Great Pretenders: My Strange Love Affair with '50s Pop Music - Hardcover

Schoemer, Karen

3.76

29 ratings by Goodreads

9780743272469: Great Pretenders: My Strange Love Affair with '50s Pop Music

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743272463 ISBN 13: 9780743272469

Publisher: Free Press, 2006

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A veteran music critic traces her search for seven pop stars from the 1950s, including Connie Francis, Pat Boone, and Patti Page, offering insight into their musical period's cultural significance, historical influence, and ongoing legacy. 25,000 first printing.

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About the Author:

Karen Schoemer has written for Newsweek, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Blender, and other publications. Her writing has appeared in the anthologies Rock She Wrote: Women Write About Rock, Pop, and Rap; Trouble Girls: The Rolling Stone Book of Women in Rock; Da Capo Best Music Writing 2000; and Innocent When You Dream: The Tom Waits Reader. She lives in upstate New York with her husband and daughter.

From Booklist:

*Starred Review* This is no conventional music history. Although Schoemer, Newsweek's former chief pop-music critic, spends considerable time recounting the lives and careers of seven often overlooked and, in her opinion, underappreciated fifties pop icons--Patti Page, Frankie Laine, Georgia Gibbs, Tommy Sands, Fabian, Pat Boone, and Connie Francis--she spends much more examining her fascination with these performers, whose careers were already in eclipse when the Beatles led the British pop-music invasion. Schoemer admits that when she began research for the book, she shared the conventional belief that these singers were square, uptight, utterly conventional representatives of the conformist era in which they flourished. Worse, their careers seemed to have been based entirely on selling shallow, silly, emotionally dishonest new songs and homogenized covers of the rougher, more authentic work of such black performers as Little Richard, Etta James, and Big Mama Thornton. Over the course of the book, Schoemer depicts a journey to deeper understanding of the era, the music, and herself. What makes her intellectual trip especially exciting is her willingness throughout the book to explore issues both personal and professional that most critics are terrified to confront, most notable among them the thin line that divides interest from obsession and the observation that all music criticism, indeed all criticism, is subjective and autobiographical. Jack Helbig
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