Electric Shock: From the Gramophone to the iPhone125 Years of Pop Music by Peter Doggett

Electric Shock: From the Gramophone to the iPhone125 Years of Pop Music Reviews

• 
  Paul Bryant

  I had to read this, it’s my specialist subject, but it was never fun. There was a book published in 2013 called Yeah Yeah Yeah : The Story of Modern Pop by Bob Stanley and that one is a five star thing of joy and wonder. Bob starts the story in 1950 and takes 740 pages to tell it. Peter starts the story in 1890 and tells it in 630 pages. So you can see the difference. Peter is trying to get a grip on ALL of popular music, starting with ragtime, then jazz, then musicals, then crooners, then swing, then bop, then backtrack to hillbilly, blues, r&b, and so on. Oh, don't forget the polka craze of the 1940s. Noted!
  
  
  
  
  Plus all the technical innovations which explode the whole story every 5 years or so – the invention of radio for instance. The arrival of jukeboxes. And the sociology of it all - musician strikes. Zoot suits. How heroin addiction signified authenticity in jazz by the 1940s. Invention of muzak. Invention of teen-agers. I admire his work ethic but Peter slogs through all this with a grit and determination to cover all of this vast waterfront – whereas Bob dances the hully gully through his 60 or so years, and sparkles like a rainbow trout in the spring sunshine as he does so. Bob throws out quotes and instant capsule rave reviews of this or that single on every other page. Peter is maniacally determined to avoid his own opinions and enthusiasms, I think he thinks that’s what he should be doing, this is a proper history not a frolic, but alas, the flavour has seeped out of the pages. So I read up to the point where Bob’s book begins & stopped. (p247.)
  
  
  
  RACISM IN EARLY MUSIC
  
  In reading the very early history of popular music (pre-1925) you have to be prepared for a deluge of repulsive racism. This was just normal in those days, when a lot of pop songs were in the minstrel tradition, and blackface was still big. (Even black entertainers had to black up sometimes!) Peter is right, there’s no way round it, you have to acknowledge all this stuff, but it does not make pleasant reading & I will not be quoting any examples. Frequent use of the n word is the least of it. The British press reviews of Louis Armstrong’s first concerts were particularly unbelievable. Oh, and on 212 he says :
  
  As late as 1973, singer-composer Neil Sedaka was still adopting ‘blackface’ as part of his stage show.
  
  Whew – can that be true? I guess it must be.
  
  SOME BITS & PIECES
  
  I liked this :
  
  Typically, the American musician’s union set out to investigate all the cover versions of “Mule Train”, to ensure that on each of them the whip had been handled by a union member.
  
  And I liked this quote from a reminiscing Teddy Boy (British rocker) :
  
  You used to go on the dance floor and say “Lend us your bones, doll"
  
  What a great line… “lend us your bones, doll”. I must remember that. Although the comeback might be “why, do you need a hip replacement?”
  
  And I also liked the small print on the label of “Rock Around the Clock” (1954) :
  
  FOXTROT. Vocal chorus by Bill Haley.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• 
  Patrick

  It's certainly a book that is taking the broadest of broad sweep views of its subject. Last month I read a book which sought to tell the story of the people who wrote the music for a small coterie of 21st Century pop stars in just over 300 oages. Doggett only takes around double that number to attempt to tell the entire story of recorded popular music. And he takes as his starting point not Elivs and Bill Haley and the rock-and-roll revolution of the 1950s (far less revolutionary, Doggett would say, than it is assumed); nor even the 20s and 30s US bluesmen they were plagiarising; No, he goes all the way back to the 1890s.
  
  Which, as he explains in his introductory chapter, (one of the best bits of the book, and worth flicking through in Waterstones even if you've no interest in ploughing through the whole thing) makes more sense than you might at first think. There is a good argument that the single biggest 'paradigm shift' in the last millennium of musical history was the ability to record and play back music. For the first time in history, you no longer needed to be in a room with musicians to hear music. The early chapters, which tell the story of those first years of recorded music, are the book's best, and I kind of wish he'd instead written a shorter book about exactly this). I had no idea that, in contrast with the slightly later phonograph, the wax cylinder lacked any mechanism for creating multiple copies, so each individual 'record' is a recording of a unique performance. Nor that the early recordings we have reflect not so much what people were listening to at the time as which instruments could be recorded to an acceptable standard using the very primitive early recording equipment which existed then. Pianos were out; and the reason that the great majority of surviving recordings are of male rather than female vocalists is indicative not of a world in which there were no female singers, but of the fact that the equipment available at the time was better able to capture lower pitched voices to a standard that people would actually want to listen to.
  
  There follow chapters on the early history of recorded popular music which, if nothing else, goes to show that if you think there is racism in the music business now, it's nothing on what came before. A whole genre of music known as 'coon songs' of which a particularly famous example of the time was “All coons look alike to me” (it had originally been called “All pimps look alike to me” but apparently that was not considered a socially acceptable title for a song).
  
  There are accounts of the rise of ragtime, foxtrot, swing music and the crooners of the 20s and 30s, all of which probably merited a book of their own. It is striking that there were Daily Mail-esque moral panics surrounding all these genres of music at the time, which would be familiarto anyone who recalls the headlines around rave music at the end of the 80s or gangsta rap a few years later. And Doggett has a good go at trying to explain the origins of jazz (nobody can even agree on the etymology of the word, let alone exactly what defines the music the word is intended to describe).
  
