Roadrunner: A Song by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers

by Joshua Clover

Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers' 1972 song “Roadrunner” captures the freedom and wonder of cruising down the highway late at night with the radio on. Although the song circles Boston's beltway, its significance reaches far beyond Richman's deceptively simple declarations of love for modern moonlight, the made world, and rock & roll. In Roadrunner, cultural theorist and poet Joshua Clover charts both the song's emotional power and its elaborate history, tracing its place in popular music from Chuck Berry to M.I.A. He also locates “Roadrunner” at the intersection of car culture, industrialization, consumption, mobility, and politics. Like the song itself, Clover tells a story about a particular time and place—the American era that rock & roll signifies—that becomes a story about love and the modern world.

Genres: Music, History, Nonfiction

144 pages, Paperback

Published October 12, 2021

About the author

Joshua Clover was an American poet, writer, professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, Davis, and revolutionary.
He was a published scholar, poet, critic, and journalist whose work has been translated into more than a dozen languages; his scholarship on the political economy of riots has been widely influential in political theory. He appeared in three editions of The Best American Poetry and two times in Best Music Writing, and received an individual grant from the NEA as well as fellowships from the Cornell Society for the Humanities, the University of California Humanities Research Institute, and Institute of Advanced Study, University of Warwick. His first book of poetry, Madonna anno domini, received the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets in 1996.

Reviews

[Sarah Jaffe · Rating 5 out of 5]

So good, I sent screenshots and bullied at least two people into buying before I even finished.

[ocelia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I come to you on the final day of the year of our lord 2022 with my review for the most important book I read this year, which I finished in September but avoided talking about because I am scared of being misunderstood and do not trust myself to discuss things I love.

I preface with this: I am NOT recommending this to anyone. I think many would hate it.

This whole book is about a four minute song (Roadrunner by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers). It is such a clever book mostly because it is thinking so hard and trying so hard to be clever and because it does not care at all that you can see how hard it's trying. It’s just as earnest as Jonathan Richman (in Joshua Clover’s own words, the most sincere artist who ever lived) is himself. It illustrates how music has this grand sweeping history; how it’s connected to its predecessors and its successors, world economics and local politics; how it’s about everything and absolutely nothing at all, and how magical it is. The form itself mirrors the point it’s trying to make about the song, about rock and roll, about global capitalism. I think there’s a lot of concrete stuff to be learned in its pages but the only real reason to read this would be to marvel at the snowballing of history and culture and to think about what music means to you. At the end of the day it is poetry. For lovers of pop music, the mundane, the run on sentence, the radio, and the modern world!

[Jay Gabler · Rating 2 out of 5]

Boston is a terrible city for driving, which is probably why its best-known automotive references in pop music are heavily ironic. The Cars applied glamorous mid-century cheesecake imagery to music that looked forward rather than back, anticipating the tight throb of '80s hits. Jonathan Richman, meanwhile, is best-known for the song "Roadrunner," a song that merges frantic energy with an insistent pulse — featuring near-absurdist lyrics about "going faster miles an hour."

"The highway is your girlfriend," sings Richman in a line that could have been penned by David Byrne; as Joshua Clover notes in his new book, journalist Lisa Robinson described Byrne as being "like Jonathan Richman without the warmth." Roadrunner, Clover's book, has plenty of warmth; in fact, it runs positively hot as the poet and cultural theorist veers off onto one exit ramp after another.

I reviewed Roadrunner for The Current.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Joshua Clover's rhapsodic interpellation of Jonathan Richman's most famous song. "Either he's a Fabian with brains or a youthful Lou Reed who can't get over girls," Paul Nelson said of Richman when he saw him perform in 1973 -- Nelson tried to get Richman signed to Mercury Records but the label couldn't get with Richman's faux-naive band leading -- label presidents always want the artist to fire the band, and this was the age, recall, of the rockist search for "the great American Band." Which gives Clover a subject: what's the relation of rock 'n' roll such that he loves the ideology coming out of Greil Marcus to the American exceptionalism that would mansplain Bretton Woods? Maybe it isn't a subject after all. At any rate, Clover finds several songs, by Chuck Berry, by Cornershop, and by M.I.A., that clearly owe their fascination, at least partly, to Richman's song about driving around the Boston "ring road" or outer belt circa 1970 -- a couple of years before rock made its peak and American exceptionalism choked on its gas guzzling. The critic's set of songs are so well-chosen that they seem a historicization of some kind, and the revolutionary Clover wants the fire of heaven alit in the flowing halo of a belching industrialization: "It smells like heaven (thunder)," Richman sings. Seemingly without alienation -- which was always the trick Richman managed to pull off. There's no alienation either in a revolutionary's long-game.

