Dispatches from the Kingdom of Outsiders: Writing on Music, Culture and More 1979-2025, by Tim Sommer
If you grew up in the late ‘70s feeling somehow … different from your locker mates and home roomers, you’ll immediately relate to Tim Sommer’s book. The Kingdom of Outsiders refers to that intuition, call it hope, that there were others like you out there. In that pre-online age, you had to get off the couch, go outside and find them, spot them from clues in how they dressed, the LPs or the magazines they clutched in their hands.
Music was the catalyst, the gateway to new worlds, especially the music everyone else wasn’t listening to. It was, he writes, “a way for us to say, ‘We are not that group sitting at that cafeteria table … Music was your first portal to identity when you were old enough to choose for yourself. And it has stayed with you, still somewhere inside of you, hasn’t it?”
Sommer later played with the influential Glenn Branca and the under-appreciated Hugo Largo and worked in the recording industry, signing Public Image Ltd. to Atlantic. But he began as a teenager who wanted to be a rock critic and master the alchemy that changed sounds into words. He was geographically fortunate, growing up on Long Island, a short ride to the subway that took him to where everything was happening.
Not yet out of high school, he started working at Trouser Press in the summer of 1978. Many of the Dispatches are articles and interviews he produced for Trouser Press, the New York Observer, the Washington Post, the LA Weekly and a variety of other venues. He’d be fun to argue with—what? Patti Smith isn’t punk rock!—and you’d forgive him because of his many astute observations. He found the “Trinity moment,” the birth of “modern rock and roll,” in the 1959 recording by Eddie Cochran, “Somethin’ Else,” where a heavy beat jettisoned swing and foresaw the direction of rock in the ‘60s and ‘70s.
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Unsurprisingly, he dubs David Bowie as the “King of the Outsiders,” and with that assertion, he launches into bad memories of ‘70s high school, “a shoebox of shame and staggering incivility,” populated by jocks and bullies who “didn’t know your secret.” Bowie, he writes, “made us realize that there were enough of us to make a kingdom.”
Given the worsening politics of this century, Sommer has regrets. He posits that the “circuses” of rock “actively distracted us from meaningful action and mislead us into confusing freedom of leisure with actual freedom, the kind of freedom that guards, insures and enables freedom of belief, worship and love.” But a few sentences later: “Rock is the sound of 30 centuries of the world’s disenfranchised made electric.”
Get Dispatches from the Kingdom of Outsiders on Amazon here.
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