Dispatches From the Kingdom of Outsiders: Writing on Music, Culture and More 1979-2025

In the first collection of his essays, outspoken critic Tim Sommer challenges some conventional beliefs about rock and explains how left-of-the-dial music in the '80s turned a generation of awkward loners into a cultural community. Sommer is a musician, journalist, record producer and radio DJ.He was an on-air news correspondent for MTV and VH1 and later did A&R for Atlantic Records, where he signed, among others, Hootie & the Blowfish. Dispatches From the Kingdom of Outsiders contains dozens of fervent and often surprising takes on music, culture and politics, offering a powerful and entertaining corrective to the timidity of so much modern music journalism. From his precocious emergence as a teenaged rock writer, Sommer describes the Zelig-like experiences of his life, mounts controversial arguments about well-known artists, connects music and politics in unexpected ways and reflects on a handful artists whose deaths affected him. Grouped into seven themed sections, the book covers U