A review by sloreader
How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music by Elijah Wald

5.0

Though listening to music has been one of the central organizing foci of my life I've never gotten into digging into its history in any dedicated way. I believe reading this book has caught me up on 25 years of lost time. Once you can ignore the misleading hot-take of a title, you will find a staggeringly researched timeline of eight decades of American popular music. It's serious scholarship (the 250 pages is deceptively short) but regaled with wit, anecdotes and curiosities that keep it from feeling lecturing. I plan on finding other books about music history now but I also to buy this one to refer back to in the future.