PANTHEON: 2025

Monday, May 19, 2025

Lester Bangs on 1981 and the state of rock

As mentioned by Nick S in comments to the Meatloaf Manifesto, here is Lester Bangs's "protest ballot" for the Village Voice's 1981 Pazz and Jop poll of America's critics. Plus a satirical anticipation of 1982's best records....

As Nick notes, for someone supposedly utterly alienated from current music (a soul-less wasteland) he has no trouble listing a bunch of favorite records from the year

His number 1 album is a great lost post-No Wave record, very unusual sound.

LESTER BANGS’S BALLOT

Because of the realities of the situation and a simple respect for music itself I am compelled to state in response to your poll that 1981 was in my view such a dismal year that I cannot in good conscience vote for more than two or three albums, much less 10. As you know, I always vote in these things strictly on the basis of how much I actually listen to the record, as opposed to how “significant” it might be. What I did this year was what almost everybody else, certainly including critics, did: listened to old music, when I listened at all. Because almost all current music is worthless. Very simply, it has no soul. It is fraudulent, and so are the mechanisms which perpetuate the lie that anybody else finds it vital enough to do more than consume and file or “collect” (be the first on your block). New Wave has terminated in thudding hollow xeroxes of poses that aren’t even annoying anymore. Rap is nothing, or not enough. Jazz does not exist as a musical form with anything new to say. And the rest of rock is recycling various formuli forever. I don’t know what I am going to write about — music is the only thing in the world I really care about — but I simply cannot pretend to find anything compelling in the choice between pap and mud. I haven’t made this decision without some soul-searching, but I feel that I can best serve the purposes for which I became a music critic in the first place by filing a protest ballot, with the following exceptions:

ALBUMS: 1. Jody Harris & Robert Quine: Escape (Infidelity) 30; 2. Richard Hell & the Voidoids: the album Richard recorded last spring and never got around to putting out. 20; 3. The Clash: Sandinista! (Epic) 10; 4. Public Image Ltd: Flowers of Romance (Warner Bros.) 5; 5. Stevie Nicks: Bella Donna (Modern) 5.

SINGLES: 1. Rolling Stones: “Start Me Up” (Rolling Stones); 2. Ramones: “We Want the Airwaves” (Sire); 3. Hank Williams Jr.: “All My Rowdy Friends (Have Settled Down)” (Elektra); 4. Roseanne Cash: “Seven Year Ache” (Columbia)

EPs: 1. A Taste of DNA (American Clave).

LOCAL BANDS: 1. DNA; 2. The Bloods; 3. Robert Quine.

P.S. Perhaps it will help to explain if I list the other albums that would have been in the running for my “Top 10”: Stones, Iggy’s Party, and Miles Davis, which in various ways manifested varying degrees of contempt for their audience so palpable they were ultimately unplayable; Ramones’ Pleasant Dreams and the Byrne-Eno album, which just didn’t work somehow; and John Lee Hooker’s Live Alone Volume 1, which is really all old stuff anyway.

Pazz & Jop Critics’ Poll Ballot 1981

LESTER BANGS: ALBUMS: 1. Jody Harris/Robert Quine: Escape (Infidelity)30; 2. “Velvet Underground 1966” (bootleg) 20; 3. Richard Hell & the Voidoids: Richard Hell & the Voidoids Now (Richard recorded it last spring but never got around to releasing it) 15; 4. The Clash: Sandinista (Epic) 5; 5. Public Image Ltd: Flowers of Romance (Warner Bros.) 5; 6. The Mekons (Red Rhino import) 5; 7. Stevie Nicks: Bella Donna (Modern) 5; 8. John Lee Hooker: Live Alone Vol. 1 (Labor) 5; 9. Ramones: Pleasant Dreams (Sire) 5; 10. Iggy Pop: Party (Arista) 5.

