I'm a Man: Sex, Gods and Rock 'n' Roll [Paperback]

I'm a man. Well, maybe so, but were you also aware that you're the progeny of ancient Greek concepts of music, myth and hero, even as you strut around your bedroom in your y-fronts, snarling into your hairbrush, pretending to be Iggy Pop?

Rock taps into the all-important idea of the "authentic" and into our Western grammar of hoping and dreaming. But what exactly of what, asks Ruth Padel in her breathless, yet virile exploration, is the patently artificial rock sensibility authentic? Under pressure to be "men", she argues, boys and young men seek refuge and transformation by dissolution into the realm of rock--a place where they can celebrate their heroism, howl their need, and rage against the machine. How did these swaggering displays become so damn sexy? Along the way, Padel investigates rock's imprint on relationships between masculinity and femininity and blackness and whiteness. She wisely avoids scoring points by comparing Greek myths with the rock & roll lifestyle (her argument is at its weakest when she dips into lazy comparisons between Brian Jones and Narcissus because both died face down in a pool), to concentrate on their effect, what Raymond Williams would call a "structure of feeling" or culturally shared repertoire.

Her whistle-stop tour takes us across the US in search of rock history and the rise of the teenager borne upon the holy electric guitar and its howl of male sexual need. Padel thankfully ranges not only across the anecdotal landscape of rock & roll legend, but also dives into the music itself, its lyrics, reception, quality of feeling and intensity, which musicological jargon often fails to make accessible for the very people who really get it. A welcome cultural analysis that serves nicely as a slice of literary rock & roll product itself, read I'm a Man along with work by Nick Hornby, Greil Marcus, Simon Reynolds, and Jon Savage. And keep some Led Zep, Stones, Prodigy and Billie Holiday handy for less than easy listening--or just in case you feel the need to get heroic.--Fiona Buckland

This is a witty, sparklingly argued study about the links between rock, maleness, and the Greek myths. In a boldly original thesis, Ruth Padel examines a hundred interweaving strands of image and influence. She takes us from the pop single to the operatic aria; from opera to Greek drama; and from there to the Greek myths which became the West's blueprint of sexual adventure. She relates the spotlit, adulated rock god to his classical ancestors - Dionysus, Narcissus, Hercules. She also tracks the story of rock through 20th century history, investigating the links betwen male dreams of violence, misogyny, and - above all - of blackness.

Ruth Padel was born in London in 1947 and educated at Oxford. She lived several years in Greece and worked as a Greek scholar before becoming a freelance writer. She has won the National Poetry Competition and published three books about reading modern poetry, most recently Silent Letters of the Alphabet. Other non-fiction includes I'm a Man, about rock music and Greek myth, and Tigers in Red Weather, a nature book and travel memoir about the years she spent searching for tigers in Asian jungles. She has published six collections of poems, most recently The Soho Leopard (2004), and her verse biography Darwin: A Life in Poems was shortlisted for the 2009 Costa Prize. Her first novel is Where the Serpent Lives.