1989 Bob Dylan Didnt Have This to Sing About [Paperback]

In a tour de force of lyrical theory, Joshua Clover boldly reimagines how we understand both pop music and its social context in a vibrant exploration of a year famously described as the end of history. Amid the historic overturnings of 1989, including the fall of the Berlin Wall, pop music also experienced striking changes. Vividly conjuring cultural sensations and events, Clover tracks the emergence of seemingly disconnected phenomena--from grunge to acid house to gangsta rap--asking if perhaps pop had been biding its time until 1989 came along to make sense of its sensibility. His analysis deftly moves among varied artists and genres including Public Enemy, N.W.A., Dr. Dre, De La Soul, The KLF, Nine Inch Nails, Nirvana, U2, Jesus Jones, the Scorpions, George Michael, Madonna, Roxette, and others. This elegantly written work, deliberately mirroring history as dialectical and ongoing, summons forth a new understanding of how history had come out to meet pop as something more than a fairytale, or something less. A truth, a way of being.

Joshua Clover,Associate Professor at the University of California, Davis, is author ofThe Totality for Kids(UC Press),The Matrix,andMadonna anno domini.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PROLOGUE
INTRODUCTION: The Long 1989

PART ONE: 1989 (THE UNCONFINED UNRECKONED YEAR)

1. The Bourgeois and the Boulevard
BRIDGE: da inner sound, y'all

2. The Second Summer of Love
BRIDGE: I Was up above It

3. Negative Creep
BRIDGE: Just a Stop down the Line

4. The Billboard Consensus

PART TWO: 1989 (A SHOUT IN THE STREET)

5. The Image-Event and the Blind Spot

EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
WORKS CITED
INDEX

Joshua Clover finally puts the lie to the tiresome cliche that 'writing about music is like dancing about architecture.' He shows definitively that whel†