Lost Joy

Lost Joy collects the writing that first brought Camden Joy wide attention in the mid-90s, when he wheatpasted his “manifestoes" around New York, excoriating the music industry and celebrating unsung geniuses of rock and roll. Joy's voice—heartfelt, mocking, lyrical, razor-sharp—earned comparisons to the likes of Allen Ginsberg, Patti Smith, and Nick Hornby. Rooted in DIY zine culture, his rants prefigure the unfettered public expression of personal views that would explode with the rise of the Internet, and enact in words what Banksy would later achieve in art. Joy's groundbreaking early fiction, in which his characters often invoke musicians and songs, is also included here. These haunting stories explore the many ways in which we use music to communicate our feelings and make sense of our memories. Lost Joy is a scintillating collection of the tracts and manifestoes that first brought Camden Joy to public attention in the mid-1990s, when he flyposted his rants all over New York City, protesting the commodification of rock and roll. His stance: angry and mocking, incantatory yet razor sharp, ironic but sincere, drew on the work of earlier, then neglected rock writers (Lester Bangs, Patti Smith, Richard Meltzer), as well as prefiguring the hipster uprising of more recent years. Lost Joy also includes some of Joy's early stories (which appeared in zines and self-published chapbooks as well i