Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!: The Story of Pop Music from Bill Haley to Beyoncé

by Bob Stanley

Overview

An addictively readable, encyclopedic history of pop music in chapters as short and adrenaline-fueled as the best pop songs themselves.

As much fun to argue with as to quote, Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! is a monumental work of musical history, tracing the story of pop music through individual songs, bands, musical scenes, and styles from Bill Haley and the Comets’ “Rock around the Clock” (1954) to Beyoncé’s first megahit, “Crazy in Love” (2003). It covers the birth of rock, soul, R&B, punk, hip hop, indie, house, techno, and more, and it will remind you why you fell in love with pop music in the first place.

Bob Stanley—musician, music critic, and unabashed fan—recounts the progression from the Beach Boys to the Pet Shop Boys to the Beastie Boys; explores what connects doo wop to the sock hop; and reveals how technological changes have affected pop production. Working with a broad definition of “pop”—one that includes country and metal, disco and Dylan, skiffle and glam—Stanley teases out the connections and tensions that animate the pop charts and argues that the charts are vital social history.

Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! is like the world’s best and most eclectic jukebox in book form. All the hits are here: the Monkees, Metallica, Patsy Cline, Patti Smith, new wave, New Order, “It’s the Same Old Song,” The Song Remains the Same, Aretha, Bowie, Madonna, Prince, Sgt. Pepper, A Tribe Called Quest, the Big Bopper, Fleetwood Mac, “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini,” Bikini Kill, the Kinks, Mick Jagger, Michael Jackson, Jay-Z, and on and on and on. This book will have you reaching for your records (or CDs or MP3s) and discovering countless others.

For anyone who has ever thrilled to the opening chord of the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night” or fallen crazy in love for Beyoncé, Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! is a vital guide to the rich soundtrack of the second half of the twentieth century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393242690
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Pages:	624
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

Bob Stanley has worked as a music journalist, DJ, and record-label owner, and is the cofounder and keyboard player for the band Saint Etienne. He lives in London.

