Roadrunner Roadrunner / going faster miles an hour
“Faster miles an hour” is the velocity of insight on offer here, as Joshua Clover tells a story that expands from Boston’s inner beltway to world revolution. The book, like the song that supplies its occasion, is an ordinary love triangle. Jonathan Richman is in love with both what’s playing on his car radio and what he glimpses out his window—rock & roll music and “the modern world”; Clover is in love with the poesis of this song by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers as well as the myriad truths about the undoing of said world that it discloses. “Roadrunner,” Roadrunner: each intensely “deliver[s] their message about the extraordinariness of the ordinary.”
Every time I travel the ring road of Clover’s sentences, I hear this message anew. I learn things I try not to forget about the relationship between popular culture and social life. One word for this experience is revelation. “[T]hat is what revelation is, after all,” Clover writes, “it is just a recognition accelerated to faster miles an hour.”
Even those readers who have somehow never heard (of) “Roadrunner” before should want to go for a ride if they are interested in the history of pop music and/or the ongoing, collective struggle to wrest freedom from necessity.
It must only be one song because that’s the constraint of Duke UP’s Singles: A Series, which Clover co-edited with Emily Lordi. And it must be this particular song because “it’s the greatest song of the era, because rock & roll is the last great invention of industrial capitalism and ‘Roadrunner’ is a love song for the world of industrial capitalism when it’s late at night.”
Clover cannot help but connect “Roadrunner” with three kindred songs—Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene,” Cornershop’s “Brimful of Asha,” and M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes”—that each merit their own chapter in the book. Like “Roadrunner,” they “feel both immediate and like they have the infinite within them.” Clover’s luminous account of pop music moves us not only towards a deeper appreciation of the importance of these songs, but also in the direction of a more concrete understanding of abstractions such as Fordism, financialization, and globalization.
I am such a fan of Roadrunner that hyperbole comes easily. It’s my favourite book of the 21st century. I’ve read it ten times or more. It takes the top of my head off, to paraphrase Emily Dickinson. You know the feeling.
It helps me from being lonely when I encounter propositions like the following: “everything that begins also ends, childhood, the Holy Roman Empire, the Hundred Years’ War, feudalism, the period during which Joni Mitchel was transcendent, Gravity’s Rainbow, rock & roll, and capitalism too, this is an absolute certainty.”
— Geordie Miller teaches at Mount Allison University. His chapbook, Love Poems for Landlords, is due out from Hardscrabble Press in April. He recently completed a poetry manuscript, co-authored with his sister (Kate). If he must choose only one, his favourite Jonathan Richman song is “I’m Just Beginning To Live,” which he first heard exactly when he needed to hear it.
You can read Geordie Miller’s poetry in Issue 306 (Winter 2026). Order the issue now!
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