Author | Jonathan Lethem |
---|---|
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Published | 2007 (Doubleday) |
Media type | Print (hardback) |
Pages | 240 pp |
ISBN | 978-0-385-51218-3 |
Preceded by | How We Got Insipid |
Followed by | Chronic City |
You Don't Love Me Yet (2007) is a comic novel about alternative music from Jonathan Lethem, set in modern Los Angeles.
The novel takes its title from two (otherwise unconnected) songs of the same title by Roky Erickson and The Vulgar Boatmen. The original title was Monster Eyes, but Lethem was convinced to change it by his publisher. He later admitted to an interviewer that the association with the two songs "made it feel very lucky to me to put it on the book," and that even though the new title "isn’t my phrase, for a book about appropriated language and the way things can be repurposed, it seemed okay. And, it’s a beautifully passive-aggressive title." [1]
Lucinda Hoekke is an underemployed woman in her late twenties, playing bass in a fledgling Los Angeles rock group. There are three other members: Matthew, the group's lead singer and Lucinda's ex-boyfriend, who kidnaps a kangaroo from the local zoo to save it from boredom; Denise, the clear-headed drummer, works at "No Shame," a sex shop; and Bedwin, the group's composer and lead guitarist, who is very fragile and suffers from writer's block. Bedwin watches the same Fritz Lang movie repeatedly.
Lucinda takes a job at a performance art project called "Complaint Line," listening to anonymous callers talk about their grievances. She falls for a regular caller, initially known only as the "Complainer," who amuses her with his acerbic reflections about life and self-deprecating humor. She begins using his musings as song lyrics, inspiring her band to new heights of creativity. She becomes obsessed with the complainer, whose name is Carl, and begins an unstable all-consuming love affair with him.
The band's unexpectedly successful performance at a loft party leads to an invitation to appear live on Los Angeles' leading alternative music radio program. However, Carl, who uses his lyrics to force his way into the band, disrupts their radio broadcast, leading to romantic and musical consequences.
You Don't Love Me Yet received mixed reviews. In his promotional appearance at Google, Lethem attributed this reaction to the novel's intentionally silly and light tone. He claimed that the novel was supposed to follow the form of a romantic comedy and was his most "funny" and "sexy" book. He argued that the novel's central theme was the mystery of artistic influence, borrowing and collaboration, the individual artist's murky relationship to the world around him. He thought that this theme could best be explored in the context of a rock band, since band members are often much greater artists collectively than they are as individuals in a way that is difficult to explain clearly. He also noted that musicians often borrow banal pieces of popular culture and give them new and exciting meanings.[ citation needed ]
The novel was noted for incorporating the real-life "Happy Foot/Sad Foot Sign" in Silver Lake, Los Angeles into its plot. This was a rotating sign for a foot clinic that showed a foot with a happy face on one side and a sad face on the other. Like Lucinda in the book, some locals would use the sign as an omen of good or bad luck based on which side they saw first, [2] until the sign was taken down in 2019. [3]
John J. Mellencamp, previously known as Johnny Cougar, John Cougar, and John Cougar Mellencamp, is an American singer-songwriter. He is known for his catchy brand of heartland rock, which emphasizes traditional instrumentation. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008, followed by an induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2018.
Roger Kynard "Roky" Erickson was an American musician and singer-songwriter. He was a founding member and the leader of the 13th Floor Elevators and a pioneer of the psychedelic rock genre.
The Turtles are an American rock band formed in Los Angeles, California, in 1965 and best known for their 1967 hit song "Happy Together". They charted several other top 40 hits, including "It Ain't Me Babe" (1965), "You Baby" (1966), "She'd Rather Be With Me" (1967), "Elenore" (1968) and "You Showed Me" (1969).
Christopher Gilbert Pérez is an American guitarist, best known as lead guitarist for the Tejano band Selena y Los Dinos. He married the frontwoman of the group, Selena, on April 2, 1992. Pérez grew up in San Antonio, Texas as one of two children of Gilbert Pérez and Carmen Medina. In 1986, he began his tenure by joining Shelly Lares' band. By the late 1980s, Pérez was respected among Tejano musicians for his guitar skills. This caught A.B. Quintanilla's attention; at the time, A.B. was seeking another guitarist for the band he produced, Selena y Los Dinos. Between one and two years after Pérez joined the band, he and Selena began a personal relationship.
Jonathan Allen Lethem is an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction and detective fiction, was published in 1994. In 1999, Lethem published Motherless Brooklyn, a National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel that achieved mainstream success. In 2003, he published The Fortress of Solitude, which became a New York Times Best Seller. In 2005, he received a MacArthur Fellowship. Since 2011, he has taught creative writing at Pomona College.
