Kirjahaku

This infamous book has enjoyed a lively underground reputation since its first publication in 1970. Richard Meltzer (a.k.a. R. Meltzer) took his training as a young philosopher and applied it with unalloyed enthusiasm to the lyrics, sound, and culture of rock and roll. Never before had anyone noticed the relationship between the philosophy of Heidegger and a tune by Little Anthony and the Imperials, heard the cries of agony in the Shangri Las' Remember (Walkin' in the Sand)", or transcribed every "papa-ooma-mow-mow" in the Trashmen's Surfin' Bird."From Dionne Warwick to Plato, Jim Morrison to Bert Brecht, Conway Twitty to Miguel de Unamuno, Meltzer subverts high and low culture in his search for meaning, emotion, and codes in popular music. At once an earnest investigation and a crypto put-on, the book can be read for its nuggets of information and insights or for its humour. Here with Greil Marcus's new introduction, yet another generation of readers can be outraged and inspired.

He is one of the inventors of rock criticism. His first book, The Aesthetics of Rock (acclaimed by Greil Marcus as "a disemboweling of rock's soft white underbelly"), became an instant cult classic when published in 1970. And for the next thirty years he fearlessly expanded the boundaries of music writing. Now he has collected the best of his prodigious output into a gonzo sampler of the reviews, profiles, interviews, and essays that form the heart of his rockwriter legacy. Traveling from psychedelia to the "dinosaur-rot early'70s" to the redeeming majesty of punk and the constant solace of jazz, this will stand as a remarkable document of an era by a singular voice in music writing.

A sublime and moving collection of essays by an eloquent master writer, Autumn Rhythm is equal parts candour, courage, humour, and desperation. A true-tongued, almost joyous gallows humour permeates the book, a meditation on what it's like to be on the outer edge of "boomerhood," on the cusp of official seniority what it's like to have been so long associated with a youth movement-rock music-yet to no longer be young. Autumn Rhythm comes from a man whose work has always been music as much as it's been about it, and who now brings his syncopation of word, sound, and sense to the subject of life itself, as lived and lost: a frank, brilliant, and ultimately poetic contemplation of physical decline, the deaths of friends and family, and the confounding, ever-accelerating changes in our culture."A rant in [Meltzer's] finest and funniest manner, an epic vernacular monologue with stylistic roots in nineteenth-century humourists Bill Nye, Artemus Ward, and Mark Twain."