Number One Cup founder/guitarist/singer, Seth Kim-Cohen distills a lifetime of listening, making, and writing about music into what he calls a "unified field theory" of rock and roll. Kim-Cohen has wrangled his hard-won understandings into a book that attempts to explain rock and roll in the larger cultural context of the mid-60s to the mid-80s. Think: Nixon, Didion, the Black Panthers, conceptual art, Hunter S. Thompson, Godard, Derrida, and Reagan. The book is organized around a series of moments of rock and roll colliding with mainstream taste, technology, and values. Opening with Iggy on the televised broadcast of the 1970 Cincinnati Pop Festival and concluding with John Lydon staring down the camera on American Bandstand, we also see the modern world trying to make sense of and subdue the supermodern (Lester Bangs' word) energies of Patti Smith, James Brown, the Velvets, the Last Poets, Dylan, Scritti Politti, PiL, etc.

Look at what Greil Marcus said: "I started your book, reading on my phone, and knew five pages in I would finish it. It was a wonderful rollercoaster. There was so much that was on the fringes of things I knew and cared about but filled with things I didn't know and now care about, whether the obscure Kathryn Bigelow video or the investigations of Scritti Politti, and luckily today it was only a couple of clicks to see anything you were talking about. I hope the book gets the attention and consideration it deserves. I couldn't be happier than to have my name on it."

Meanwhile Vasaar musicologist, Justin Patch, says of Kim-Cohen's book: "A delight to read and deserves to be read twice, once for the ideas and a second time for the joy of the prose. Original and deftly written, it brings discussions of art, aesthetics, politics, race, and gender into multi-sided conversations that effortlessly flow together. This book is one of the best examples of transdisciplinary scholarship in the arts."

Out now with Bloomsbury Publishing (home to Harry Potter (?!))