For more than thirty years, David Hajdu has been a leading critic, casting light on artists past and present and on culture high and low. The Night Before is a collection of his writing on music, comics, and popular culture, in which he brings historical perspective and a keen critical sensibility to unraveling underappreciated or misunderstood works. These essays encompass an extraordinarily wide range of artists—from Billie Holiday to Billie Eilish—and themes, from the wails for racial justice by the “blues queens” of the 1920s to the role of new technologies in the making of twenty-first-century pop hits.
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