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 place-the American era that rock & roll signifies-that becomes a story about love and the modern world.
Industry Reviews
"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 *