SINGLES: 1. Rolling Stones: “Start Me Up” (Rolling Stones); 2. Joy Division: “Atmosphere” (Factory 12-inch); 3. The Mekons: “Snow” (Red Rhino import); 4. Hank Williams Jr.: “All My Rowdy Friends (Have Settled Down)” (Elektra); 5. Roseanne Cash: “Seven Year Ache” (Columbia); 6. Ramones: “We Want the Airwaves” (Sire); 7. Blondie: “Rapture” (Chrysalis); 8. Afrika Bombaataa: “Zulu Nation Throwdown” (Paul Winley 12-inch); 9. That Charlie Daniels single that goes “blah blah water, she’s the devil’s daughter, she’s hard and she’s cold and she’s mean, blah blah blah, blah blah to wash away New Orleans”; 10. Richard Lloyd: “Get Off My Cloud” (Ice House).

EPS: 1. DNA: “A Taste of DNA” (American Clave); 2. The Angry Samoans: “Inside My Brain” (Bad Trip); 3. Dead Kennedys: “In God We Trust, Inc.” (Alternative Tentacles).

LOCAL BANDS: 1. DNA; 2. The Bloods; 3. The Angry Samoans.

and

FOLK AND ROCK

ALBUMS I LIKED THIS YEAR

By L. Bangs

1. Quine & Harris: Escape (Infidelity) 30; 2. The Clash: Sandinista (CBS) 10; 3. Public Image Ltd.: What the Hell’s the Name of that Fucker? (Warners) 5; 4. Beck Bogert & Appice (Epic) 5; 5. Beck Bogert & Appice Live (Japanese Epic) 5; 6. Grateful Dead: Dead Set (Artesia) 2; 7. Richard Hell & the Voidoids: Second Album Richard Never Got Around to Titling or Releasing 2; 8. Stevie Nix: Rat Poison (Chump Change) 2; 9. Rolling Stones: What’s in the Can, Charlie? (Mango) 2; 10. Muammar Qaddafi: Live on Hee Haw (Shelby Singleton) 2.

and

Just to save some time, here’s NEXT YEAR’S TOP 10

1. Robert Quine Orchestra: I Heard Her Call My Name Symphony (Columbia); 2. DNA Live at Madison Square Garden (Prestige); Richard Hell Sings the R. Dean Taylor Songbook (Tamla); 4. Emerson, Lake & Palmer: Heard Ya Missed Us, Well We’re Back (Factory); 5. The Clash: Rappin’ with Bert ’n’ Big Bird (Guest Artist: Oscar the Grouch) (Sesame); 6. Ramones: 14,000,000 Records (Epic); 7. Sue Saad and the Next with Robert Fripp: Jiggle Themes from Prime Time (Verve); 8. Lichtensteiner Polka Band: Hamtramck Oi Gassers (WEA); 9. Brian Eno: 24 New Songs with Bridges & Everything! (Egregious 2-album set); 10. Miles Davis: Rated X (Alternate Take) (Columbia).

Wednesday, May 14, 2025

Lester Bangs - Meat Loaf: A Political Manifesto of Sorts - Hit Parader - January 1979

Not sure if this counts as wrongfooted or rightfooted by history (the dissage of Wire is certainly wrongfooted - I assume the lifeless record he heard was Chairs Missing?) but an enjoyable if over-exuberant contrarian take on the Bat Out Of Hell multiplatinum-shipper, with named-and-shamed swipes (playful) at major rock critics of the time. Sort of a proto-Chuck Eddy move. (The Lisa referenced in the text must be Lisa Robinson, his editor?)

Meat Loaf Nation

Hit Parader
January 1979

Meat Loaf - Why Him?

I Would Buy A Used Car From Meat Loaf -
A Political Manifesto Of Sorts by Lester Bangs

Robert Christgau, whom not a man nor woman here among us would dare challenge for his throne as Dean Of American Rock Critics (Yeah, but what about the Dean of Senegalese Rock Critics, huh?) (Lisa, I beg your pardon, you do seem to get around a lot, perhaps you after all want to contest Mr. Christgau for the crown 'n' scepter or whatever the hell it is deans tote around with them? "No thanks. I have to go interview Jerri Hall...why don't you and Billy Altman slug it out with him, Lester?" Okay, if you'll change the name of this magazine from Hit Parader to Incest - come to think of it, we'd probably sell more copies of it that way, specially if we put the Bee Gees on the cover into the bargain), recently said to me these exact words: "I'm proud that the Village Voice 'Riffs" section," which Big Bob edits, "is the last bastion of pretentious rock criticism."

