Nothing Has Been Done Before

Is there such a thing today as music that's meaningfully new? Critics cry that "there's nothing new under the sun" while musicians, PR machines, and media outlets claim every product is new. Despite this, the topic of the new remains surprisingly unaddressed in contemporary criticism and scholarship about American popular music. Nothing Has Been Done Before instigates a fresh debate about that music--rock 'n' roll, pop, folk, R&B, country, hip-hop--since the turn of the millennium: an era of repurposing, hyperconsumerism, and post-Web 2.0 technology. In prose accessible to educated general readers, the book follows the stories of a diverse cast of musicians as they seek the new, from the dusty roads of Bob Dylan's Love and Theft to the glamorous pop spectacle of the American Wow; from Kanye West's gilded techno-futurism to a Guided By Voices tribute concert in a local dive bar. Nothing Has Been Done Before is a counter-orthodoxy to current music criticism and the perception of music as merely a product. Arguably what we consider "new" has been degraded or dismissed as a fantasy; either the new is merely code for what's trending, or, in certain postmodern circles, it's considered an unnecessary and impossible ideal. Nothing Has Been Done Before argues for a revitalized understanding of the new in popular music. Neither a jeremiad against nor a slick apologia for all things contemporary, the book claims that, indeed, nothing has been done before, but music must remind us--and we must remember.