PANTHEON

Monday, April 28, 2025

RIP Joshua Clover

I was shocked and saddened to learn of the death of Joshua Clover.

I didn't know Joshua well but always enjoyed our encounters. Most of these occurred via the phone during a year when I worked at Spin mainly editing the albums section, to which Clover contributed a monthly column. My memory is hazy but I believe that the idea was through this column Spin would dramatically expand the number of things covered in the reviews section - he would write about a huge number of albums - 12, 15, 20? - in what added up to less than the amount of words that a single album would get if it was that month's lead review. A rather labor-intensive gig, then, as a listening load.... but Joshua relished it - the compression required (just a few lines per record), the challenge of squeezing in polemical barbs and jokes, the opportunity to reflect his wide taste and interests..

At that point Joshua wrote for Spin and Village Voice under the name Jane Dark. Perhaps the female alter-ego was meant to express his identification with teengirl taste. He was in fact an early poptimist. (Early for America - in the UK we had anti-rockist provocateurs back in the early Eighties). A few years later he started the blog jane dark's sugarhigh! - the name again making a pro-pop statement.

From the spiky wit of the reviews and blogposts, and from his playful demeanor, I took Joshua to be a sort of dandy of the mind (if not necessarily appearance). So it was a surprise to learn later that he was a Marxist - a stringent one too, deeply steeped in economy theory - and a committed and courageous activist.

I did wonder how the anti-corporate politics correlated with his preference for the products of the entertainment conglomerates over the indie-alternative - I guess maybe the thinking was that the music of the masses would always be more vital than the milquetoast fare favored by bourgeois-bohemia, and also have greater latent political content. Stuff you could read, and where the sales and culture-wide impact ratified the significance read into it.

As a result of these parallel passions, Clover's publications include a monograph on "Roadrunner" by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers and 1989: Bob Dylan Didn't Have This To Sing About, a fascinating book about pop music and the so-called "end of history", but also a book for Verso about rioting as political praxis.

On top of - in parallel to - all of that, Clover was a celebrated poet, winner of acclaim and awards.

And a professor at UC Davis's Department of English.

Here is a tribute to Joshua Clover by Carl Wilson.

And here at Verso is another completely different tribute from one of JC's Marxist comrades.

And at The Nation, an obituary from poet Juliana Spahr, about the Many Lives of Joshua Clover, in which it is revealed that he was connoisseur of gummy candies - which fits the Sugar High concept.

Here's a video where Joshua talks about "Roadrunner" with Eric Weisbard and Elizabeth Nelson.

The conversation continues with Nelson here

And below is something rather extraordinary, a relic of the days when Twitter was a creative, freeform space: the tale, told at enormous length and unsparing detail, entirely through tweets, of the strange circumstances in which Joshua quit his job at Spin. The events told take place in September 2001; the telling is happening in 2015.

#HowIQuitSpin 1. I moved to France on the day GWB was inaugurated. Email was a little squiggly in 2001 but good enough.