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
"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."—John
Rockwell, European Cultural Correspondent, The New York Times
"This collection brings together two of the cultural right's
favorite targets—mass culture and high theory—and demonstrates
brilliantly how mutually illuminating they can be as a way of
understanding the American scene."—Stanley Fish, Duke
University
"This collection is a useful and provocative addition to rock
literature. Its collage of forms—scholarship, journalism,
interviews, and fiction—allows access to a variety of readers, and
provides a diverse forum for addressing the current consciousness
about rock."—Andrew Ross, Princeton University
"This shit rocks! To wit: Exhibiting a wide range of critical music
writing, this collection speaks volumes about how music, and our
varied perceptions of it, are intrinsically woven into the social
and ideological web of end-of-the-century thought."—Michael Stipe,
R.E.M.
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