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‘… into another kind of life in which anything might happen …’ Popular music and late modernity, 1910–1930

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

John Baxendale
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Extract

One evening in Leeds, in about 1913, the young J.B. Priestley had a brush with modernity:

… hot and astonished in the Empire, we discovered ragtime … It was as if we had been still living in the nineteenth century and then suddenly found the twentieth glaring and screaming at us. We were yanked into our own age, fascinating, jungle-haunted, monstrous … Out of these twenty noisy minutes in a music hall, so long ago, came fragmentary but prophetic outlines of the situation in which we find ourselves now, the menace to old Europe, the domination of America, the emergence of Africa, the end of confidence and any feeling of security, the nervous excitement, the frenzy, the underlying despair of our century … here was something new, strange, curiously disturbing … (Priestley 1962, pp. 66–7)

Type
Articles
Information
Popular Music , Volume 14 , Issue 2 , May 1995 , pp. 137 - 154
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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