Includes index

Foreword / by David Yaffe -- B's world. Billy Eckstine: the man who was too hot -- Whose standards? Mos Def and the American songbook ; Rodgers and Hart ; Sammy Davis, Jr.: two lives ; Anita O'Day ; Bobby Darin: Roman candle ; Susannah McCorkle -- Blues and the abstract truth. A hundred years of blues ; Alan Lomax ; Dinah Washington: Queen ; Ray Charles -- Growing up. Elvis Costello at fifty ; Brian Wilson and the lost masterpiece ; Sting the lutenist ; Joe Sacco and Daniel Clowes ; The White Stripes ; Abbey Lincoln and Mark Murphy ; Three women in pop: Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, and Lucinda Williams -- Cultural machinery. The blogging of American pop ; MySpace ; The music of Starbucks ; Rick Rubin and Kanye West ; Open-source remixing -- Life with the lions. Woody Guthrie: Ramblin' man ; Will Eisner ; Elvis and the Colonel ; Ken Burns and the great men of jazz ; John Lennon: The life ; Paul McCartney's Chaos and creation ; Joni Mitchell's Shine ; Wynton Marsalis -- Otherwise engaged. Harry Partch ; Elmer Fudd ; Walt Whitman and Fred Hersch: the jazz Leaves of grass ; Michel Petrucciani ; Philip Glass and Leonard Cohen : The book of longing ; Jules Feiffer at the Village Voice ; John Zorn ; Josh Groban ; Marjane Satrapi

"Heroes and Villains is the first collection of essays by David Hajdu, the award-winning author of The Ten-Cent Plague, Positively 4th Street, and Lush Life. Eclectic and controversial, Hajdu's essays take on topics as varied as pop music, jazz, the avant-garde, comic books, and our downloading culture."--BOOK JACKET

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