Adrian Daub

Charles Kronengold

Starting with 1964's Goldfinger, every James Bond film has followed the same ritual, and so has its audience: after an exciting action sequence the screen goes black and the viewer spends three long minutes absorbing abstract opening credits and a song that sounds like it wants to return to 1964. In The James Bond Songs authors Adrian Daub and Charles Kronengold use the genre to trace not only a changing cultural landscape, but also evolving conceptions of what a pop song is. They argue that the story of the Bond song is the story of the pop song more generally, and perhaps even the story of its end. Each chapter discusses a particular segment of the Bond canon and contextualizes it in its era's music and culture. But the book also asks how Bond and his music reflected and influenced our feelings about such topics as masculinity, race, money, and aging. Through these individual pieces the book presents the Bond song as the perfect anthem of late capitalism. The Bond songs want to talk about the fulfillment that comes from fast cars, shaken Martinis and mindless sex, but their unstable speakers, subjects, and addressees actually undercut the logic of the lifestyle James Bond is sworn to defend. The book is an invitation to think critically about pop music, about genre, and about the political aspects of popular culture in the twentieth century and beyond.

Pop Anthems of Late Capitalism

The James Bond Songs

Living Genres in Late Modernity reassesses the role of genres in musical practice and experience. Exploring stylistic developments from the late 1960s through the early 1980s, including soul, funk, disco, pop, the nocturne, and the concerto, Charles Kronengold treats genres as unstable constellations of works, people, practices, institutions, technologies, money, conventions, forms, ideas, and multisensory experiences. What these genres share is a significant cultural moment: they arrive just after "the sixties" and are haunted by a sense of belatedness or loss, even as they embrace narratives of progress or abundance. These genres give us reasons--and means--to examine our culture's self-understandings. Through close readings and large-scale mappings of cultural and stylistic patterns, the book's five linked studies reveal how genres help construct personal and cultural identities that are both partial and overlapping, that exist in tension with one another, and that we experience in ebbs and flows.

American Music of the Long 1970s

Living Genres in Late Modernity

You know the name. You know the number. And, strangely enough, you recognize the songs: "Live and Let Die," "Skyfall," "Nobody Does It Better" and of course "Goldfinger." For more than fifty years, the producers of the James Bond movies have felt the need to open their films with chintzy songs featuring puzzling lyrics about diamonds and guns. And for more than fifty years we've listened to, bought, and sung along with these songs. The Bond-songs make pop critics and pop historians of all of us - there is a canon of them, and whenever a new one hits the airwaves we compare it to that canon. This book is about the canon, but it's as much about the kind of audience that canon has turned us into. The Bond-songs are far more about us the consumers than they are about 007: they talk to us about what pop music has to do with work, they try to tell us what's great (and maybe not so great) about capitalism, they speak about aging and becoming obsolete. Following their trail of bizarre lyrics and retro instrumental gestures we trace a secret history of pop and of our changing ways of listening to pop over the last half century.

Charles Kronengold

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