''The Aesthetics of Rock'' is a book by

Richard Meltzer Richard Meltzer (born May 10, 1945) is an American rock critic, performer, writer and songwriter. He is considered by some rock historians to be the first to write real analysis of rock and roll and is credited with inventing "rock criticism". B ...

(born May 10, 1945).Rock Criticism from the Beginning: Amusers, Bruisers, and Cool-headed Cruisers. Ulf Lindberg, et al, 2005 Written between 1965 and 1968, it was first published in 1970 by

Something Else Press Something Else Press was founded by Dick Higgins in 1963. It published many important Intermedia texts and artworks by such Fluxus artists as Higgins, Ray Johnson, Alison Knowles, Allan Kaprow, George Brecht, Daniel Spoerri, Robert Filliou, Al ...

. In 1987,

Da Capo Press Da Capo Press is an American publishing company with headquarters in Boston, Massachusetts. It is now an imprint of Hachette Books. History Founded in 1964 as a publisher of music books, as a division of Plenum Publishers, it had additional of ...

published an unabridged second edition, with a new foreword by Meltzer. It is one of the first major works of rock-music criticism and analysis. He wrote it as an undergraduate at the

State University of New York at Stony Brook Stony Brook University (SBU), officially the State University of New York at Stony Brook, is a public research university in Stony Brook, New York. Along with the University at Buffalo, it is one of the State University of New York system's ...

and as a graduate student at

Yale University Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wo ...

, from which he was, as he relates in his foreword, "kicked out toot-sweet on my rock-roll caboose" for writing papers with rock-music themes for philosophy classes. Writer Greil Marcus, in his introduction to the Da Capo edition of ''Aesthetics'', maintains that the book is "the best and most obsessive book about the Beatles ever written," and that the work seeks to illuminate "the collapse of art into everyday life, and vice versa."

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Aesthetics Of Rock 1970 non-fiction books Books about rock music Da Capo Press books