Wanted Man is a folk rock album by Paul Kelly and was originally released in July 1994. It was issued on Mushroom Records in Australia and was Kelly's first solo studio album after disbanding his previous group, The Messengers. Tracks 1–10 were recorded at three Los Angeles studios while tracks 11–13 were recorded in Melbourne. It was produced by Kelly, Randy Jacobs and David Bridie. The cover art for Wanted Man is a colophon rendering of Australia's legendary outlaw Ned Kelly as a guitarist and was painted by David Band.
"Hey Joe" is an American song from the 1960s that has become a rock standard and has been performed in many musical styles by hundreds of different artists. The lyrics tell of a man who is on the run and planning to head to Mexico after shooting his unfaithful wife. In 1962, Billy Roberts registered "Hey Joe" for copyright in the United States.
Daniel Fuchs was an American screenwriter, fiction writer, and essayist.
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Happy Sad is the third album by American singer-songwriter Tim Buckley, released in April 1969. It was recorded at Elektra Sound Recorders in Los Angeles, California and was produced by former Lovin' Spoonful members Zal Yanovsky and, coincidentally, his subsequent replacement Jerry Yester. It marked the beginning of Buckley's experimental period, as it incorporated elements of jazz that he had never used before. Many of the songs here represent a departure from the binary form that dominated much of his previous work.
Alfred Jesse Smith, better known as Brenton Wood, is an American singer and songwriter known for his three 1967 hit singles, "The Oogum Boogum Song", "Gimme Little Sign", and "Baby You Got It".
Christopher Sorrentino is an American novelist and short story writer of Italian and Puerto Rican descent. He is the son of novelist Gilbert Sorrentino and Victoria Ortiz. His first published novel, Sound on Sound (1995), draws upon innovations pioneered in the work of his father, but also contains echoes of many other modernist and postmodernist writers. The book is structured according to the format of a multitrack recording session, with corresponding section titles.
That's Right – You're Wrong is a 1939 American musical film directed by David Butler and released by RKO Radio Pictures. The film stars Kay Kyser and his band, with a cast that included Adolphe Menjou, Lucille Ball, Edward Everett Horton, Roscoe Karns, and Ginny Simms. It was the first film to feature Kyser and his band, and its success led to their headlining several more pictures over the next five years. The title was a Kyser catchphrase, used on his radio show when a contestant correctly gave a wrong answer to a "right or wrong" question.
The Choirboys is a 1977 American comedy-drama film directed by Robert Aldrich, written by Christopher Knopf and Joseph Wambaugh based on Wambaugh's 1975 novel of the same name. It features an ensemble cast including Charles Durning, Louis Gossett Jr., Randy Quaid, and James Woods. The film was released to theaters by Universal Pictures on December 23, 1977.
Greg Marcks is an American director and screenwriter of motion pictures.
The Vulgar Boatmen are an American rock band, formed in Gainesville, Florida, United States, in 1982 by a group of students at the University of Florida, including John Eder and Walter Salas-Humara, later of The Silos. In its original configuration the group issued several cassette-only releases, including Women and Boatmen First (1982) and All Bands on Deck (1984). As first Eder and then Salas-Humara departed, the group coalesced around Robert Ray, a film studies professor at the university, who became one of the group's two principal songwriters and vocalists, the other being Indiana musician Dale Lawrence, a former student of Ray's who was a veteran of the early punk band the Gizmos. The band was named as a play on the Russian folk song The Volga Boatmen.
The Take Off and Landing of Everything is the sixth studio album by English rock band Elbow, released in the UK, Europe, and Australia through Fiction Records and Polydor Records on 10 March 2014 and in the US on Concord Records on 11 March 2014.
Bradley Joel Skaught is the principal songwriter, guitarist, and lead vocalist for The Bye Bye Blackbirds, an Oakland, California-based indie rock and power pop band. Skaught's vocals have been called "distinctive and lovely", "a unique drawl reminiscent of Tom Petty", and likened to John Lennon. The San Francisco Chronicle described his band's work as "British Invasion guitar-pop with a twinge of country and roots," in which "disparate rock influences – '60s rock, '70s power pop, '80s college radio and indie rock – come together for catchy, harmony-laden songs."
A Gambler's Anatomy is a 2016 novel by American author Jonathan Lethem. The plot concerns Alexander Bruno, a professional backgammon player with "psychic tendencies". The novel received mixed reviews and was compared negatively to other novels by Lethem.
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