[Carol · Rating 4 out of 5]

This short book is a meditation on "Roadrunner" that starts and ends with the song and in between takes a trip backwards through time to the early rock n roll evoked in the song and forwards to the ways the song has been quoted and invoked in more recent pop songs. In particular, he looks at M.I.A. and her song "Bamboo Banga" which quotes "Roadrunner", and at Cornershop's "Brimful of Asha" which reuses "Roadrunner"s chords and melody to look at the Desi diaspora. Clover weaves in commentary on the political and social events surrounding each song. He muses about the nature of cultural circulation, critiques capitalism and the world order it has produced, and takes pop music seriously. It was a very interesting read and made me think about a very familiar and beloved song in new ways. I do wish he had spent a little more time on the song itself and on Jonathan Richman, but that's a minor quibble.

[Mike Mikulski · Rating 4 out of 5]

Along with Left of the Dial by The Replacements and On the Radio by Cheap Trick, Roadrunner by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers is one of my top three songs celebrating rock radio. Joshua Clover takes a deep dive in a 144p. essay on the single in the first of what I hope is many in a series offered up by Duke University Press.

Clover's conjecture is that Roadrunner was released in 1972 at the pinnacle of American car culture and manufacturing strength and that Richman perfectly captures that peak in reverie of circling Boston on Hwy 128 listening to the radio and expressing his love for the Modern World. Clover charts the rise of rock and car culture with a chapter devoted to Chuck Berry and the many songs and lyrics he wrote placed in a car and driving fast.

Clover then draws parallels to a similar 2000 pop song Brimful of Asha by Tjinder Singh and Cornershop which carries a similar simplicity in his ode to singles and Bollywood music. Finally he charts the decline he has seen since 1972 focusing on world rap artist MIA and her song Galang Galang. An interesting broad perspective from one single.

I want to read more by Clover and see more from this series.

Postscript - In the acknowledgements, Clover notes he also considered writing about Jolene, Dim All the Lights, Tell me Something Good, Freedom '90 (which I don't know) and Fuck The Police. A pretty wide spectrum.

[Dean · Rating 1 out of 5]

My goodness, if ever a book read like the author was writing to a guaranteed minimum pages requirement, this is it. What a lot of fatuous air.

This is an overthought, overwrought book about a fantastic song. If you like "Roadrunner," don't bother to read this book. Please.

Go here instead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gy88-.... Two chords and the truth. Tip of the hat to Lou Reed, Jonathan's hero in the late 60s.

Now, don't you feel better?

[Geoff Winston Leghorn Balme · Rating 3 out of 5]

I gave up. This essay is just a bit too loose and tangential for me to enjoy. By the time i was trying to get a bead on who MIA was or how Tamil Tigers fit into the story of this basic rock song about listening to the radio while breezily tooling about Boston, i was finished.
I must be missing something, like maybe Clover adapted an MFA thesis into a short book only remotely about the old song that erupted on our music scene seemingly fresh as a punk rock daisy but in fact like a walking dead Richman had buried.
I did enjoy the windows falling out of the Hancock building though.

[Stewart Mason · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm afraid I wanted to like this more than I did. The author makes a lot of great connections -- the similarities between the Modern Lovers' "Roadrunner" and Cornershop's "Brimful of Asha" had never occurred to me, as much as I love both songs -- but even at 120 pages, it feels flabby and overwritten. (Even though the central metaphor is the ring road, there's such a thing as returning to a point too many times.) The acknowledgements say that it started as a 20-minute talk at PopCon, and I bet it was a lot tighter in that form.

[Patty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well that was sure a fun fast drive around Route 128, through multiple decades, connecting other songs and other cultural moments in unexpected and delightful ways. I think the best way to read this would be all at once in one sitting, but it took me a little longer. I'm thrilled that the series this book kicks off (Singles) exists and I look forward to future books in the series, and I'm in love with the modern world!

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh I love this kind of book - write about one song but weave it together with history and music theory and Marxism and the finance industry and late capitalism and migration and culture and lots of rock and roll. Clover dazzles as he works out his thoughts before our eyes. Highly recommended!

[Dave M · Rating 4 out of 5]

Worth the read, but not the purchase. I've enjoyed Richman on streaming services. Roadrunner is Boston local, Parties in the USA is reminiscent of Sal Paradise in Sausolito, and the country twang of Since She Started to Ride is hoedown fun. He seems genuine. Gotta like it.

[Rich Booher · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastic and illuminating book, which traces the story of “Roadrunner” and its progeny against the transformations of late capitalism.

[Rich · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lot of repetition when you’re just writing about one song…one amazing song, that’s for sure. But i didn’t stick around long enough on the book to see if the repetition stopped.

[Jamie Winston · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting but repetitive

[Mark Lashley · Rating 5 out of 5]

All great songs - and "Roadrunner" is a great fucking song - deserve a book like this. Just as Clover characterizes the song itself, the book pulls in a million different directions and brings you back to the same place.

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's the greatest rock song of all time. Yup, I said it. Here's me expounding on it at length: https://www.thesmartset.com/like-the-...