the 1950s. The Beatles may have won over some more traditional music critics, but Wald seems to erase entirely the cultural and generational strife that rock 'n' roll continued to represent long after Sgt Pepper was released. Which one of Whiteman's sidemen was targeted as a subversive like John Lennon was? Moreover, none of the Beatles' very different late albums set the tone for future music. Rather, different artists picked up on different directions toward which the Beatles had pointed, while many others went elsewhere entirely.
Wald asserts that he is uncovering neglected continuities in the history of American popular music, and he is often persuasive on this point. It is only when he reaches the Beatles, who don't appear until the last chapter, that his claims for continuity become untenable. If he had titled the book something different, one could easily have relegated comment on that chapter to a dependent clause. Unfortunately, since How the Beatles is on the whole a major contribution, the title calls attention to its major failing.
