Ink on the Tracks - by Adrian Grafe & Andrew McKeown (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Exploring a diverse range of formats, this book identifies and prioritizes writing forms often excluded from the categorization of rock music writing. The scope of the book goes beyond rock journalism in order to take in many other forms of expression that can also be considered "writing," such as album notes, gig reviews, rock biopics, and concert/tour programs and gives equal consideration to commercial and critical writing and fiction, memoir, and fantasy writing. Vitally, the volume places rock and roll writing within a wider cultural frame often overlooked by studies of traditional white male-led music journalism"--

Book Synopsis

This book embraces the multiplicity of forms of writing inspired by rock and roll.

Exploring a diverse range of formats including rock autobiography and gender, race and class in American rock journalism, rock obituaries, rock literature and spirituality, rock writing and promotion/packaging, and more, this book identifies and prioritizes writing forms often excluded from the categorization of rock music writing. Vitally, the volume places rock and roll writing within a wider cultural frame often overlooked by studies of traditional white male-led music journalism.

Review Quotes

"A remarkably wide-ranging collection of essays that stresses the extraordinary power of Rock and Roll to generate first-rate criticism and commentary. The essays are impressively eclectic, touching everything from the philosophy of Adorno to the poetics of liner notes." --Timothy Hampton, author of Bob Dylan, How the Songs Work

"You may be drawn to particular entries in Rock and Roll Writing's extraordinary range of topics and approaches, and you should stay for this entire exemplary collection. Throughout the entire anthology, whether a discussion of Patti Smith's elegiac writings, a challenge to Adorno's disparagement of popular music, a deep and informed look at the Grateful Dead's digital life - it's truly impossible to do justice to the collection's diversity - Rock and Roll Writing proves that intellectual seriousness can inspire your relationship with the music you love." --Nina Goss, editor of Tearing the World Apart: Bob Dylan and the 21st Century (2017) and Dylan at Play (2011)

"A stellar exploration of the multifarious connections between rock music and the written word, Rock and Roll Writing examines classic and more unexpected formats, offering fresh perspectives on crucial, contemporary issues." --Claude Chastagner, Professor of American Popular Culture, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France

"Editors McKeown and Grafe have produced a vigorous rock concert of a book, each essay a hit in its own way. This well-researched and lively volume enables readers, whether scholars or aficionados, to tune in to the peculiarly enlightening heterogeneity of writing about Rock and Roll." --Emily Taylor Merriman, Associate Director of the Writing Center, Amherst College, USA

About the Author

Andrew McKeown is Senior lecturer in English at the University of Poitiers, France. He has made several contributions to scholarly works on poetry and popular music. He co-edited and contributed to Edward Thomas: Roads from Arras (2018) and 21st-Century Dylan: Late and Timely (Bloomsbury, 2021). He has also published poetry, You What? (2017) and fiction, Spurts (2022).

Adrian Grafe is Professor of English at Université d'Artois, France. He has published widely on the connections between popular music and literature and written for TLS, Essays in Criticism and The Spectator. He co-edited and contributed to 21st-Century Dylan: Late and Timely (Bloomsbury, 2021). His novel The Ravens of Vienna was published in 2022.