Dispatches From the Kingdom of Outsiders: Writing on Music, Culture and More 1979-2025 - Softcover

Sommer, Tim

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9798999048738

Verlag: Trouser Press Books, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

In the first collection of his essays, outspoken critic Tim Sommer challenges some conventional beliefs about rock and explains how left-of-the-dial music in the '80s turned a generation of awkward loners into a cultural community.

Sommer is a musician, journalist, record producer and radio DJ. He was an on-air news correspondent for MTV and VH1 and later did A&R for Atlantic Records, where he signed, among others, Hootie & the Blowfish.

Dispatches From the Kingdom of Outsiders contains dozens of fervent and often surprising takes on music, culture and politics, offering a powerful and entertaining corrective to the timidity of so much modern music journalism.

From his precocious emergence as a teenaged rock writer, Sommer describes the Zelig-like experiences of his life, mounts controversial arguments about well-known artists, connects music and politics in unexpected ways and reflects on a handful artists whose deaths affected him.

Grouped into seven themed sections, the book covers U2 and R.E.M. to the Beatles and Taylor Swift, Bob Dylan to Frank Sinatra and Bruce Springsteen. It also includes in-depth interviews with Dave Davies of the Kinks and a previously unpublished interview with Mark E. Smith of the Fall.

Sample chapter titles:

• I Was Almost a Temporary Beastie Boy
• Meet the Beatles’ First Left-Handed Bassist
• What Was the First Punk Rock Record?
• Weezer’s cover of Toto's “Africa” Is the Most Repugnant Pop Recording of All Time
• How Kent State Helped Create the Template for American Indie Rock

With its diverse collection of subjects and entertaining opinions, this colorful, rollicking collection of writing will appeal to (and perhaps infuriate) a wide variety of music fans.

Billy Idol: "Tim Sommer goes deep on a whole century of rock and pop culture, from Bowie to Buddy Bolden, Spike Milligan to Taylor Swift, and everything in between. Punk was always a state of mind, as much as a sound or a look, and this book is punk AF."

Thurston Moore, co-founder of Sonic Youth: "It was the pleasure of noise, be it from the margins or from the mainstream, that inspired Tim to pontificate so excitedly. While his “dispatches” are modestly critical and discerning, they are essentially informed by joy, an aspect of shared dialogue utterly welcoming -- and one the world necessitates now more than ever."

Geoff Edgers, national arts reporter, The Washington Post and author of Walk This Way: Run-DMC, Aerosmith, and the Song That Changed American Music Forever: "Sommer is a throwback to when people writing about music wrote whatever they wanted, took shocking takes not to garner social media attention but because they really believed in them, and did not worry about industry repercussions. He's also a little insane. This is a truly original document of the kind of smart, free, joyous writing we so rarely find anywhere today. Tim Sommer writes because he has to, not because he's trying to impress anyone, and his takes -- on the Beatles, Glenn Branca, Kent State and just about anything that pops into his brain -- are refreshingly disinterested in scoring social media points."

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Since debuting as a columnist for Trouser Press magazine when he was 16, Tim Sommer has been a participant in, witness to and catalyst for some of the pivotal moments in music history. He has worked extensively as a musician, journalist, major label creative executive, MTV and VH1 producer and VJ, record producer and club and radio DJ.

As a journalist, Sommer has contributed to the Village Voice, Sounds (UK), New York Daily News, Washington Post, New York Times, Mojo (UK), LA Weekly, The Observer, Rolling Stone, Spin, Rock and Roll Globe and many other publications.

From 1989 to 1992, Sommer was on staff at MTV and VH1 as an on-air news correspondent. For the bulk of the 1990s, he worked as an A&R rep for Atlantic Records. He signed and supervised record production for Hootie & the Blowfish, Duncan Sheik, Michael Crawford, Scott Weiland, Bruce McCulloch, 7 Year Bitch, Melissa Ferrick and King Missile.

In 2022, he published Only Wanna Be With You: The Inside Story of Hootie & the Blowfish.

The author lives in Stamford, CT.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Rock and Roll is our small town. We carry it in our hearts wherever we go.

We recognize that rock and roll is the sound of America’s disenfranchised made electric.

We recognize that rock and roll was created by America’s unwilling and willing immigrants and their children and grandchildren; by the sons and daughters of sharecroppers, tenant farmers and freed slaves; by the sons and daughters of coal miners and hard rocks; by the sons and daughters of the great northern migration and the sons and daughters of the veterans of Johnston's First Mississippi Infantry; by the sons and daughters of Pullman porters and those who grew up under the Third Avenue El; by the sons and daughters of those who played the bent blues on Rampart Street and those who sang celebratory schottisches in dusty west Texas towns. 

Find the names of those who were meant to be excluded from the American dream and you will find the names of those who invented your music, your rock and roll, your country, your pop.

They were in every small town and every city and every place in between: the outsiders, the excluded, who found a forever voice in music, who turned their experience and their suffering into the beat and melody of work and play and who live in every guitar chord played yesterday, today, tomorrow. Do not keep them from your town, because they built your town. They are the bricks and mortar, the heart and tears, of your town.

And in our times, in the cathode ray dust of the last century and the buzz-less ether of this one, we were also the other, the excluded: we were the greasers and the stoners, the geeks and the sullen and brilliant; we were those who were called faggot and dyke and who learned to wear those labels proudly, and we called it rock and roll. We recognize each other because we love rock and roll and how it made us all princes and princesses in the Kingdom of Outsiders.

We recognize that rock and roll not only celebrates our differences, it is also a creation of our differences. It was made by those who sat in the back of the bus because they had to, and those who sat in the back of the bus because they wanted to. It was made by those who had no choice but to be different, and those who were told over and over they were different; and who used rock and roll to find the door to a world that welcomed them, a town of the spirit where they could fly a flag which said, “Freaks, geeks, you are welcome here; those who love noise that is too quiet or too loud, you are welcome here; those who have more questions than answers, you are welcome here; the beautiful refused of high school hallway cliques, you are welcome here: I am rock and roll, I am inclusive, I welcome you, Skynyrd fan and Bauhaus fan alike, you are home.”

We found our small town under that flag. It was a land scattered with pretty boys and handsome girls, the strange who seemed instantly familiar, those within whom we finally recognized ourselves, who sang in a language which we instantly recognized. We carry the freedom of that small town with us, wherever we go.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Trouser Press Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2026
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 13: 9798999048738
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 340
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland