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.
"James Bond and the End(s) of the Pop Song Chapter 1: ""At Skyfall"": The Bond-Song, Repression, and Repetition Chapter 2: ""A Golden Girl Knows"": The Ballads of James Bond Chapter 3: ""You Only Live Twice"": James Bond and (his) Age Chapter 4: ""When You've Got a Job to Do"": The 70s Chapter 5: ""We're an All Time High"": James Bond, Pop, and the Endless 1970s Chapter 6: Looking the Part: James Bond's New Wave Years Chapter 7: ""Your Life is a Story I Have Already Written"": The Gay Panic Years Chapter 8: ""Close My Body Now"": Bond's Traumas and the Compulsion to Repeat James Bond Will Return In.... Index"
Adrian Daub is Associate Professor of German Studies at Stanford University and author of Four-Handed Monsters: Four-Hand Piano Playing and Nineteenth-Century Culture (2014), Uncivil Unions - The Metaphysics of Marriage in German Idealism and Romanticism (2012), and Tristan's Shadow - Sexuality and the Total Work of Art (2013). Charles Kronengold is Associate Professor of Musicology at Stanford University.
Reviews for The James Bond Songs: Pop Anthems of Late Capitalism
Critique of ideology at its best: taking our pleasures at their most stupid and marginal, and discerning in them echoes of global social and ideological antagonisms. A must for all those who believe that we really live in post-ideological times! --Slavoj Zizek In prose that purrs like a Bond girl, Daub and Kronengold tell a remarkable story not just of these curious songs but of popular music since the early 1960s. A terrific history! --Alice Echols, Professor of History and Gender Studies, The University of Southern California This refreshingly unique study chronicles Bond songs as part of pop music and apart from it, within the Bond movies and apart from them, imagining hip futures while desperately holding onto anachronistic visions of empire. --Dana Polan, Cinema Studies, New York University A book as sophisticated as a shaken martini, as clever as Q's gadgets, as zippy as an Aston Martin, as razor sharp as Goldfinger's laser, as gorgeous as Shirley Bassey's voice, and as enthralling as any Bond movie I've ever seen. --Alexander Rehding, Harvard University
