ROADRUNNER

In the inaugural title of the publisher’s Singles series, which celebrates the single rather than the album, English professor Clover—also the series editor, along with Emily Lordi—makes his case for the titular Modern Lovers tune. Recorded in 1972 but not released until 1976, “Roadrunner” wasn’t a Top 40 hit, and it was initially unknown outside its Boston market. The group that recorded it had disbanded in 1974, and Jonathan Richman, the songwriter and singer, would take a very different direction with his music in subsequent years. This is by no means the first book devoted to the recording of a single song, but the song in question lacks the cultural reach of, say, “Like a Rolling Stone” or “Strange Fruit”—or “Hallelujah,” the story of which was brilliantly delineated by Alan Light in The Holy or the Broken (2013). Clover is clearly an obsessive writing to and for fellow obsessives, employing some of the jargon and occasional impenetrability of academic writing to commemorate the legacy of “the greatest song of all time, or maybe it is the greatest rock song of all time, or the greatest American rock song of all time, or the greatest American rock song of that era.” The author also explores the development of the interstate highway system, White flight, Watergate, Vietnam, and links to the sonic collages of current pop star M.I.A. “So you have these songs making circular sounds and it turns out they are trying to think about circulation,” writes Clover, “about records on turntables and cars on ring roads and sounds in the transnational flow of culture: the relaying of sonic contagions through the system and around the globe and often returning to where they began but different, mutated.” All this about a song that has an immediacy and exhilaration that hardly require a book to explain it.

Rock criticism invades academia.