Details

ISBN-10: 1478014393
ISBN-13: 9781478014393
Publisher: Duke University Press
Publish Date: 09/01/2021
Dimensions: 7.00" L, 7.00" W, 0.31" H

Roadrunner

Paperback

Price: $19.95

Overview

Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers’ 1972 song “Roadrunner” captures the freedom and wonder of cruising down the highway late at night with the radio on. Although the song circles Boston’s beltway, its significance reaches far beyond Richman’s deceptively simple declarations of love for modern moonlight, the made world, and rock & roll. In Roadrunner, cultural theorist and poet Joshua Clover charts both the song’s emotional power and its elaborate history, tracing its place in popular music from Chuck Berry to M.I.A. He also locates “Roadrunner” at the intersection of car culture, industrialization, consumption, mobility, and politics. Like the song itself, Clover tells a story about a particular time and place-the American era that rock & roll signifies-that becomes a story about love and the modern world.

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Reviews
"Roadrunner is a wonderful book: unique, passionate, sardonic, and as intellectually playful as it is rigorous. It is thrilling to be in the presence of a writer realizing all of his gifts–and yet he and the reader never lose sight of the song or cease to hear it. In that sense, Joshua Clover has not only realized himself as a writer; he has realized the song."–Greil Marcus, author of "The History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs"
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Details

ISBN-10: 1478014393
ISBN-13: 9781478014393
Publisher: Duke University Press
Publish Date: 09/01/2021
Dimensions: 7.00" L, 7.00" W, 0.31" H
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