Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics, and Culture » (Original)

David Hajdu is the author of Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn and Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariña.

Incisive, intelligent, beautifully written essays by the acclaimed, bestselling author of The Ten-Cent Plague

Publishers Weekly

In this rollicking collection of mostly previously published essays, Hadju (The Ten-Cent Plague; Positively 4th Street) combines the cutting candor of Lester Bangs and the measured and judicious cultural learning of Lionel Trilling as he takes aim at subjects ranging widely from jazz, rock and country music and cartoon characters like Elmer Fudd to broader cultural topics such as blogging, MySpace, and remixing. Hadju writes affectionately about the old Warner Brothers cartoons, recalling the respite they provided from the tumult of the 1960s, every night before dinner. In another essay, he uses the release of Joni Mitchell's album, Shine, as an entrée into a moving retrospective of her music and a bit of mourning over her recent absence from the music scene. In a superb comparison of the music of Lucinda Williams, Taylor Swift, and Beyoncé, he captures Williams as a woman rare among pop stars, possessing unfeathered intelligence, untheatrical carnality, and uncompromising humanity. Hadju's opening essay on jazz great Billy Eckstine is alone worth the price of admission, a poignant portrait of a brilliant musician whose star might have risen even higher had he been born in a different era. Hadju's essays never fail to amuse, please and provoke.
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Foreword David Yaffe Yaffe, David

I B's World 1

Billy Eckstine: The Man Who Was Too Hot 3

II Whose Standards? 19

Mos Def and the American Songbook 21

Rodgers and Hart 27

Sammy Davis, Jr.:Two Lives 34

Anita O'Day 40

Bobby Darin: Roman Candle 45

Susannah McCorkle 50

III Blues and the Abstract Truth 55

A Hundred Years of Blues 57

Alan Lomax 66

Dinah Washington: Queen 74

Ray Charles 81

IV Growing Up 87

Elvis Costello at Fifty 89

Brian Wilson and the Lost Masterpiece 96

Sting the Lutenist 103

Joe Sacco and Daniel Clowes 108

The White Stripes 116

Abbey Lincoln and Mark Murphy 122

Three Women in Pop: Taylor Swift, Beyonce, and Lucinda Williams 128

V Cultural Machinery 135

The Blogging of American Pop 137

MySpace 144

The Music of Starbucks 150

Rick Rubin and Kanye West 156

Open-Source Remixing 162

VI Life With the Lions 169

Woody Guthrie: Ramblin' Man 171

Will Eisner 178

Elvis and the Colonel 187

Ken Burns and the Great Men of Jazz 194

John Lennon: The Life 201

Paul McCartney's Chaos and Creation 206

Joni Mitchell's Shine 212

Wynton Marsalis 218

VII Otherwise Engaged 237

Harry Partch 239

Elmer Fudd 250

Walt Whitman and Fred Hersch: The Jazz Leaves of Grass 255

Michel Petrucciani 261

Philip Glass and Leonard Cohen: Book of Longing 270

Jules Feiffer at the Village Voice 276

John Zorn 283

Josh Groban 289

Marjane Satrapi 295

Acknowledgments 305

Credits 307

Index 309