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Rock of Pages

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What to expect

Bloomsbury presents Rock of Pages by Jesse Kavadlo, read by Christopher Ragland.

Rock of Pages provides contexts and close readings of 1980s heavy metal with forty years of hindsight, drawing upon analytical frameworks usually associated with literature and literary studies.

Based on decades of work as a professor of literature and as a musician, Jesse Kavadlo analyzes the ways in which 1980s heavy metal aligns with and develops many of the themes prevalent in the canon of literature. In doing so, the book examines some of the contexts of 1980s heavy metal, including Cold War, the rise of MTV, and the formation of the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) and subsequent congressional hearings.

Rock of Pages takes the PMRC’s own objections to heavy metal and uses them as titles and topics to analyze the intersections between heavy metal and literature: representations of violence, but the connected concerns about justice; images of substance abuse, and the interrelated issues of obsession, madness, suicidal ideation; sex and love, with, concomitantly, representations of women and relationships between men and women; and the references to the occult, with the depictions of Satan, the afterlife, and morality on earth itself. In doing so, the book suggests that 1980s heavy metal displayed more artistry and intelligence than people imagine, but that literature is rebellious and subversive as well.

Critics Review

Like Virgil of Dante's Inferno, Kavadlo guides us through metal's long and complicated relationship with literature, art and critical theory, elegantly displaying how metal is more erudite than its critics – proving them wrong again and again.
T Coles, author of Death Metal (2022)
In Rock of Pages, Jesse Kavadlo sings a song of 80s metal, an epic account written from the inside that captures the music and its moment. As he does so, Kavadlo joins Dee Snider at the hearing table, testifying for the literary merit of the genre against the attacks of Tipper Gore and the PMRC. In the end, for Kavadlo, 80s heavy metal was dangerous, but not in the way its detractors argued; rather, like great literature, its Explicit Content challenged American pieties. In Kavadlo’s hands, metal also reminds us of the value of literature and all expressive art, however uncomfortable, and of the importance of protecting it from the censors.
Samuel Cohen, Associate Professor of English, University of Missouri, US
This witty, engaging, yet erudite study plumbs metal’s relationships with its literary forebears to prove that this often-dismissed genre rewards close reading and carries significant social implications. With a light touch, Kavadlo shows that heavy metal offers more than just a good time.
Mark Osteen, editor of The Beatles through a Glass Onion (2019)
Jesse Kavadlo rips through the 1980s like a guitarist hammering a solo—raw, precise, and unrelenting. Rock of Pages isn’t rock ’n’ roll nostalgia, it’s cultural theory in leather pants, wired on feedback, and attuned to the distortions of myth, image, and power. This is the book the decade—and its readers—have been waiting for.
Bob Batchelor, author of Roadhouse Blues (2022) and The 1980s (2006)

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