Rock and Roll vs. Modern Life

(Hardback)

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No Boomer-esque celebration of the "music that defined an era," Rock and Roll vs. Modern Life is instead a deeply critical analysis of rock and roll as a chaotic, caterwauling project to upend the foundational presumptions of postwar values. What we have here is the closest thing yet to a unified field theory of rock and roll. In seminal performances, films, and recordings, Iggy Pop, James Brown, Patti Smith, the Last Poets, and the Sex Pistols disrupt the implicit ontologies of modernism and late-stage capitalism. With its comrades, conceptual art, Black power, and poststructuralism, rock and roll strips back the linoleum surface of modern life to reveal a feral sensibility unwilling to be boxed up for clean consumption.

Reviews

Seth Kim-Cohen opens by putting the modernist art critic Michael Fried and punk singer Iggy Pop in a cage match, Fried armed with a frame and a spotlight, Iggy with a microphone and a half-naked body, and never lets them out. Figure after figure is taken through the cage, from Bob Dylan (He could outdance the spotlight, rupture each successive frame as it stabilized around him) to James Brown suspending the moment when his popcorn pops (a libidinal freedom that he never allows to surface) to Adrian Piper measuring her freedom against that of Sol LeWitt (The borders establishing inclusion and exclusion are traced in the land, the architecture, the art of the society. They dont need to be stamped Whites Only). Connections are rarely what you might expect and they never conclude where, from one side of the cage, they should. Reading Gramscis Political Writings in the name of the postpunk/critical theory Leeds band Scritti Politti is one thing. As Eddie Cochran might have put it, simultaneously hearing Little Richards Tutti Frutti is something else. * Greil Marcus, American music critic *
Rock and Roll vs. Modern Life is a delight to read, and deserves to be read twice, once for the ideas and a second time for the joy of the prose. Original and deftly written, it brings discussions of art, aesthetics, politics, race, and gender into multi-sided conversations that effortlessly flow together. The book is one of the best examples of transdisciplinary scholarship in the arts and can easily find a home in music, art, philosophy, American studies, and political studies courses. * Justin Patch, Associate Professor of Music, Vassar College, USA *
A beautiful analysis of the friction and propulsion of our most sonorous art form and the electric wave that crackles out of amplifiers into our cultural consciousness. * Damon Locks, leader of the Black Monument Ensemble and founding member of The Eternals *

Author Bio

Seth Kim-Cohen is Professor of Art History, Theory and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA. He is the author of Against Ambience and Other Essays (Bloomsbury, 2013), In the Blink of an Ear: Toward A Non-Cochlear Sonic Art (Bloomsbury, 2009), and One Reason to Live: Conversations About Music (2006). With his bands (names_of_music, The Fire Show, Number One Cup), he has released more than a dozen albums and performed throughout North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. John Peel once bought him a beer.