Book Review: “Do You Have a Band?”: Poetry and Punk Rock in New York City by Daniel Kane

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Book Review| March 01 2018 Book Review: “Do You Have a Band?”: Poetry and Punk Rock in New York City by Daniel Kane “Do You Have a Band?”: Poetry and Punk Rock in New York City, by Daniel Kane. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. 296 pp. Peter Coviello Peter Coviello University of Illinois, Chicago Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of Popular Music Studies (2018) 30 (1-2): 183–186. https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2018.000006 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Peter Coviello; Book Review: “Do You Have a Band?”: Poetry and Punk Rock in New York City by Daniel Kane. Journal of Popular Music Studies 1 March 2018; 30 (1-2): 183–186. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2018.000006 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of Popular Music Studies Search One of the twentieth century’s paradigmatic stagings of the volatile comity between poetry and music, Langston Hughes’s 1926 “The Weary Blues” opens like this: There’s a great deal to be said about the glorious effects of prosody here — about, for instance, the way the utter iambic regularity of those punctuating three-beat lines (I heard a Negro play, He did a lazy sway) have the effect of investing the loose-jointed pentameterish lines that surround them with an undulating, off-beat rhythm: in a word, with syncopation. Yet if Hughes poaches a bit in this metrical way from the singer’s repertoire, he also works to blur the syntactical distinctions between speaker and singer. Look again: the singer is the one down on Lenox Avenue, while the speaker is droning a drowsy syncopated tune, though this does not quite come clear until after the line breaks, when the subjects of... You do not currently have access to this content.