AUAMBABULUBA BALAMBAMBÚ, NIK COHN

"Simply the best piece of pop writing of all time: heresy and revelation at the same time. It has never been surpassed." (Simon Reynolds)
No one, half a century after its publication, has written anything like it. Not with such freshness, at least. Nor with such ruthless and, at the same time, hilarious honesty. David Bowie, Simon Reynolds, Greil Marcus, and Jarvis Cocker, among many others, consider it one of their favorite books, a work that remains unsurpassed to this day. The Guardian, for its part, hails it in gold lettering as the Great Book on Pop.
Cohn tells us he's there, on the front lines; he's witnessed everything and has come to tell us about it. He's a fan writing about his obsession, pop music, with tremendous drive and erudition. Also with a passion that is pure and crystalline. "What's missing from this book?" asks Kiko Amat in the prologue to this edition. "Not much, to tell you the truth. Not much. Awopbopalobop Alopbamboom is pure teenage totalitarianism, that's for sure, and as such it must be read. Year Zero arrived, and in a flash it was gone," he seems to be telling us. Cohn talks about the roots, about Elvis and James Brown, Merseybeat and the Mods, but he shuts the era and the genre down in 1968, declaring that the golden age was over, that both the Beatles and the Stones were finished, geriatric, arteriosclerotic, pure detergent commercial fodder, and that from then on there could only be degeneration, pretentiousness, impurity, and tedium. I marveled at every sentence, every staccato, every comparison, every damn epigram of Cohn's. This is the best book on pop ever written, I thought then, when I hadn't read any other. And I still think so now, having read all the others.
This is the long-awaited reissue, after more than two decades out of print, of one of the monumental works of energetic pop and rock and roll at its sweetest and also wildest moment, written by the "father" of music criticism.

• Number of pages: 404
• Measures: 140 x 190 mm.
• Weight: 250 gr
• Binding: Rustic