We were having two beers and two hamburgers at the time. And speaking of time (oh, yeah; that stuff), in the time between these thoughts and words turn turn turning till everybody's been burned one must in the face of all artificial energy ask if this is placing too great a burden on Bob's shoulders. I think so, don't you? Sure. (God, I feel like Mr. Rogers, writing in this lousy magazine.) Okay, so let's, uh, let's...hey let's SEIZE THE MOTHAHUMPIN TIME & DAM WELL DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT? I WANNA KNOW, ARE YOU PART OF THE SOLUTION OR PART OF THE PROBLEM? IT ONLY TAKES FIVE SECONDS TO DECIDE YOUR PURPOSE HERE ON THE PLANET? (To steal Super Sneaky Squirtin' Sticks c. WHAM-O Inc., from Kay-Mart, that's why.) SO I WANNA KNOW ARE YOU READY FOR THE NIGHT TRAIN? READY READY READY READY and furthermore GONE GONE GONE GONE GONE? I GOT MAH EYES WIDE OPEN!

Well, then, good then - we will hereinafter endeavor to make Hit Parader the most pretentious rock mag around: critics whom no one has ever heard of or certainly would not recognize on the street squabbling interminably over nothing like whether say Kaya or Darkness at the Edge of Town is (as sex critic A) "one of the most masterful manifestations of a fundamental change in the dental charts of rock occurring during this vernal equinox" or (according to Brew 102) "a bucket of shit."

Yeah! What fun all you readers'll have, watching us rock critics here every month, picking the onions out of each others' teeth! So, herewith and with no little pomp I fire the first salvo: MEATLOF! (oops, spelled it wrong) Meat Loaf is (sic) a genius. I'm listening to his first album through headphones right now as I write this, and you can see from what rubbish you already read how this record has inspired me. I love it. Wow, here comes the Delaney & Bonnie section! Hey, where'd they get those black chicks (hope I'm not being presumptuous calling 'em that) chanting "Shop shop shoo" just at the right time! Hey hey HEY! Wodda recud! Whooops, what's that, I smell smoke, oh it's a synthesizer and what sounds like a carnival barker imitating Phil Rizzuto - holy cow indeed! This record is like a one-way ticket to Coney Island, if not that place where they sent Pinocchio and the other little fools to eat cotton candy till dey come a crop a vomit.

Oh my god, you're not gonna believe this, but right at this very moment (well, not while you're reading it, but while I'm writing it; guess we must make allowances for the yawns of Father Time who has seen ALL of 'em come and go, besides which the Meat Loaf circus is probably playing somewhere, in some stucco-armored suburban bedroom way down Encino way even as your eyes scan these codwallopings, in fact a record as great and with such universal appeal as Bat Out Of Hell, why hell I bet it's somewhere lots of places in fact, every second of your waking day, while you're taking a crap, while you're stuck in traffic, while you're wondering if she's gonna get weird when you say "Wanna come up to my place for a while?", while you're whiling away the endless existential hours making love, a physical juxtaposition mit attendant rotational/gravitational differentials which Mr. Loaf himself is not ashamed to say he is totally in favor of, as did Sky Saxon before him - face it, you're never gonna escape from this elpee slab of gorgonzola) Mr. Loaf and his lady are getting ready to, uh, wait a second, click, dit dit dit dit dit bzz, click, brrring, “Robinson Amusements incorporated.”

“Hello, is Lisa there?” “Who is calling, please?” “Halston.” “Okay, just hold on a second, sir.” “…Daaa-ling…!” “Lissen Lisa, this is Lester, I have to know whether in the process of describing this Meat Loaf fellow you saddled me with, I can refer to or describe the sights or sounds of implied effluvia of a man and woman having sexual intercourse?” “Well, Lester, you know Hit Parader’s policy on that word…!” “Lisa, please, I don’t even use it in my daily speech at Washington Square Park! I just want to know if I can describe a couple of heterosexual adults…uh, well, you know…”

