Popular Music Autobiography

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.

Auteur

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).

Contenu

Introduction: Generation Audio-Biography

1. Disenabling Fame: Rock 'n' Recovery Autobiographies and Disability Narrative
2. "A Cellarful of Boys": The Swinging Sixties, Gay Managers, and the Other Beatle
3. Performative Identity: Cosey Fanni Tutti, Brett Anderson, Moby
4. Performative Identity: Patti Smith, David Wojnarowicz
5. The Invention of Bob Dylan and the Archival Autograph
   Conclusion
   Acknowledgments
   **Works Cited
   Index