Rock and Roll vs. Modern Life

Book excerpt: 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. 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.