The James Bond Songs [antikvár]

IntroductionJames Bond and The End(s)of The Pod SonqThe James Bond films have a loyal audience; maybe you're part of it. Their songs do not. They hardly represent the heights of popular music. So why have we written a book about them? Partly because they keep getting pushed out into cultural space as if you caredsince 1965 there have been at least thirty songs, and at least forty compilations of those songs, released in over a dozen countries. But mostly because we think the Bond songs say something about what has happened to pop music since the early 1960s, and about what happened to us as listeners to pop.Over this fifty-year span the making and hearing of pop songs have been turned upside down. Pop records have been produced under vastly different technological and institutional regimes for an ever-widening range of audiences who are being addressed in all sorts of ways. A pop song from 2014 might be unrecognizable as such to a listener transported from 1964. Or not; pop music of the post-rock-&-roll era has also managed to preserve older themes and pre-rock musical aesthetics. The Bond songs fascinate us for precisely the way they engage this dynamic of change and stasis. They both reveal and conceal pop's many transformations while grasping a singular strand of pop-music tradition in a vice-like grip that Jaws and his fellow Bond heavies would be compelled to admire.