“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
"In this fascinating discursive journey, Clover discusses Boston-area car culture’s impact on the lyrics and music of 'Roadrunner' and other road and highway songs; he also laments social changes wrought by the emphasis on industrialization and, more recently, financialization, at the expense of substantive production. . . . Clover demonstrates a sweeping command of his material. . . ."
-- Barry Zaslow Library Journal
"In a brisk 100-plus pages, he pulls off a kind of critical jiujitsu, linking a song about driving past the Stop & Shop 'with the radio on' back to Chuck Berry's classic songs about riding along in an automobile, and forward to Cornershop's 'Brimful of Asha' and M.I.A.'s 'Paper Planes,' both of which reference 'Roadrunner.' . . . Like the song, Clover's lengthy essay steps on the gas from the on-ramp and keeps pushing."
-- James Sullivan Boston Globe
"Roadrunner, Clover's book, has plenty of warmth; in fact, it runs positively hot as the poet and cultural theorist veers off onto one exit ramp after another."
-- Jay Gabler The Current
"It’s heady stuff, for sure, but it’s also as ecstatic as the music it celebrates—an inspired, inspiring tribute to what Greil Marcus once called 'the most obvious song in the world, and the strangest.'"
-- Marc Hogan Pitchfork, Best Music Books of 2021
"Poet and critic Joshua Clover’s book-length exploration of 'Roadrunner' stays true to Richman’s “faster miles an hour” gospel, thrillingly pursuing connections backward and forward, from Chuck Berry to Cornershop to M.I.A. . . . Even if you’ve heard 'Roadunner' a million times, this book will make it sound newly present and alive."
-- Jon Dolan Rolling Stone, Best Music Books of 2021
"Clover perceptively emphasizes how postwar suburbanization changed the face of American life forever, spreading it out from the density and unease of the city into the kinds of spacious highways Richman celebrates. . . . Clover’s radical politics make him especially sensitive to the ways in which capital and urban planning changed the landscape of America during the postwar boom. In some ways, Clover’s historical analysis is quite sharp and certainly relevant to today’s concerns."
-- Matt Hanson The Smart Set
"Great song, great book. Clover has set the bar high for this new series."
-- Elizabeth Lindau Journal of Popular Music Studies
2021-07-18
A 50-year-old anthem in celebration of rock radio garners a book-length analysis.
In the inaugural title of the publisher’s Singles series, which celebrates the single rather than the album, English professor Clover—also the series editor, along with Emily Lordi—makes his case for the titular Modern Lovers tune. Recorded in 1972 but not released until 1976, “Roadrunner” wasn’t a Top 40 hit, and it was initially unknown outside its Boston market. The group that recorded it had disbanded in 1974, and Jonathan Richman, the songwriter and singer, would take a very different direction with his music in subsequent years. This is by no means the first book devoted to the recording of a single song, but the song in question lacks the cultural reach of, say, “Like a Rolling Stone” or “Strange Fruit”—or “Hallelujah,” the story of which was brilliantly delineated by Alan Light in The Holy or the Broken (2013). Clover is clearly an obsessive writing to and for fellow obsessives, employing some of the jargon and occasional impenetrability of academic writing to commemorate the legacy of “the greatest song of all time, or maybe it is the greatest rock song of all time, or the greatest American rock song of all time, or the greatest American rock song of that era.” The author also explores the development of the interstate highway system, White flight, Watergate, Vietnam, and links to the sonic collages of current pop star M.I.A. “So you have these songs making circular sounds and it turns out they are trying to think about circulation,” writes Clover, “about records on turntables and cars on ring roads and sounds in the transnational flow of culture: the relaying of sonic contagions through the system and around the globe and often returning to where they began but different, mutated.” All this about a song that has an immediacy and exhilaration that hardly require a book to explain it.
Rock criticism invades academia.
