Bloomsbury Academic
Popular Music Autobiography : The Revolution in Life-Writing by 1960s' Musicians and Their Descendants
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Popular Music Autobiography
Author(s): Oliver Lovesey
The 1960s saw the nexus of the revolution in popular music by a post-war generation amid demographic upheavals and seismic shifts in technology. Over the past two decades, musicians associated with this period have produced a large amount of important autobiographical writing. This book situates these works -- in the forms of formal autobiographies and memoirs, auto-fiction, songs, and self-fashioned museum exhibitions -- within the context of the recent expansion of interest in autobiography, disability, and celebrity studies. It argues that these writings express anxiety over musical originality and authenticity, and seeks to dispel their writers' celebrity status and particularly the association with a lack of seriousness. These works often constitute a meditation on the nature of postmodern fame within a celebrity-obsessed culture, and paradoxically they aim to regain the private self in a public forum.
Review(s):
“Tracking the emergence, in the wake of the Sixties, of a wide-ranging genre of “audio-biography,” Lovesey's witty, ambitious study explores how the autobiographical performances of edgy, experimental musician-life writers shape a “generational autobiography.” Ranging from Beatles' manager Brian Epstein to Bob Dylan and Patti Smith, post-punk rock to Moby, his knowledgeable overview of popular-music memoirs probes narratives of aspiration and confession, homoerotica and violence, addiction and mortality as hybrids of celebrity culture that fuel popular music's global reach.” —Julia Watson, Professor Emerita of Comparative Studies, The Ohio State University, USA
ISBN: 9781501355837
Author(s): Oliver Lovesey
The 1960s saw the nexus of the revolution in popular music by a post-war generation amid demographic upheavals and seismic shifts in technology. Over the past two decades, musicians associated with this period have produced a large amount of important autobiographical writing. This book situates these works -- in the forms of formal autobiographies and memoirs, auto-fiction, songs, and self-fashioned museum exhibitions -- within the context of the recent expansion of interest in autobiography, disability, and celebrity studies. It argues that these writings express anxiety over musical originality and authenticity, and seeks to dispel their writers' celebrity status and particularly the association with a lack of seriousness. These works often constitute a meditation on the nature of postmodern fame within a celebrity-obsessed culture, and paradoxically they aim to regain the private self in a public forum.
Review(s):
“Tracking the emergence, in the wake of the Sixties, of a wide-ranging genre of “audio-biography,” Lovesey's witty, ambitious study explores how the autobiographical performances of edgy, experimental musician-life writers shape a “generational autobiography.” Ranging from Beatles' manager Brian Epstein to Bob Dylan and Patti Smith, post-punk rock to Moby, his knowledgeable overview of popular-music memoirs probes narratives of aspiration and confession, homoerotica and violence, addiction and mortality as hybrids of celebrity culture that fuel popular music's global reach.” —Julia Watson, Professor Emerita of Comparative Studies, The Ohio State University, USA
ISBN: 9781501355837