Rock Aesthetics in Colombian Literature and Culture

David Martinez Houghton is professor at the Universidad del Norte, in Barranquilla, Colombia.

• Part I: What Do We Mean by Rock Aesthetics?Chapter 1. Rock Aesthetics: More Than a Music Genre, More Than a BusinessChapter 2. Rock as the Latin American Soundscape: From Music to LiteraturePart II: The Rock Aesthetic in Colombian Literature. Corpus AnalysisChapter 3. Nadaism: Rock Aesthetics in the Formation of the Literary Field in ColombiaChapter 4. To Die Before Growing Old: Rock Aesthetics in the Work of Andrés CaicedoChapter 5. Rock Aesthetics as Resistance Against Death: The Punk Poetry of Giovanny OquendoChapter 6. Rock Aesthetics at the Turn of the Century in Colombia

When people think about rock music there is still a privileging—for good reasons—of the music pioneered in the United States and Great Britain, influenced from a collage of genres that include blues, country, and jazz. The 1950s witnessed rock music’s dissemination throughout Latin America, and by the 1960s, new artists cropped up in spaces such as Mexico, Chile, Argentina, and, of course, Colombia. While the Colombian rock music scene expanded and witnessed local productions going beyond cover songs, the region’s literary circles took to the pen to expressing new thoughts and critiques with rock music as their soundtrack. Rock Aesthetics in Colombian Literature and Culture: Writing the Noise allows readers an opportunity to see how Colombian literature in the latter half of the twentieth century evolves through rock music’s own progression and transformation in response to the country’s ongoing socio-political and economic tensions.