Free of anxiety, ‘Night Moves’ urges us to live
Thanks to Instagram, this book review can begin with a reference to a recovering art form: Sections of Jessica Hopper’s “Night Moves” will remind readers of a certain persuasion what it feels like to chew on the poetry of Carl Sandburg, say, “Happiness” or “Under a Hat Rim.”
That’s not to say that Hopper, best known to her social-media followers as a music critic and former MTV News editorial director, aspires to be perceived as a poet (though she does read poetry) or that she wants her slim, pocket-sized follow-up to “The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic” to be viewed as a compendium of verse. “Night Moves,” published by the University of Texas Press, is also neither a formal memoir of a young woman orbiting punk rock nor a micro-history of the 2000s in her adopted hometown. Hopper loves Chicago the way that Sandburg did and wants to convey the everythingness of her domicile-playground, to somehow put into words the cinematic experience of living in a city while a city lives inside her, minute by minute, hour by hour.
Considering her motivation, one could, and should, question her decision to opt for spareness across three quasi-chapters over hard-core detail and chronology, the very tools for building atmosphere. After all, no thanks to Instagram, we live in an era of FOMO (fear — and fallout — of missing out). Anyone who did not directly participate in the gritty upper Midwestern music scenes of 10, 15, 20 years ago might not be able to latch on to Hopper’s narrative of nonsequential moments, however charming or prescient they are, because she leaves out the last names of supporting characters and their exact relationship to her, not to mention analysis.
Craig Finn, frontman of rock band The Hold Steady, makes a cameo in a blip about filming a music video in which Hopper and a friend played extras, but he’s hardly enough of a thread to keep the easily distractible engaged. Today, the people demand fleshed-out stories. If they’re bingeable, even better. Validation of contemporary anxiety is key.
Speaking of distress, the world still lacks published books by women writing as historians of the countercultural movements they built. So it’s hard between pages not to pine for a more traditional take that would have helped balance the scales. To be clear, Hopper is qualified to produce such a book as a woman who assisted in the breakup of an infamous boys’ club (music journalism) and watched young bands rise to prominence.
Autobiographies of bygone decades, such as Debbie Harry and Chris Stein’s “Making Tracks: The Rise of Blondie,” Viv Albertine’s “Clothes, Music, Boys,” Kim Gordon’s “Girl in a Band” and Cosey Fanni Tutti’s “Art, Sex, Music,” set out to grab and shake their audiences before dropping them on their heads in their respective milieus. The result is a sense of what it was like to stand alongside these gifted artists as they caroused and created with oddballs and losers in the wee small hours. Their glittering nostalgia can be yours, up to a certain point, even if you didn’t experience what they have survived.
Though it possesses a voice that crackles with the intelligence and worldliness of a wellread rock star, “Night Moves,” drawn from Hopper’s personal journals, does not add to the above literature (which is, thankfully, growing nonetheless). And yet it does something we need books to do in 2018 — it gives readers a neutral space to kick around thoughts of their own glory days by omitting dates and fame, root causes of anxiety. The lack of specificity becomes a strength when combined with the motif of a destiny-seeking woman on a bike who is taking in a gentrifying metropolis. Readers, regardless of background, will identify with her nocturnal movements from point A to point B, either to get to dear friends or to move with them on to the next diversion. A form of nostalgia will arise, and if you have ever stood sweating in a crowd at a concert or indulged a drunk in conversation, you will feel it without the nasty side effect of reprocessing your mortality.
“Hey, you!” whispers Hopper’s subtext. “Go forth and live still.”