The Rise And Fall Of Popular Music

[Jim R]

I just posted a link to this yesterday in a thread ("Holiday bios") from March, 2003, but I really feel like this deserves it's own thread. I was somewhat surprised that I found no real discussion of this book when I tried a search, and the fact that it hardly seems to have been mentioned here since the early days of this board was even more surprising.

Donald Clarke is an extremely talented and intelligent writer, and this particular work (which is available to be read online, and has been for several years) is very impressive in both its scope and consistent level of meaningful insight.

I'm not exactly a voracious reader, and I'll admit I have not yet read the entire thing. Nonetheless, what I have read has impressed me, and I wanted to recommend it both for its quality and its potential as a discussion topic.

Here is a link to Clark's home page, where you will find links to this as well as other books by him:

Donald Clarke's Music Box

[ghost of miles]

I've got a copy of the book but haven't read it yet. I like his Billie Holiday bio quite a bit...he's a friend of Chuck Nessa's, btw, and I think his name's popped up from time to time in a few discussions here.

[Chuck Nessa]

IIRC, originally Donald's title for the book was Everybody's Doing It - the Rise and Fall of Popular Music, but the publisher changed it.

Here's a pic of Donald and yours truly in my brother-in-law's back yard. This was a couple of weeks ago.

Edited August 6, 2009 by Chuck Nessa

[BruceH]

Wait, you mean music isn't popular anymore? No wonder CD sales are down!

[BruceH]

I just posted a link to this yesterday in a thread ("Holiday bios") from March, 2003, but I really feel like this deserves it's own thread. I was somewhat surprised that I found no real discussion of this book when I tried a search, and the fact that it hardly seems to have been mentioned here since the early days of this board was even more surprising.

Donald Clarke is an extremely talented and intelligent writer, and this particular work (which is available to be read online, and has been for several years) is very impressive in both its scope and consistent level of meaningful insight.

I'm not exactly a voracious reader, and I'll admit I have not yet read the entire thing. Nonetheless, what I have read has impressed me, and I wanted to recommend it both for its quality and its potential as a discussion topic.

Here is a link to Clark's home page, where you will find links to this as well as other books by him:

Donald Clarke's Music Box

How's the prose?

[Larry Kart]

Here's a pic of Donald and yours truly in my brother-in-law's back yard. This was a couple of weeks ago.

Good to see that someone other than myself has switched to suspenders.

[paul secor]

IIRC, originally Donald's title for the book was Everybody's Doing It - the Rise and Fall of Popular Music, but the publisher changed it.

Here's a pic of Donald and yours truly in my brother-in-law's back yard. This was a couple of weeks ago.

Cool pic. Just a couple of Iowa farmboys hangin out.

[Chuck Nessa]

I forwarded this and the earlier thread to Donald. He has registered here - I hope he decides to enter the discussion. Speaking of discussion - I hope some folks are taking advantage of his website and read the dang books. Rise and Fall should generate some interesting discussions.

[Shawn]

Great book!

[Lazaro Vega]

During one of Clarke's sojourns to Whitehall we did an interview that resulted in a lengthy article in the Grand Rapids Press, and several segments on Jazz From Blue Lake. The topic was his work on the Penguin Encyclopedia of Popular Music. Have the tear sheet around here somewhere, but was unable to locate that one in digital form. Donald did an interactive CD Rom, too.

[johnlitweiler]

During one of Clarke's sojourns to Whitehall we did an interview that resulted in a lengthy article in the Grand Rapids Press, and several segments on Jazz From Blue Lake. The topic was his work on the Penguin Encyclopedia of Popular Music. Have the tear sheet around here somewhere, but was unable to locate that one in digital form. Donald did an interactive CD Rom, too.

