The Aesthetics of Rock

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The Aesthetics of Rock is a non-fiction book by Richard Meltzer. He wrote it between 1965 and 1968, and it was first published in 1970 by Something Else Press. In 1987, Da Capo Press released an unabridged second edition with a new foreword by Meltzer. The book is one of the earliest major works of rock music criticism and analysis. Meltzer wrote it as an undergraduate at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and as a graduate student at Yale University, from which he says he was kicked out for writing rock-music papers for philosophy classes. Music writer Greil Marcus, in the introduction to the Da Capo edition, calls it “the best and most obsessive book about the Beatles ever written,” and says it examines how art and everyday life collapse into each other.