Critical Reactions to The James Bond Songs (selection)

"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

"The James Bond Songs, especially good at dissecting the music and its place in the films, is most interesting when it's fleshing out the Bond character and his era. More than a book for music lovers and Bond devotees, it's a wise statement of how commerce tries to pass itself off as art."

—Pasatiempo

"The most scintillatingly analytical book on music I've read since Robert Cantwell's When We Were Good: The Folk Revival, and that came out in 1996... what makes the book sing is Daub and Kronengold's rare sense of songs thinking, as creations that acquire their own agency, and their acute ability to put flesh on the bones of the late-capitalist shibboleth."

— Greil Marcus, Pitchfork