Ian Penman is a British writer, music journalist, and critic. He began his career at the NME in 1977, later contributing to various publications including The Face, Arena, Tatler, Uncut, Sight & Sound, The Wire, the Guardian, the LRB, and City Journal. He is the author of Vital Signs: Music, Movies, andOther Manias (Serpent's Tail, 1998).
'It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track summons the lives and times of
several extravagantly damaged musical geniuses and near-geniuses in
(mainly) the brutal context of mid-century America - its racial
atrocities, its venality, its murderous conformities. Ian Penman
writes an exact, evocative prose as surprising as improvised jazz
in its fluid progress from music criticism to social commentary to
biography and back. He's found a way to be erudite without
pedantry, entertaining without pandering. His ear for mesmerizing
nuance is unmatched by any music critic alive.' - Gary Indiana,
author of Three Month Fever
'Consistently told me stuff I didn't know about stuff I thought I
knew. No other 'music writer' combines such lightness of touch with
such depths of diving.' - John Jeremiah Sullivan, author of
Pulphead
'Ian Penman's work has the tone, and the texture, and the
complexities of the music and musicians he talks about, whether
it's Steely Dan laughing up their sleeves, the thorny declines of
John Fahey and James Brown, or Elvis's conflicted southern manners.
It's sharp and incisive but also full of love; it is beautiful
writing.' - Bob Stanley, author of Yeah Yeah Yeah
'The eight pieces have a depth and expansiveness that transcend
their origin as book reviews, several of them cannily commissioned
by someone at the London Review of Books who saw his potential as a
long-form essayist. ... What gets us home, as it were, is Penman's
verve, and his eagerness to make us listen to the records as
attentively as he does. ... his essays on James Brown, Charlie
Parker and Prince aren't definitive; they are only inimitable.' -
Anthony Quinn, Guardian
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