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Present Tense: Rock & Roll and Culture
- Author: DeCurtis, Anthony
- Editor: DeCurtis, Anthony
Ever since people started writing about rock, other people have made fun of them. Anthony DeCurtis's anthology, with its clutch of academics, rock writers and musicians, will strike cynics as...
Present Tense: Rock & Roll and Culture
- Author: DeCurtis, Anthony
- Editor: DeCurtis, Anthony
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Ever since people started writing about rock, other people have made fun of them. Anthony DeCurtis's anthology, with its clutch of academics, rock writers and musicians, will strike cynics as...
About
The most compelling art form to emerge from the United States in the second half of the twentieth century, rock & roll stands in an edgy relationship with its own mythology, its own musicological history and the broader culture in which it plays a part. In Present Tense, Anthony DeCurtis brings together writers from a wide variety of fields to explore how rock & roll is made, consumed, and experienced in our time.
In this collection, Greil Marcus creates a collage of words and pictures that evokes and explores Elvis Presley's grisly fate as an American cultural image, while Robert Palmer tells the gripping tale of the origins and meanings of the electric guitar. Rap music, MTV, and the issue of gender identity in the work of Bruce Springsteen all undergo thorough examination; rock & roll's complex relationship with the forces of censorship gets a remarkably fresh reading; and the mainstreaming of rock & roll in the 1980s is detailed and analyzed. And, in an interview with Laurie Anderson and an essay by Atlanta musician Jeff Calder, the artists speak for themselves.
Contributors. Jeff Calder, Anthony DeCurtis, Mark Dery, Paul Evans, Glenn Gass, Trent Hill, Michael Jarrett, Alan Light, Greil Marcus, Robert Palmer, Robert B. Ray, Dan Rubey, David R. Shumway, Martha Nell Smith, Paul Smith
Contents
- Preface ix
- The Eighties / Anthony DeCurtis 1
- The Church of the Sonic Guitar / Robert Palmer 13
- The Enemy Within: Censorship in Rock Music in the 1950s / Trent Hill 39
- A Corpse in Your Mouth: Adventures of a Metaphor, or Modern Cannibalism / Greil Marcus 73
- Why Don't We Do It in the Classroom? / Glenn Gass 93
- Playing for England / Paul Smith 101
- Rock & Roll as a Cultural Practice / David R. Shumway 117
- Tracking / Robert B. Ray 135
- Signposts on the Road to Nowhere: Laurie Anderson's Crisis of Meaning / Mark Dery 149
- Concerning the Progress of Rock & Roll / Michael Jarrett 167
- Los Angeles, 1999 / Paul Evans 183
- Sexual Mobilities in Bruce Springsteen: Performance as Commentary / Martha Nell Smith 197
- About a Salary or Reality?- Rap's Recurrent Conflict / Alan Light 219
- Voguing at the Carnival: Desire and Pleasure on MTV / Dan Rubey 235
- Living by Night in the Land of Opportunity: Observations on Life in a Rock & Roll Band / Jeff Calder 271
- Index 303
- Notes on Contributors 315
Awards and reviews
Ever since people started writing about rock, other people have made fun of them. Anthony DeCurtis's anthology, with its clutch of academics, rock writers and musicians, will strike cynics as inherently pretentious. They will be wrong: This is a smart, witty, ingeniously balanced assortment of rock commentary, with a healthy number of pieces that seem prescient and, even, moving
