Books, Arts & Manners: Dionysus Superstar

The Triumph of Vulgarity: Rock Music in the Mirror of Romanticism, by Robert Pattison (Oxford, 280 pp., $19.95)

This is the most brilliant study yet written of the modern phenomenon of rock music, although Robert Pattison attempts at the end of his book to avoid the logic of his own totally convincing analysis of what makes rock the extremely dangerous cultural force it is. But despite Pattison’s intentions, this book will provide the critics of rock music with their most serious intellectual ammunition to date in the hugely ineffective war against rock that has until now been waged mainly by such religious fundamentalists as Jimmy Swaggart.

JW

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John Wooten

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The Triumph of Vulgarity: Rock Music in the Mirror of Romanticism, by Robert Pattison (Oxford, 280 pp., $19.95)

This is the most brilliant study yet written of the modern phenomenon of rock music, although Robert Pattison attempts at the end of his book to avoid the logic of his own totally convincing analysis of what makes rock the extremely dangerous cultural force it is. But despite Pattison’s intentions, this book will provide the critics of rock music with their most serious intellectual ammunition to date in the hugely ineffective war against rock that has until now been waged mainly by such religious fundamentalists as Jimmy Swaggart.