This is my fourth book, and represents the culmination of my interest in rock historiography, or the practice and criticism of writing histories about rock musicians. As a music fan and wannabe rock musician, I grew up consuming popular music biographies and documentaries that provided simple, even austere, narrative structures of redemption and romantic individualism. Yet as an academic historian (actually, an ethnomusicologist), I learned to approach the stories that people tell about the world as participating in larger projects to “invent” or “produce” or “construct” that world in some way. 

The academic jargon word “poststructuralism” might be used to name this particular cluster of ideas pointing us toward thinking about the social construction of reality. While these ideas had their roots in modern philosophical movements stretching back to the early twentieth century, they emerged most fully in the late 1960s and early 1970s across a number of different literary, artistic, and academic movements. 

Many of these ideas came to be mainstreamed, I suggest in the book, through decidedly non-academic genres, and in the service of explaining what many commentators in the 1960s claimed to be experiencing as some sort of major social rupture. The chapters in this book present and critique different modes of constructing reality that were present in both academic and popular media during this period and just after. But they also try on, experiment with, and discard these modes. The result is my case for what Hayden White, in his germinal book Metahistory (1973), called an ironic approach to writing music history. 

As I was working on this book, a close friend told me that, while reading an early draft, they felt themselves come “unstuck” as the narrative ground at one point seemed to begin shifting beneath their feet, then disintegrating. I’ve surely never received a lovelier comment than that. If a reader who picks up this book has a similar moment, a moment where form (the written page) generates a felt experience of content (argument) – well, what author could ask for anything more? 

My real desire, however, is that someone may decide to reread certain sections after finishing the whole thing. Academic books, including my earlier ones, are written to be endured. An academic book usually compels you to crack open its osteal prose (as painlessly as possible), in order to gulp down the rich marrow-information within (as quickly as possible). 

For sure, vanity may be dictating my secret desire that people might reread this book. But so too does my central premise, as outlined in a note at the end: 

To really understand a piece of writing, you must grasp its unity. And that unity can be grasped only by discovering how a work is one—and in that same moment, many. This advice can be found in Mortimer J. Adler’s classic How to Read a Book (1940), overhauled for publication in 1972 with Charles Van Doren. And it’s an example of the central problem underlying No Sense Makes Sense: namely that, during the so-called American century, an exegetical impulse—characterized by the compulsion to “read between the lines,” to transform all phenomena, written and unwritten, into “texts” that can be parsed—came to dominate how we make sense of our worlds.

A historical study of that impulse to interpret and make sense of experiential phenomena, in this case, rock music, as well as an experiment in social interpretation, this book – I hope – will allow rock fans, academics, and true-crime afficionados alike to revisit one of the most closely chronicled, and hotly debated, events of the American century.