ABSTRACT
If rock weren’t widely believed to be dead, it’s possible we’d be completely at a loss as to how to talk about it. Or rather, not how to talk about it but, specifically, how to write about it: as in painting, still lifes are easier for most of us than capturing a live subject, and rock & roll would be a lot easier to write about if it would just hold still. For rather different reasons, as we’ll explore, both popular rock writers and journalists, on the one hand, and scholars writing about rock, on the other, share the same proclivity to declare rock dead as a doornail. In both outlets, the popular and the scholarly, the death of rock is the story of rock: it’s rock writing’s enabling, foundational myth.
