City Songs and American Life, 1900–1950 by Michael Lasser

Abstract

Reviewed by: City Songs and American Life, 1900–1950 by Michael Lasser David H. Miller City Songs and American Life, 1900–1950. By Michael Lasser. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2019. [xi, 303 p. ISBN 9781580469524 (hardcover), $34.95; ISBN 9781787444638 (e-book), price varies.] Illustrations. In City Songs and American Life, 1900– 1950, Michael Lasser sets out to document how American cityscapes “spring to life” in the popular songs of the first half of the twentieth century. “My chapter on Broadway,” Lasser explains in the book’s opening pages, “isn’t about the great musicals . . . but rather about the ways songs portrayed the street, itself” (p. ix). Many of the protagonists in these songs, he later argues, are bound together by “urban sensibility . . . an outlook and a way of speaking that comes from living in a city” (pp. 16–17). This topic is appealing, since it encompasses not only many of the most prominent events and trends of the era, from the Harlem Renaissance and the Great Depression to flappers and Prohibition, but also many of the most familiar and beloved songs, from “I Get a Kick out of You” and “As Time Goes By” to “Ain’t Misbehavin’ ” and “St. Louis Blues.” With tunes like these at its center, City Songs would seem destined to find a wide audience. And yet it is difficult to say who this book’s intended audience is. Though it is published by a university press, contains endnotes, and makes occasional reference to academic literature, it is definitely not aimed at academics. Lasser’s engagement with secondary sources is fleeting and at the surface level, usually consisting of nothing more than a one-sentence summary of an author’s work. What’s more, City Songs lacks an index, thus severely limiting the scholarly utility of a book filled to the brim with the names of people, places, and songs. One might presume, then, that Lasser wrote City Songs with a more general audience of music lovers in mind, but in this context, too, it is an awkward fit. While it is not especially long (280 pages of main text), it is dense and rambling. Lasser’s writing style consists of a mélange of references to historical figures famous and obscure, endless song lyrics, and obtuse philosophical musings. “You never quite get away from New York,” begins one paragraph (p. 22); “Songs are among the most conservative of the arts,” Lasser proclaims out of nowhere (p. 27). There are, furthermore, no main characters from whose perspective a reader might more easily follow the story. Figures such as Irving Berlin and Ma Rainey take center [End Page 72] stage for a few paragraphs only to disappear from the narrative as suddenly as they emerged. All but the most dedicated devotees are liable to find this approach disorienting. Most confounding, City Songs contains few images (typically no more than two per chapter) and exactly zero audio clips. Yes, it is a book, but I was surprised to learn that it did not come with an accompanying website or at least a link to a curated YouTube or Spotify playlist. In the “Notes to the Reader,” Lasser blames this situation on copyright restrictions: If I could, I would put all of them [the songs discussed in the book] on a giant CD to hand you when you open the book, or, even better, I’d loosen the copyright laws so an author could quote more liberally from songs written after 1922. Neither is going to happen, so that takes me back to the need for adjectives, a lot of adjectives. Their task is to bring you closer to the songs. (p. ix) Closer, perhaps, but not close enough. Lasser writes with a palpable enthusiasm for the music he discusses, but I found it difficult to match that enthusiasm in cases in which I was not already familiar with the songs in question. I soon tired, additionally, of toggling back and forth bet ween the book and my computer in an effort to hear what Lasser was hearing. In the opening chapter, Lasser recounts how a radio show on the Great American Songbook that he hosted...