Lit-Rock: Literary Capital in Popular Music

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Just as soon as it had got rolling, rock music had a problem: it wanted to be art. A mere four years separate the Beatles as mere kiddy culture from the artful geniuses of Sergeant Peppers, meaning the very same band who represents the mass-consumed, "mindless" music of adolescents simultaneously enjoys status as among the best that Western culture has to offer. The story of rock music, it turns out, is less that of a contagious popular form situated in opposition to high art, but, rather, a story of high and low in dialogue--messy and contentious, to be sure, but also mutually obligated to account for, if not appropriate, one another. The chapters in this book track the uses of literature, specifically, within this relation, helping to showcase collectively its fundamental role in the emergence of the "pop omnivore."

Reviews

In the hubbub that followed Bob Dylans Nobel Prize it was clear that many commentators took it for granted that literature and popular music occupy quite different cultural spheres. The essayists in this collection disagree. Here Taylor Swift, Kathy Acker, Flannery OConnor, and Joni Michell get the same respect, Bowie, Burroughs, Browning, and Bono equal billing, and Dashiell Hammett and James Joyce are no more (or less) iconic figures than the Polish singer songwriter Czeslaw Nieman or the British band The Mekons. This book challenges literary and rock academics alike and Ryan Hibbetts crackerjack introduction should be on all their reading lists. * Simon Frith, Tovey Chair of Music, University of Edinburgh, UK, and author of The Sociology of Rock (1978) *
With Lit-Rock, Ryan Hibbett and his rich stable of contributors make a compelling case for the vital and ongoing role of literary art in popular music. Moving well beyond the tired debates over whether rock lyrics are poetry, the essays here bring nuance and new insight into the complicated pas de deux of lit and rock that has too often been figured as flowing in one direction only, rock riding on literatures coattails. Hibbetts opening essay is a marvel: wide ranging, eruditea revelation. * Kevin Dettmar, W.M. Keck Professor of English and Director, The Humanities Studio, Pomona College, USA *

Author Bio

Ryan Hibbett is Associate Professor of English at Northern Illinois University, USA, whose research examines the high art/pop culture relation in literature and music alike. He is the author of Philip Larkin, Popular Culture, and the English Individual (2019), and his articles have appeared in Cambridge Quarterly, Popular Music and Society, Twentieth-Century Literature, Contemporary Literature, and Journal of Popular Music Studies.