Now Available
Guns N’ Roses, Rock & Roll, and the Sounds of the Lyric Tradition
By Mike Chasar
Routledge, 2026
In this innovative book, Mike Chasar forwards a theory for how we read, hear, and understand popular music lyrics on their own, in relation to each other, and in relation to the poetic tradition that they inherit, revitalize, and push into new expressive quarters.
When Guns N’ Roses lead singer Axl Rose belts out the series of “ohs” in the chorus from one of the band’s most famous songs—“Whoa, oh, oh, oh, sweet child o’ mine”—exactly what sort of poetic work is going on? When Freddie Mercury sings “Mama, oooh, didn’t mean to make you cry” on Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” what does that “oooh” accomplish? We all know the pleasure of unpacking the content of the songs we love, and Guns N’ Roses, Rock & Roll, and the Sounds of the Lyric Tradition deepens that pleasure by….
Now in Paperback
The Poetry of Bob Dylan: Thirty Essays on Thirty Songs
Edited by Mike Chasar
Bloomsbury Academic, 2025
An innovative resource for Bob Dylan fans and scholars alike, these thirty essays by leading scholars of poetry, music, and literature illustrate how and why the work of the 2016 Novel Literature Laureate is in fact so literary. Examining how Dylan’s lyrics shape or get shaped by vocalization, performance, instrumentation, film, recording technologies, and the forces of history unfolding around him, this collection models a range of ways to understand the songs as poetical phenomena by answering questions like How can we read and understand Dylan's lyrics as poetry? How do those lyrics build on, dialogue with, and expand the poetic tradition? How does Dylan's style change over time while both pushing and responding to changes in the world of popular music?