Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)This is an important book, which is not to say it's a great book. When intellectual historians look back to that strange time when cultural studies was trendy in the late 80s and early 90s, this might be the one book they cite as evidence that cultural studies raised very important questions but gave us intellectually obtuse answers. The questions that Grossberg poses are definitely significant, and more so today--the rise of the right-wing as "popular conservatism," the condition of postmodernity and its simulated depthlessness, the death of rock music, the waning of affect and ironic cynicism among young people,, etc. But his prose is notorious for its obfuscations, its fetishism of French theory (especially the dadaist Marxism of Henri Lefebvre and the incomprehensible Deleuze and Guattari), and the fact that Grossberg built his career writing about music and youth culture but never quoted a lyric or talked at length about a particular band. It's still a worthwhile read for lefty intellectuals and if anything I think too many have dismissed Grossberg's work on the basis of its cult stud/pomo pretensions. But beware the lines of flight and deterretorialization.
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Consider this paradox: for many people, rock is dead, crushed by the weight of its own success and popularity, little more than of mainstream commercial entertainment. But for many others, especially among the new conservative Right, rock poses a greater threat now than ever before. What is it about rock that makes it so important in contemporary political struggles? Bringing together cultural, political and economic analyses, Lawrence Grossberg offers an original and bold interpretation of the contemporary politics of both rock and popular culture. We Gotta Get Out of This Place explores four histories: the changing role of rock in everyday life; the emergence of an affective and popular conservatism; the crisis of contemporary capitalism; and the apparent inability of the Left to respond to these changes. These critical developments are bound together by their concern with postmodernity, understood as both a structure of everyday life and as a sensibility of popular culture. Everyone wants to get out of this place, but only the Right seems to have found a way to benefit from where we are.
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