Roadrunner Clover

September 144 pages, 1 illustration paper, 978-1-4780-1439-3 $19.95tr/£14.99 cloth, 978-1-4780-1347-1 $84.95/£68.00

Joshua Clover is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Davis and author of Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings, 1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This To Sing About, and other books.

Roadrunner

JOSHUA CLOVER

“Roadrunner is a wonderful book: unique, passionate, sardonic, and as intellectually playful as it is rigorous. It is thrilling to be in the presence of a writer realizing all of his gifts—and yet he, and the reader, never lose sight of the song or cease to hear it. In that sense, Joshua Clover has not only realized himself as a writer, he has realized the song.”—GREIL MARCUS, author of The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in Ten Songs

“Roadrunner is incisive, poetic, and full of life, a beautifully circuitous meditation that mirrors how obsessive music fandom feels. Joshua Clover is in his finest critical form here.”—JESSICA HOPPER, author of The First Collection of Criticism By A Living Female Rock Critic

Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers’ 1972 song “Roadrunner” captures the freedom and wonder of cruising down the highway late at night with the radio on. Although the song circles Boston’s beltway, its significance reaches far beyond Richman’s deceptively simple declarations of love for modern moonlight, the made world, and rock & roll. In Roadrunner, cultural theorist and poet Joshua Clover charts both the song’s emotional power and its elaborate history, tracing its place in popular music from Chuck Berry to M.I.A. He also locates “Roadrunner” at the intersection of car culture, industrialization, consumption, mobility, and politics. Like the song itself, Clover tells a story about a particular time and a place—the American era that rock & roll signifies—that becomes a story about love and the modern world.

SINGLES A series edited by Joshua Clover and Emily J. Lordi

Announcing a new series

Singles

Edited by JOSHUA CLOVER and EMILY J. LORDI

One song, one book, one series. Each book in the Singles series tells a complex story about a single song. Not just a lone track on an album, but a single: a song distributed to and heard by millions that creates a shared moment it is bound to outlive, revealing social fault lines in the process. These books combine popular culture and fandom with music criticism and scholarly research to ask how singles change lives, reshape perceptions, bring people together, and drive them apart. What is it about a single that can pry open a whole world? That can feel common to all and different for each? How can something so little mean so much? Singles offers insightful, provocative answers to these questions.