American Rock Trip

Another book about rock? Worse: a book about rock museums, and by capillarity about museums of blues, soul and country music. Americans don't have Lascaux caves or a Sistine Chapel, but in the middle of the 20th century they invented rock'n'roll, and in recent years they've developed their own special art: displaying their relics in glass cases. However little rock'n'roll it may be, the museum arsenal today represents the ultimate stage in the process of sacralizing popular mythologies. Gone is a certain European-style museum tradition: in the land of rock'n'roll, where Elvis Presley is the King, we confer the status of national treasure on a microphone stand, a pair of cowboy boots or a hairbrush. This all-out patrimonialization may be akin to "a neurotic reaction to the emptiness of memories" (Umberto Eco) - in any case, it reveals the place that this music has taken in everyone's life. American Rock Trip is the result of a genuine field survey conducted by an author who himself works in the world's largest museum (the Louvre). 12,000 kilometers of foot-to-the-floor, 6-week journey to visit some fifty places and discover museums, pop cabinets of curiosities and other local singularities: from the shed where Muddy Waters grew up to Robert Johnson's tombstones, Britney Spears' bedroom, Jerry Lee Lewis' hell, Daft Punk's luminescent jumpsuits, Dolly Parton's butt firming machine, Jimi Hendrix's drawings, Michael Jackson's monkey, the bunker of the world's biggest ElvisPresley fan, the "Louvre of rock'n'roll" in Cleveland - and so on. .. American Rock Trip opens with a map of the route taken and a list of places visited with their contact details (which also makes the book a practical guide for tourists), then the book is divided into thirty-three short chapters that combine descriptions of the places visited, analyses of their symbolic workings, fan impressions, testimonials from stars, quotes from specialists and insights from contemporary artists. ... with a cast of colorful characters met along the way in Seattle, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Chicago, Detroit, New York, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee and Texas. Each chapter is illustrated, scrapbook-style, with photographs taken in situ - and the cover comes in three versions, paying homage to three sacred monsters of American pop. By setting its sights on these museums of a new kind, American Rock Trip captures the universal, irrational attachment that governs the relationship between musicians and audiences. In short: rock as you've never read it before.

Second-hand book in very good condition (language : french)

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