“Is it absolutely necessary to the piece?” “It’s on the record.” “Hmmm. Well, I guess if we can print makeup tips we can get by with this. Just try to curb your Meltzerisms and not say anything bad about people like Clive or Ahmet Ertegun, okay? You know you’ve been a very bad boy lately, don’t shape up and mama gon’ spank!” “Yeah, I know, you’re right Lisa, it’s okay, Mr. Loaf’s on Epic and I forgot the name of their president, okay, yeah, great, thanx, like I said, whew!” - yes my friends as I was saying, should you happen to ply up the provender necessary unto purchase of this Meat Loaf album, which is the only one out so far so you can’t get too confused, then you and your lady friend too if you’re so minded can apprehend the luxuriant privilege of hearing a man and a woman (Mr. Loaf and his Femme de soir, sans doute) MAKING LOVE as all the broken umbrellas are shipped in dark slitlid cattlecars like fallen silos off to cherbourg death camps.

Now, here’s where the political part comes in: just because Mr. Loaf is in favor of heterosexual intercourse, apparently, all the gangly four-eyes spindly-legged hunchbacked sissifixated rock critics have decided that he stinks! Never mind that American boys and girls, or American citizens with money of whatever wherever, ran out by the hundreds of thousands to buy this mothahumpin album - these self-appointed expert hotshot rock critics have all decided that Mr. Loaf is just a sham if not a scam if not both.

Now, I ask you, in the light of that, how could they possibly have the gall to think they’d gleaned enough of your trust to get you to go out and buy the Sex Pistols or whichever foulmouthed hyped-up bit of regurgitated Dylan dog vomit they’re pumping up this week?! Forget it! Robert Christgau made Bat Out Of Hell his “Must to Avoid” in the Dean of American Consumer Guides the same month he made an album by an English group called Wire “Pick Hit.” Pretty funny, a dean picking hits in the first place, Clark Kerr abacussing out Screamin’ Jay Hawkin’s in the 7 A.M. light. But I heard that album by Wire, that “Pick Hit.” It sucks.

It’s the deadest record, possibly, that I have ever been privy to in my life to date. Meanwhile, I’m sitting here with Meat Loaf blasting through my headphones, taking the words right out of my mouth, thanks a lot you fat sonofabitch, but no, that’s just kvetching between friends, or should I say stars and their functionaries, you all know if you seen say My Man Godfrey what that’s about, and is not Meat Loaf a metaphor for the Man Godfrey in us all, I ask you? Though starbrite now, has he not so obviously, as have we not each, been a Godfrey at some point in his poor pathetic life? Yes. This man has been thru the tongs and pangs and backalleyes of hell.

He’s PAID HIS DUES BUSTER, so you better just SHUT UP whatever you were gonna say agin him. Like f’rinstance this other rock critic Billy Altman, who also writes for rock magazines, well he happens not to like the Meat Loaf album any better’n Mr. Xgau, in fact he described it to me thus: “A real sucker punch. Meat Loaf’s just a patsy for Jim Steinman and who’s really getting taken with all this let’s - fill - the - cars - and - girls - operatic - Springsteen - gap business is the poor suckers that end up buying a record like that piece of crud.”

So, you hear that, that’s what that guy thinks of you, all you Meat Loaf fans, he thinks you’re so stupid he can’t even be bothered just calling you jerks, he’s gotta condescend to you “poor suckers.”

Christ, and people wonder why rock critics are looked upon by the populace gen’ral as below the gnat. Hey, wait a second! That means he must think the same thing of me, since I like the Meat Loaf album too! All right, that’s it - jeeze, how appropriate that just as I am writing this Meat Loaf is singing, “All Revved Up With No Place To Go,” now why can’t these stupid rock critics see that just like Dylan in the Sixties he, Meat Loaf, the Big M, defines for we, the people of the Meat Loaf Nation, exactly what we are thinking and what we should do about it at any given moment.

Sure am glad there’s always some guy like that around. Meat Loaf is the Dylan of the Seventies, the real peoples’ populist Rocky type Dylan, not some twit like Elvis Costello. Well, look - you’re pissed off, I’m pissed off. Are we just gonna let these pea-brains keep on squatting round our headphones, muttering how we really should be listening to the latest Punkenwald monstrosity instead of real music?