Good news, Lazaro, here's the Penguin Encyclopedia on Donald's web site: http://www.donaldclarkemusicbox.com/encyclopedia/index.php

[doneth]

Hello, Hello. It's Donald Clarke here. I have been registered as musicbox for a couple of days but I have been unable to post. Organissimo reminds me of the cash registers at Barnes & Noble where I work: too many damned buttons. Let's see if this message gets through, and then if I can remember how I did it. Fast Reply, I think...

[Teasing the Korean]

Hello, Hello. It's Donald Clarke here. I have been registered as musicbox for a couple of days but I have been unable to post. Organissimo reminds me of the cash registers at Barnes & Noble where I work: too many damned buttons. Let's see if this message gets through, and then if I can remember how I did it. Fast Reply, I think...

Hello Donald and welcome. I've been skimming over your book online and it's a very interesting read - I think I generally agree with your main thesis if I understand correctly based on what I've read.

[doneth]

Well, fast reply works. I wonder what all the other buttons are for.

Elijah Wald's recent book, How The Beatles Destroyed Rock'n'Roll, makes some of the same points I tried to make. I know, there's another thread on that book on this site, but most of the people there haven't read it: I don't know how well Wald makes his points, but the book is full of fun little tidbits, and any book that makes you think is a good book. He starts out apparently flabbergasted at discovering the enormous popularity of Paul Whiteman, said to be the second biggest-selling artist 1890-1950 after Bing Crosby, who started out with Whiteman. Wald doesn't quite point out that a lot of Whiteman's music was very good - somebody should compile the Bill Challis arrangements on CD. (An aside: Henry Louis Gates is the dude who, in the New Yorker when the worthless Tina Brown was editor there, thought that there was something funny about Whiteman's name.) But Wald demonstrates that most of the music we value today was outsold in its time by the likes of Patti Page and Pat Boone. I loved to listen to the radio when I was a kid, but when 'Doggie in the Window' was on the radio every ten minutes, I knew I would have to build my own music collection.

The Beatles did destroy rock'n'roll, which was a feisty music, generating regional hits from Clovis, New Orleans, Seattle, Chicago, Memphis, Austin, Nashville etc. The Beatles turned it into art music, a kind of antithesis. The same thing didn't happen earlier with the Elvis Presley tidal wave for a number of reasons, but partly because the audience was smaller. When the Beatles came along the baby boomers were almost grown up (or as close as they ever got) and had lots of spending money; all of a sudden there was so much money involved that the business was turned upside down. For my money, Bob Dylan is still the greatest of the era, but he hasn't sold anything like the records that other superstars have, and I would trade any of the best Fats Domino tracks for all the arty-farty music that came out of Los Angeles in subsequent years. I think Wald's thesis, and mine, is that the industry always went where it thought the most money was, or as Chuck Nessa puts it, they didn't want to sell 10,000 copies each of 100 releases, or even 100,000 copies each of ten releases, but a million copies of one release; and the result today is pop music a lot of which sounds like kids playing with karaoke in their bedrooms, while a lot of good music is found in Americana, which is the new name for the places where rock'n'roll came from. And now the major labels are hitting the wall because kids don't want to pay for throwaway music.

There are still millions of people who would like to browse in a record shop, but our money isn't good enough, so the music CDs are being pushed out of Barnes & Noble and Borders by the DVDs, and the irony there is that even the guy who runs Netflix knows that DVDs will disappear too: someday we will all be watching movies on our computers. But when all the music is on the Net, maybe it will be a level playing field.

[Teasing the Korean]

Don't forget that Patti Page made at least three solid albums, all with THEE AMAZING PETE RUGOLO. (The East Side, The West Side, In the Land of Hi-Fi).

[doneth]

Yeah, but did she swing?

[Teasing the Korean]

Yeah, but did she swing?

Highly subjective, but yeah, I think she swung. It made me wish she'd recorded more in that vein.

BTW, the Leith Stevens "Wild One" album was not the film soundtrack. It was a studio session with an octet playing jazz versions of music from his score to the film. The actual film soundtrack had a much larger orchestra and has never been released on CD or LP AFAIK.