  It might just be because the book was moving onto familiar territory for me, but I thought it lost momentum when it moved on to the post World War 2 history of pop music. Too often it felt like it was just a chronological list of culturally or commercially significant pop acts, with little in the way of context or explanation as to why we should care. And there were some curious gaps. Maybe I wasn't paying enough attention, but I still don't know, for example, quite how it was that R&B ceased to be a term to describe what I would understand to be rhythm & blues music, and instead became a label attached to disco-influenced soul music. Doggett uses the term to describe both kinds of music without explanation.
  
  That said, I did quite like his pithy summary of the McCartney/Lennon partnership and the difference between them. That McCartney was a believer in experimentation, in the studio as instrument, while Lennon was obsessed with 'authenticity' and sincerity. McCartney begat Talking Heads, Bowie and Radiohead, while you could trace a straight line from Lennon to Kurt Cobain.
  
  In the end, I think this is a book that bites off more than it can chew. The subject matter is imply too vast to be covered in 600 pages, and it is hard to imagine anyone genuinely entirely unfamiliar with the history of popular music, who might find the latter half of the book informative, ever deciding to pick up such a huge tome to read in the first place. But I'd recommend getting it out of the library and reading the first 250 pages or so...
• 
  Nick Spacek

  doggett does a fine job of explaining popular music, and in the intro he claims that he's focusing on popular music, rather than hip trends and so forth, but punk gets yet another retread of its history, whereas edm doesn't hardly get touched on at all. it seems that the author's biases get in the way of his own thesis, with his dipping into greater focus of sidebars and influences, rather than the actual chart-toppers. honestly, elijah wald's how the beatles destroyed rock & roll does the same thing, and is far more focused.
• 
  Melinda

  I really enjoyed this book up through its coverage of the 1970s. The '80s were rushed and the '90s - 2015 were almost nonexistent. Britney Spears is mentioned once in a list of Star Search contestants. Lady Gaga is in a list of artists you might hear in other countries. New Kids on the Block and One Direction are talked about such that, if you didn't know better, you could assume they were contemporaries. It's like the author ran out of time, space, or interest.
• 
  Du

  Welcome to pop music 101. There is not too much to keep you in the mood to read this, other than a general curiosity. There are far better books out there on the topic, though most of them don't start as early in history as this one does and most are going to be as British about pop music as this one is.
• 
  Gareth Howells

  Brilliant and comprehensive commentary on over 100 years of popular music.
  It covers a huge range of genres and cultural changes, and despite the scale of the book, is written extremely well, with a lot of detail but a light tone that stops it from being bogged down into a monotone drone.
  Well worth reading if you are interested in how Pop and Rock changed across the 20th century.
  
• 
  Nate

  Very ambitious historical survey that's readable and well executed.
• 
  Ralphz

  Peter Doggett’s sweeping overview of popular music from the 1890s to today (well, 2015, anyway) had a huge challenge: Cover the major and minor trends, and find the threads connecting it all.
  
  He succeeded, in an amazing way.
  
  “Electric Shock” is one critic’s look at popular music and will have its detractors – I’ve read other reviews saying it’s too broad, or he wasn’t critical enough, etc. But in the Introduction, Doggett made clear what he was up to. He wanted to look at popular music, and couldn’t go back far enough. ’50s? ’40s? ’30s?
  
  Eventually, he settled on the 1890s for two reasons: The beginning of ragtime, one of the first “popular” non-European music styles in the West, and it was the start of sound recording. Both events began to change music.
  
  Another thing Doggett does is set aside his own biases. He acknowledges that the mere mention of Bing Crosby or Queen would set him off. He decided to let all the music speak to him – and in turn, he became a fan of more people and styles than he used to be.
  
  The downside is it spends little time on some bigger practitioners, but the upside is the almost encyclopedic look at styles and artists. He covers jazz, blues, rock, country and subgenre after subgenre, such as swing, boy bands, electronica, bebop, exotica, folk, metal – almost anything that became popular, even for a second.
  
  If you’re looking for a deep dive into rock or jazz, you won’t find it here. But if you want to relive the scope of popular music, decade by decade, you’ll find it here.
  
  Highly recommended.
  
  Read more of my reviews at
  Ralphsbooks.
  
• 
  Jack Bates

  I love reading about music, and this is a great overview of the history of popular music 'from the gramophone to the iPhone' (nice). The early stuff was probably the most interesting - I've read lots about music from the fifties on, so it was good to learn more about ragtime and swing etc. and think about what my great-grandparents might have listened/danced to.
  When we get to the stuff I'm more familiar with it's not quite so thrilling, but that would be me, rather than the content. It's about popular music, of course, so as he says in the foreword 'it may not contain your favourite artists' but that's fine.
  
  I love anything that reminds the reader that society and even 'the music press' (remember that? Ha) has always reacted with horror and revulsion to whatever the kids are into. Even though with hindsight it's impossible to imagine people being outraged by Frank Sinatra, they were.
• 
  Paul Mais

  Exhaustive comprehensive history and evolution of Pop - illuminating, provocative and as much a soundtracked social history as a record of the pioneers and prime purveyors of popular music. Recommended