Introduction: Themes in Classic Rock Music: Rebellion, Utopia, and
Liberation
Chapter One: Listening to the Blues
Chapter Two: The Imaginative Legacy of the Beats: Countercultural
Utopia
Chapter Three: Science Fiction Imagination and Fantasy in
Progressive Rock
Chapter Four: The End of the World as We Know It: Rock Music
Dystopia
Chapter Five: Rock Romanticism: Power Chords and the Imaginary
Company:
Chapter Six: Paperback Writers: Rock Music and Fiction
Chapter Seven: Human Rights, Community, and Global Rock
Robert McParland is professor of English at Felician University.
The Rock Music Imagination takes on a huge and sprawling topic—and
doesn’t disappoint. McParland maps out the diverse and often
complex terrain of the rock music imagination during its height of
creativity from 1964-1980. Drawing on multiple theories concerning
the creative process, he cuts a path through blues and psychedelic
rock, folk rock and prog rock, utopian and dystopian imaginings,
science fiction meanderings and humanitarian appeals, and more. It
is an ambitious undertaking that not only succeeds but also
suggests further lines of inquiry to the serious student of rock
music.
*Thomas Kitts, Co-editor of Popular Music and Society and Rock
Music Studies*
Robert McParland’s The Rock Music Imagination explores the roles of
creativity, imagination, and emotional expression in the era of
“classic rock” in a manner that is rewarding for the indoctrinated
fan and accessible for the uninitiated reader. For those familiar
with the subjects, McParland presents novel readings,
interpretations, and connections between the popular and less
popular, the creative process (produced from within the established
commercial recording industry), and literature and related arts.
For the newer fan of classic rock music, The Rock Music Imagination
provides a primer of introduction that eschews linear and temporal
timelines, scenes, and surface relations in favor of creative and
imaginative connections between otherwise disconnected artists. Far
from the repetitive playlists of classic rock format radio,
McParland rescues classic rock’s creative influence from the
banality of one or two representative songs by nostalgia acts in
favor of a web-like analysis of innovators and innovation in one of
popular music’s greatest “golden eras.”
*Colin Helb, Elizabethtown College*
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