Hell no! I, as a disaffected, possibly disbarred rock critic, want to give up my media soapbox, let Dave Marsh have it so he can push more Bruce Springsteen albums about the hotrod American adolescence he (Dave) never had. Let me just mellow down easy ‘mong the people, my people, the only people not covered in People magazine, and that’s because we’re real people, the people of Meat Loaf Nation, who may well outnumber you establishment media pigs who don’t wanna think there should be anymore hit singles from this album, and as we gather like Rastas smoking our doobies and plotting our revenge, you may hear our battle cry: “WE’RE MAD AS HELL AND WE’RE NOT GONNA TAKE IT ANYMORE!” Either that or “THANK GOD IT’S FRIDAY!”

"The inaugural Meat Loaf album" - bombastic, moi?

A clever sod, Jim Steinman - seldom has cleverness been so misapplied (sez the Wire-loving four-eyed rockcrit)

Me on the Steinman Universe

Snippets from his interviews:

Steinman: When I was writing the record, I'd say my major influences were the key things I'd grown up with - Wagner, The Who and Alfred Hitchcock movies. Those songs are cinematic. But producers are a bit like critics. I'm sure you'll recall that great line that Frank Zappa came up with: 'Rock critics are people who can't write, writing about people who can't talk for people who can't read.' It's hard to generalize but I've read some brilliant writing about rock 'n roll and I've also read Dave Marsh of Rolling Stone who I think is a complete fool. I'm astounded that he has the power that he possesses on that platform. He regularly reaches the heights of lunacy. His review of the latest Patti Smith album was the worst piece of rock 'n roll writing I've ever read.

Meat Loaf: Jim has got the rock 'n roll recipe pinned down to six key ingredients. He views it like a menu and we've gone all the way with it. He's the Julia Child of rock 'n roll.

Steinman: Well, it's just that the more I thought about it, the more I realized that there are really only six essentials, beyond the obvious requirements of melody rhythm and lyrics. I think the art of creating great rock 'n roll comes down to

1) fever

2) fantasy

3) romance

4) violence

5) rebellion and

6) fun.

It's how these six things are interplayed that makes a record magnificent. To me the greatest rock 'n roll is both romantically violent and violently romantic. It's not one or the other. It's just that the romance should be desperate. Be My Baby is desperately violent - it's a cry of desperation. Whereas the Sex Pistols are transparent.

Q. Let's rap about the future of rock 'n roll in general.

Steinman: I don't think that records have begun to scratch the surface of what they can do. The more Fleetwood Mac's there are, putting out albums of ten short and cute little cuts, the more it hurts music in general. I worry about the effects of formats and such in the long term. Rock 'n roll and TV are the two most powerful art forms the world has ever seen, yet they are probably the two most misused mediums. I mean, think of what TV could do....

Jim Steinman: I grew up studying classical music and even before I heard any other kind of music, I'd been exposed to all sorts of classical things. The style I was most heavily drawn to was German romantic music, especially opera. When I was 14, I became an incredible Wagner freak. And my other favorite kind of music was Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard. I used to listen to Wagner and rock back to back.

I'd listen to an entire Wagner opera and be totally paralyzed by it - I literally wouldn't move an inch because I was afraid I might upset something. I was somewhat insane in those days. So I'd be virtually paralyzed there listening to these five-hour operas in complete form. Then when it was over I'd sit in awe for an hour or so and then I'd put on Little Richard and it would be a magnificent combination. The more I listened, the more I was convinced that Wagner and Little Richard came from the same place. Even though Wagner elevated me to a point that Little Richard couldn't achieve. Little Richard wasn't so much elevation as revitalization.

The thing is that they both amplified human beings. The Wagner material was about God and Little Richard sounded like God. It made me realize that you don't have to remain a human being - that one of the great uses of art (which I'd only heard talked about as some valuable cultural asset that meant nothing to me) is that it was like taking a pill and you were no longer just a human being. That's how I perceived the situation when I was 14 anyway. I just never thought of rock 'n roll and classical music all that differently - to me they were essentially the same thing.

Meat Loaf: Jim has got this old book of reviews of Wagner operas, and they all panned the hell out of Wagner's work. The critics hated it.

Steinman: Yeah if you take out the names, the original reviews of Wagner's operas read exactly like rock 'n roll reviews. Wagner's arch enemy - who was like Dave Marsh of Rolling Stone to my way of thinking - was a guy named Hanslick who wrote for a German paper equivalent to the New York Times in America. His reviews were the most vicious slurs on the greatest operas ever written.

