Overview

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.

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9781501385919

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Reviews

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 With Popular Musical Autobiography Oliver Lovesey delivers a sweeping and groundbreaking study of this neglected and underappreciated subgenre. In his energetic introduction, with discussion of life-writers ranging from Saint Augustine and Lord Byron to Jeff Tweedy, Lovesey sets the stage for an insightful and enjoyable examination of various music autobiographers and their strategies. Among others, he explores Clapton's and Marianne Faithfull's recovery narratives, Brian Epstein's Victorian-styled concealment, Cozey Fanni Tutti's self-objectivization, Patti Smith's performative self with her homage to European literary greats, and Bob Dylan's lifelong preoccupation with self-construction. It's a brilliant and very necessary work. --Thomas Kitts, Professor of English, St. John's University, New York, USA

Author Information

Oliver Lovesey is Professor of English at the University of British Columbia, Canada and the author of Postcolonial George Eliot (2017) and The Postcolonial Intellectual (2016) and editor of Popular Music and the Postcolonial (2018).

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