num_pages: 352
description: Heroes and Villains is the first collection of essays by David Hajdu award-winning author of The Ten-Cent Plague Positively 4th Street and Lush Life. Eclectic and controversial Hajdus essays take on topics as varied as pop music jazz the avant-garde comic books and our downloading culture. The heart of Heroes and Villains is an extraordinary new piece of cultural rediscovery original to this book. It tells the untold story of one of the most importantand ultimately one of the most tragicfigures in American popular music Billy Eckstine. Through exhaustive new research Hajdu shows how this great forgotten singer once more popular than Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby transformed American music by combining sex appeal sophistication and black machismoin the era of segregation. The cost for Eckstine was his careerand nearly his life.Other essays in this expansive book deal with topical and surprising subjects like Beyonc Bobby Darin Kanye West Marjane Satrapi Woody Guthrie Will Eisner the White Stripes Elmer Fudd Elvis Costello Harry Partch Ray Charles Joni Mitchell and more. 
language: English
title: Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics, and Culture
publisher: Da Capo Press