Table of Contents

Introduction xi

Prologue xvii

Part 1

1 Flip, Flop, and Fly: Bill Haley and Jump Blues 1

2 A Mess of Blues: Elvis Presley 9

3 Put Your Cat Clothes On: Sun Records and Rockabilly 15

4 Teenage Wildlife: Rock 'n' Roll 21

5 Rock with the Cavemen: Skiffle and British Rock 'n' Roll 33

6 Whispering Bells: Doo Wop 43

7 1960: It Will Stand 49

8 Walk with Me in Paradise Garden Phil Spector Joe Meek 57

9 The Trouble with Boys: The Brill Building and Girl Groups 65

Part 2

10 Act Naturally: The Beatles 77

11 Needles and Pins: The Beat Boom 85

12 Who's Driving Your Plane? The Rolling Stones 96

13 77m Is My Prayer: The Birth of Soul 102

14 The Rake's Progress: Bob Dylan 113

15 America Strikes Back: The Byrds and Folk Rock 121

16 Up the Ladder to the Roof: Tamla Motown 132

17 1966: The London Look 139

18 Endless Summer: The Beach Boys 159

19 The Golden Road: San Francisco and Psychedelia 166

20 Pop Gets Sophisticated: Soft Rock 178

21 Crying in the Streets: Deep Soul 190

22 I Cant Sing, I Ain't Pretty, and My Legs Are Thin: Hard Rock 194

23 Bubblegum Is the Naked Truth: The Monkees 203

Part 3

24 1970: Everything's Gone Gray 213

25 Freddie's Dead: Electrified Soul 220

26 State of Independence: Jamaica 228

27 It Came from the Suburbs: Glam 236

28 The Sound of Philadelphia: Soft Soul 250

29 Progressive Rock (and Simpler Pleasures) 260

30 Young Love: Weenyhoppers and Boy Bands 272

31 See That Girl: Abba 278

32 Beyond the Blue Horizon: Country and Western 283

33 Before and After the Gold Rush: Laurel Canyon 295

34 1975: Storm Warning 305

Part 4

35 Courage, Audacity and Revolt: The Sex Pistols, the Clash, and Punk Rock 319

36 Cranked Up Really High: Punk Rock 327

37 Pleasantly Antagonistic: New Wave 332

38 Supernature: Disco 339

39 Islands in the Stream: The Bee Gees 348

40 Routine Is the Enemy of Music: Post-punk 356

41 A Shark in let's Clothing: America after Punk 367

42 This Is Tomorrow: Kraftwerk and Electropop 377

43 Adventures on the Wheels of Steel: Early Rap 383

44 Here Comes That Feeling: New Pop 390

45 American Rock (Ooh Yeah) 401

46 Just a King in Mirrors: Michael Jackson 409

47 Highs in the Mid-Eighties: Prince and Madonna 415

48 Some Kind of Monster: Metal 423

49 Poised over the Pause Button: The Smiths, REM, and the Birth of Indie 433

50 1985: What the Fuck Is Going On? 443

51 We Were Never Being Boring: Pet Shop Boys and New Order 454

Part 5

52 Chicago and Detroit: House and Techno 461

53 Smiley Culture: Acid House and Manchester 468

54 1991: Bassline Changed My Life 475

55 All Eyez on Me: Hip Hop 493

56 litis Is How You Disappear: Bristol, Shoegazing, and a New Psychedelia 506

57 As a Defense, I'm Neutered and Spayed: Grunge 513

58 Ever Decreasing Circles: Blur, Suede, and Britpop 525

59 A Vision of Love: R&B 536

Epilogue 547

Acknowledgments 553

Sources 555

Select Bibliography 557

Index 561

Editorial Reviews

04/21/2014
For anyone who’s unfamiliar with the terrain of pop music, critic Stanley’s survey offers a solid introduction to many facets of popular music. While fans of musicians mentioned will not find much new, the author nevertheless provides an intriguing view of the shifting ground of pop music. Of the Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks incarnation of Fleetwood Mac, for example, he writes: Buckingham’s guitar “felt like a continuation of the Macs that had gone before... they still felt like a walk beside a seashore on a windy day, collar pulled up against the spray.” Paul Revere and the Raiders’ “noise was the most commercially successful variant of garage punk.” Stanley covers every musical style that makes up pop music, including country and western, new wave, hip hop, and grunge, and he devotes individual chapters to groups and individuals—the Monkees, the Beach Boys, the Bee Gees, Michael Jackson, Prince, Madonna—that changed the shape of pop music. In the end, he observes, that “pop music doesn’t have the desirability it once had; it’s not as wantable.” (July)

Publishers Weekly

"Tells the story of American and British pop music almost as engagingly as the songs themselves."

Newsday - Glenn Gamboa

"Zips through decades of dance tunes and teenage heartthrobs with an affectionate ebullience… As good ‘a story of pop music’ as a fan could hope for."

Ryan Little

"An immensely entertaining pop-music survey course. [Stanley] is engagingly opinionated and often very, very funny… The assemblage of irresistible, bite-size histories of top-of-the-charts stars is joyful, smart, and addictive, just like the best pop songs, and a must for music fans everywhere."

Starred review Booklist

"[Stanley is] as clear-eyed about music as he is crazy in love with it."

Los Angeles Times - Mikael Wood

"Bob Stanley loves and finds surprising connections between a thousand kinds of pop. He makes me want to run to the nearest record store—and move in."

Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields

"[An] exuberant celebration of the silly and the sublime… [Stanley’s] writing delights and surprises, and his description of the music makes you want to dance to it."

The New Yorker - Sarah Larson

"An ambitious undertaking… Stanley’s bold positions connect pop’s many dots in fresh and fascinating patterns."

Christian Science Monitor

"{A] Roller-coaster ride through pop history… encourages readers to look deeper into offshoots of ‘pop’ and performers they might not be so familiar with."

Houston Press - Bob Ruggiero

"This book will be remembered and deserves to be."

Barnes & Noble Review - Robert Christgau

"A landmark celebration, rumination and encapsulation of just about everything worth knowing—and arguing—about the pop landscape… A book for the ages."

USA Today - Matt Damsker

"Rich with musical history lived, worked, and felt, with dozens more chapters and digressions that pay pop its due…Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! is smart, funny, surprisingly deep for just how broad it is, but, most of all, for stars and songs great and small, it is full of love."

Los Angeles Review of Books - Joshua Joy Kamensky

2014-07-16
Exhaustive, exhausting history of pop music. Like so many popular histories that aim for comprehensiveness, this plodding assemblage staggers under its own weight. Even though he claims that "this book is not meant to be an encyclopedia," in trying to tell the story of pop, music journalist, DJ and Saint Etienne founding keyboard player Stanley gets so swamped in name-checking every band and song title that he loses the plot and characters. Instead of focusing at some intelligent length on key figures, genres, trends or shifts in tastes, he is more concerned with touching on everything than doing justice to anything. He's all about connecting the dots, usually patching them together with well-worn anecdotes or conventional wisdom. The book's real juice is in Stanley's scattered opinions, which range from the unusual to the obnoxious. His Brit-skewed viewpoint offers less-than-reverential takes on the Clash and Elvis Costello and stirring defenses of The Monkees, Sex Pistols and Abba, and he delivers a cogent and interesting history of the Bee Gees. Among his many questionable judgments: that "New Morning" (1970) is possibly Bob Dylan's best album or that Bob Marley's music was as "musically simplified as the Bay City Rollers." Stanley, however, does score the occasional apt phrase: Joy Division was "modern pop viewed through night vision goggles—grimy and murky." Abba's hits "sound like a music box carved from ice." The author also writes of the Smiths' "bedsit bookishness" and Belle and Sebastian's "librarian chic," and he correctly notes that "indie" has now "stretched out to become a meaningless catchall term." Unfortunately, all these scattered perceptions fly by in a hazy, numbing blur as Stanley hits the pedal on this breakneck trip through the past 60 years, and his tone becomes increasingly grating. Like the print version of an endless, time-filling BBC series—even the most interested readers will likely do a lot of fast-forwarding.

Kirkus Reviews

"Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! ties together the disparate strands of pop’s shape-shifting history to create a vivid living document of the music of our lives."

Greg Milner

"Breezy, opinionated and totally delicious."

Wall Street Journal - David Kirby

"Quixotic and kaleidoscopic, Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! serves up erudite irreverence on every page. Like its sprawling subject, it invites everyone in for a listen."

Dallas Morning News - Chris Vognar

"Like War and Peace, but with a beat…[E]ndlessly readable."

Boston Globe - James Reed