The Night Before - by David Hajdu (Hardcover)

About the Book

The Night Before is a collection of David Hajdu's writing on music, comics, and popular culture, in which he brings historical perspective and a keen critical sensibility to unraveling underappreciated or misunderstood works.

Book Synopsis

For more than thirty years, David Hajdu has been a leading critic, casting light on artists past and present and on culture high and low. The Night Before is a collection of his writing on music, comics, and popular culture, in which he brings historical perspective and a keen critical sensibility to unraveling underappreciated or misunderstood works. These essays encompass an extraordinarily wide range of artists--from Billie Holiday to Billie Eilish--and themes, from the wails for racial justice by the "blues queens" of the 1920s to the role of new technologies in the making of twenty-first-century pop hits.

In piercing but lively prose, Hajdu explores how women singers of three generations upended gendered expectations. With insatiable curiosity, he tackles topics from Bulgarian folk music to the cartoons of Roz Chast, and from the racially mixed roots of country music to the unhinged comic strip that foreshadowed Peanuts. Turning inward, Hajdu reflects on subjects such as his fascination with the Hudson River, whose waters flow in both directions. The Night Before reveals how the currents of art and culture run forward and backward too, uniting past, present, and future in a ceaseless conversation.

Review Quotes

A pleasure to read: sharp yet generous assessments of artists and their art.-- "Kirkus (starred review)"

David Hajdu's writing on music and culture is provocative, entertaining, and always full of surprises. Whether he is writing about Dylan and the Beatles or Billie Holiday and Billie Eilish, Hajdu has a knack for making you hear familiar music with brand-new ears. Along the way, this collection functions as nothing less than a philosophy of modern song.--Seth Rogovoy, author of Within You Without You: Listening to George Harrison

This book does what the best criticism is supposed to do. Hajdu glories in taking on those artists we think we know so well that there's nothing more to be said about them and making us see these familiar figures anew. Anyone with the slightest curiosity about American culture will read The Night Before with continuous pleasure and a bracing sense of discovery.--James Marcus, author of Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Night Before provides yet more evidence--although we hardly needed it--that David Hajdu is among our most sensitive and probing critics of contemporary culture. His breadth is breathtaking: Whether he is writing about the Beatles or Tony Bennett or the comic strip auteur Daniel Clowes, he is an illuminating guide.--Gayle Wald, author of This Is Rhythm: Ella Jenkins, Children's Music, and the Long Civil Rights Movement

David Hajdu is a surpassingly astute music critic who illuminates jazz bassist William Parker's radical adventurism as elegantly and authoritatively as he does Adele's hook-heavy pop vocalism. He's a cultural omnivore who recognizes deep humanism in the work of Art Spiegelman, Roz Chast, and other graphic artists. This timely collection proves that the discernment and wisdom of a critic of Hajdu's caliber have never been more necessary than in our current age of digital onslaught.--John Gennari, author of The Jazz Barn: Music Inn, the Berkshires, and the Place of Jazz in American Life

About the Author

David Hajdu is a critic and cultural historian who teaches at the Columbia Journalism School. He is a five-time winner of the ASCAP/Deems Taylor Award for Music Writing, most recently for A Revolution in Three Acts: The Radical Vaudeville of Bert Williams, Eva Tanguay, and Julian Eltinge (Columbia, 2021, with John Carey). His biography of Billy Strayhorn, Lush Life, was named one of the hundred best nonfiction books of all time by the New York Times.