By Kyle Minor
The epigraph to Joe Bonomo’s Play This Book Loud: Noisy Essays (University of Georgia Press, 2025), comes from Lester Bangs’s “Untitled Notes on Lou Reed”:
The real question is what to live for. And I can’t answer it. Except another
one of your records. And another chance for me to write.
That epigraph, for all its devotion, underplays what was actually going on in the long, weird relationship between Reed, who made a career of making a myth of himself, and Bangs, who loved the myth, and who did as much as any music critic to burnish and promote it. What precedes the epigraph in “Untitled Notes” (and which Bonomo elides) is the invocation, “You know your hatred is just like anybody else’s,” and what follows (also elided) includes the assertion that Bangs “would suck Lou Reed’s cock.”
It is difficult to imagine a contemporary critic writing out of such a fever, or even daring the transgression of Bangs’s fellatial declaration. The performative aspect of the Bangs act arrived amidst the two-decades’-long context of all sorts of post-rock’n’roll posing—the speed-driven Warhol machine, the punker-than thou CBGB scene, Studio 54, Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson and the New Journalism, nearly every page of Creem or Crawdaddy or Rolling Stone.
What’s still seductive about all of it now is that there was a lot of good art in there. A lot of good music, a lot of good films, a lot of good writing. And despite the constraints and orthodoxies of the various authenticity cults, all of which were simultaneously and paradoxically conformity cults, there was, to be sure, an ethos of freedom of many varieties—artistic, behavioral, geographical, musical, pharmacological, sexual. But because so much of it was unexamined, darkly licentious, self-centered in its mostly masculine impositions, it has left the 21st century much to examine, find wanting, tear down, and discard.
Like Joe Bonomo, I’m from the generation between the one that preoccupied Lester Bangs and the one that has mostly consigned his work to the dustbin. In our contemporary moment of agonized reckoning—a moment in which, by the way, all the destructive parts of the Baby Boomer generational experiment have risen again, like an obstinate viral illness, to power—I still find myself wishing that the musical, literary, filmic, and visual art of the moment could come close to matching, in quality and quantity, the power, intensity, and beauty of the art that was left us by the young and recently-young artists of the 1960s and 1970s.
This longing is palpable throughout Play This Book Loud, although the objects of longing are more far-flung in time. Among twenty essays that span 240 pages, the reader will encounter the archetypal origin story and long afterlife of bluesman John D. Loudermilk’s “Tobacco Road,” the near-death of Johnny Ramone, Green Day, the Rolling Stones, a novelty 45 commissioned to a jingle factory by the convenience store chain 7-Eleven, a White Sox game on a car radio in Chicago’s Ukrainian Village, a premarital courtship including Van Halen on cassette mixtape and Smokey and the Bandit on the big screen, and a formative early-life dalliance not with Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, but rather with a cheap knockoff version of the album, recorded by the middling-talent Long Island City studio musicians at the otherwise-forgotten Pickwick Records.
This breadth of material is undergirded by an unspoken but much demonstrated dexterity with nonfiction forms and all they can reconfigure and accommodate. Bonomo freely intermingles the conventions of the personal essay, cultural criticism, short-form reportage, the memoir, and the essay-review—whatever best illustrates the seemingly unlike things (The Who’s Quadrophenia, say, seen through the lens first of Pete Townshend’s memoir, then a Guardian article by James Wood partially concerning Ethan Russell’s faux-postwar Brighton Beach liner note photographs, then Bonomo’s own adolescent fantasies of himself and his friends as latter-day mods, then a series of adult reappraisals into which enter Sylvia Plath’s sophisticated juvenilia) that cast new light on one another in juxtaposition, usually on the way to a broader insight (“ . . . paradox might be the way out of cliché when writing about childhood and adolescence.”).
A reader of a certain temperament might wish that Bonomo might more often explicitly interrogate the artistic and local-historical cultures he has invited into the essays against their stock contemporary reevaluations, and come away with something more complicated, capable of holding in tension what is true about the ways we now are accustomed to write and think about older versions of American (and sometimes British) public self-expression against what would have seemed to be true in the context of the moment in which these things were made.
There are moments in Play This Book Loud in which considerations of old physical objects seem to bloom into the beginnings of at least an abstract reckoning of this sort. For example, during a temp gig merging Library of Congress and Dewey Decimal System catalogs in the Museum of Natural History, Bonomo comes across a nineteenth century copy of National Geographic’s first issue, “somehow the history of history . . . The pages were thick and heavy, mysterious, as if the past had deepened into the fabric of the pages much as personality can deepen into character, and character into wisdom.”
But we never hear much about what preoccupied the writers of the hundred year-old magazine articles, what pleasures they brought that defied the expectations of the late-twentieth century reader, what blind spots they inhabited, what weird peccadillos they unintentionally indicted themselves for by exhibiting. And, if so, what about that divide is like the divides of the moment? And how will the future choose to deal with what is culturally primitive about the artists of today?
Often, in the middle of an essay, I was waiting for a turn like this, for Bonomo to ask questions such as: Can it be possible to consider that the enthrallments and hot shit-Eureka insights of Artist X during Time Y rose not in spite of, but rather because of, the great festering wounds of self of X and the moral iniquities of X and Y and the failures and unintended consequences of the overcomings of the culture that spawned Artist X and Time Y? What we get instead is a series of turns toward reflection, to the personal that illuminates something larger in the human person as he or she or they engages with the arts, with the culture, with history, and with other people, and, most often, comes out the other side having lost something in nearly direct proportion to what has been gained.
This critical tendency—to ask a writer to have written a different book than the book the writer chose to write—is one part perverse. But it is another part optimistic, perhaps, because in some cases it might be another way of saying to the writer: I think I’m reading a few things between the lines, and amidst your great talent, I sense a fear of approaching the third rail that runs dangerously alongside your subject. Perhaps the critic is a little bit right and a little bit wrong. And yet: Isn’t that where literature lives, where art lives, in that zone of danger, where the cost of saying something true might land you a millimeter away from accidentally seeming to be wrong, or, sometimes, to actually getting it wrong in the pursuit of getting it right?
And make no mistake about it. Joe Bonomo is a real literary artist, one of the better essayists at work today, a restless intellect, a writer of startling sentences, some of them quite beautiful: “My wife hears whirring chopper blades.” “Even punk thrash can’t deliver you from that joint.” “I was glad to be part of the phantom many” “Let’s hope the cops don’t show up.”
Kyle Minor is the author of Praying Drunk, winner of the 2015 Story Prize Spotlight award. Recent stories, essays, interviews, and reviews appear in Best American Mystery Stories, Best American Nonrequired Reading, Esquire, The Atlantic, Salon, Iowa Review, Missouri Review, and the New York Times Book Review. How to Disappear and Why, a new book of essays, will be released in February 2026, from Sarabande Books.
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