Love for Sale Quotes

“For a period around the middle of the twentieth century, when big-band swing was a musical craze, jazz and popular music were essentially the same thing.”
― David Hajdu, Love for Sale: Pop Music in America

“I have always found the very notion of the “popular” off-putting, in part because I have never fully outgrown my early conception of popularity as something restricted to the girls I was afraid to talk to in the sixth grade.”
― David Hajdu, Love for Sale: Pop Music in America

“Of the countless terms for categories of music, from “classical” and “blues” to the secret-password language of micro-genres like “doomcore” and “neurofunk,” the least useful phrase I know is “popular music.” It provides no information about the music itself: no suggestion of how it sounds or what sort of mood it might conjure, no indication of the traditions it grows from or defies, and no hint of whether it could be good for dancing, for solitary listening, or for anything else. All the term tells you about the music is the fact, or the assertion, that it’s popular—that a lot of people seem to like it for some reason. The words “popular music” are like sociological taxonomy, a way of defining a body of creative work as a measure of the group of people to whom it appeals. What good is that, if you’re not a sociologist?”
― David Hajdu, Love for Sale: Pop Music in America