"Heroes And Villains: Essays On Music, Movies, Comics, And Culture" by David Hajdu (**1/2)

October 20, 2009 6:05 a.m. EST

Miami, FL (CNS) - 310 pages

Da Capo Press

David Hajdu, who previously wrote "Lush Life," a biography on Jazz composer Billy Strayhorn, and "Positively 4th Street," which chronicled the lives of Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, among others, assembles his first collection of essays in "Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Comics, and Culture." The essays, which were nearly all published in The New Republic and The New York Review of Books among other places, all only share one thing common: music. The essays range from a piece on Rodgers & Hart, whose career took off in the 1920's, to names like Taylor Swift, who's currently topping charts.

At the centerpiece of the book is a previously unpublished article on Billy Eckstine, a profile on the big-band balladeer, originally written for Vanity Fair, which shows how one of the first romantic black males in pop music got lost in the shuffle. Among the rest of the 300 pages, Hadju's subjects include past and present jazz greats, recent commentaries on music icons like John Lennon and Elvis, and current iPod staples like Kanye West and Radiohead.

He even examines new cultural trends in music, including the new directions music distribution has seen, including examples from Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails, who both took a risk with new album purchasing methods and who also allowed fans to remix their songs using original source materials. Other articles are expanded album reviews, including the White Stripes and Joni Mitchell.

With his collection of well-written essays, Hadju seems just as in tune when talking about the blues spanning over a hundred years or skewering the latest Beyonce release. (For the record, he wasn't such a huge fan of "I Am... Sasha Fierce.") But the 54-year-old music critic succeeds in connecting the past to the present to create relevant commentaries on music from as far back as when it was being heard on phonographs to the iTunes era. "Heroes and Villains" is curiously compiled, but ultimately a sharp career-spanning collection.