I Wanna Be Me: Rock Music And The Politics Of Identity

by Theodore Gracyk

As someone who feels the emotional power of rock and who writes about it as an art form, Theodore Gracyk has been praised for launching arguments destined to change the future of rock and roll. In I Wanna Be Me, his second book about the music he cares so much about, Gracyk grapples with the ways that rock shapes - limits and expands - our notions of who we can be in the world.

Genres: Music

328 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2001

Reviews

[jamie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Named for and starting with the story behind an obscure Sex Pistols song about the pressure to constantly look punk both for other punks and the mainstream media, this text gets off to a promising start and initially asks some interesting questions and also offers some good stories (how does one define mass art, how do songwriters and bands leave their song lyrics and meanings 'open ended' for listeners, how can bands and discographies function as paradigms, the young Keith Richards' open jealousy of the young and upwardly mobile Mick Jaggers' record collection). All of this negated in later chapters where Gracyk whitesplainingly justifies cultural appropriation (he claims that when white people copy Black or African musical forms that it doesn't really harm anyone); his final chapters on gender (which betray a stereotypically binary, un-intersectional, completely unserviceable conception of gender) are equally terrible. Gracyk doesn't even bother to provide a theory of identity itself, leaving one to wonder what, exactly, the point of this book is. If I had to guess, I would say that he wanted to write an elitist white baby boomer bro's love letter to his favorite genre of music. Not recommended.