When Wagner premiered his opera Tristan and Isolde, Hanslick wrote that it was 'a barbaric savage assault on the ears.' He said it was 'nothing but noise.' He noted that the next day he felt sick and his ears were still ringing from 'the primitive, dissonant cacophony.' It was, he said, 'sexually lewd and designed to arouse people into a frenzy.' It just went on and on. And it's still the same nowadays. It just shows that there's really nothing new under the sun.

Meat Loaf: The Rite Of Spring by Stravinsky actually caused a riot, didn't it?

Steinman: Yes, and that's one of my favorite things in history. When The Rite Of Spring was performed, in Paris in 1913, it caused one of the major riots in history. The entire audience tore the Paris Opera House apart and it had to be rebuilt. Police were called in, three people were killed, it was amazing. I remember discovering the story behind it when I was 14 and I thought, 'what a magnificent power.' If a work of music could actually cause people to riot, that is astonishing. It's destructive but it's also magnificent. So I always think of that as one of the great moments in history.

Stravinsky was savagely attacked by the media. They wanted to deport him because he wrote dissonant music. They couldn't believe that someone would put those particular ten notes together. They considered it sacrilege. Now those same chords that Stravinsky put together are used in every Starsky and Hutch episode on TV. They've been totally assimilated into movie music and everything.

So that's how I became aware of the incredible power of sound, as well as its function as an art form. So I was fascinated by Wagner and Little Richard, and later in the early 60's, by the production techniques of Phil Spector. There was a four year period during which I lost interest in rock 'n roll but the obsession returned through the records Phil Spector made with the Ronettes. The first time I heard Be My Baby I had chills. It's still basically unexplainable to me.

Steinman: I don't think that our album is over-produced at all. But even Todd Rundgren, our producer, felt it would be viewed as such by some critics. Todd was very reluctant to do a lot of the things we wanted to try. He said at the beginning his job was to get our vision onto the record and he really did succeed in doing that. I suspect that he probably disagreed with about 60% of it, but he brilliantly captured it, nonetheless.

Anyway, anyone who thinks the album is over-produced should hear what I had to leave out. For instance, in Bat Out Of Hell (the title track) I had to delete two of my favorite things. In the soft section, I wanted to have a boy's choir. I argued with Todd about it and he wanted to do it with the existing vocal backup section and then speed up the tape and use other technical tricks to get the boy's choir sound. I said that we needed a real boy's choir but he insisted. But it didn't work out so we weren't able to use it. You see, I'd heard this symphony by Mahler and I really wanted a boy's choir. There's nothing more beautiful than the sound of 20 boy sopranos singing.

I also wanted a choir in the motorcycle section of Bat Out Of Hell. Just like in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, they used a choir sounding like it was singing whole clusters of notes. I wanted to use an entire orchestra, and I wanted to use them viciously. Procol Harum have done some of the best things in that vein in the past. Giving an orchestra special parts to play rather than simply supplementing the band.

"I awoke about three a.m. on a floor littered with unconscious bodies in a hotel above Sunset Strip. It was at a time when the deal with Warner's was about to fall through. Earlier in the day, Meat had picked up these two identical twins - human surfboards with hair - and bought them back to the hotel. They cooked this huge duck in white wine sauce for dinner and when I woke up, the room was fairly dripping with it.

"I was looking out at the vista of violence that is L.A. - except out there they call it romantic violence - thinking about how I'd like to wipe away the stagnate dross of Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles with a single stroke. Then I saw this chemical fire in the distance. It was eerie - a blue and red haze everywhere. I felt like I was trapped in a jukebox. About ten minutes later all the smoke was absorbed into the valley and the network of city lights molted into electrical strings and veins. I thought: 'L.A. is a total junkie, the rouge on a scar. And Fleetwood Mac is the rouge.'

"Then Sam, the only other conscious person in the room, said he'd like to levitate. I said, 'Just stay where you are, because everybody else is sinking.' Suddenly the image dawned as a powerful metaphor for rock & roll: when everybody else is sinking and going the way of L.A. music, when fever and passion become an air-conditioned thrill and fantasies become cluttered by tax-returns, rock & roll dreams come through."

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.