Adrian Daub

Charles Kronengold

You know the name. You know the number. And, strangely enough, you recognize the songs: "Live and Let Die," "Skyfall," "Nobody Does It Better" and of course "Goldfinger." For more than fifty years, the producers of the James Bond movies have felt the need to open their films with chintzy songs featuring puzzling lyrics about diamonds and guns. And for more than fifty years we've listened to, bought, and sung along with these songs. The Bond-songs make pop critics and pop historians of all of us - there is a canon of them, and whenever a new one hits the airwaves we compare it to that canon. This book is about the canon, but it's as much about the kind of audience that canon has turned us into. The Bond-songs are far more about us the consumers than they are about 007: they talk to us about what pop music has to do with work, they try to tell us what's great (and maybe not so great) about capitalism, they speak about aging and becoming obsolete. Following their trail of bizarre lyrics and retro instrumental gestures we trace a secret history of pop and of our changing ways of listening to pop over the last half century.

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