Rock and Roll Vs. Modern Life

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No Boomeresque 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. Rock and roll has always gotten credit as the music of rebellion. But rarely has the nature of this rebellion been nailed down. Seth Kim-Cohen addresses this omission with daredevil precision. Here, rock and roll is understood not as a mere excuse for hedonistic escapades or as the soundtrack for other, more important, rebellions. In a series of case studies of seminal performances, films, and recordings, Kim-Cohen argues that rock and roll plays a catalytic role in changing relations to the implicit ontologies of modernism and late-stage capitalism. Settled binaries are unsettled. Iggy Pop, James Brown, Patti Smith, the Last Poets, the Velvet Underground, shatter the framing that gives meaning to entities, concepts, ideologies, and subjectivities. For two decades, beginning in the mid-60s, rock and roll engages in a cage-match-battle-royale with the certainties of modern life. Rock and Roll vs. Modern Life reconnects rock and roll with its distant cousins: poststructruralism, conceptual art, black power, and a cultural-political skepticism lurking just beneath the linoleum surface of modern life.

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