ABSTRACT
This chapter makes a case for approaching rock music memoir as a viable form of political critique. It focuses on two recent examples, Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run (2016) and Chrissie Hynde’s Reckless: My Life as a Pretender (2016, paperback), as alternate contributions to potentially transformative counter discourses and practices, arguing that their particular versions of music life writing serve as vital—if unorthodox, conflicted, and compromised—instantiations of reparative politics. The chapter approaches both texts as provocative hybrids of several autobiography subgenres: celebrity music memoir; “rock ‘n’ recovery” disability narratives, here respectively encompassing mental illness and drug use; and working-class/deindustrialization life writing.
