Dispatches from the Kingdom of Outsiders: Writing on Music, Culture and More 1979-2025

In the first collection of his essays, outspoken critic Tim Sommer challenges some conventional beliefs about rock and explains how left-of-the-dial music in the '80s turned a generation of awkward loners into a cultural community.

Sommer is a musician, journalist, record producer and radio DJ. He was an on-air news correspondent for MTV and VH1 and later did A&R for Atlantic Records, where he signed, among others, Hootie & the Blowfish.

Dispatches From the Kingdom of Outsiders contains dozens of fervent and often surprising takes on music, culture and politics, offering a powerful and entertaining corrective to the timidity of so much modern music journalism.

From his precocious emergence as a teenaged rock writer, Sommer describes the Zelig-like experiences of his life, mounts controversial arguments about well-known artists, connects music and politics in unexpected ways and reflects on a handful artists whose deaths affected him.

Grouped into seven themed sections, the book covers U2 and R.E.M. to the Beatles and Taylor Swift, Bob Dylan to Frank Sinatra and Bruce Springsteen. It also includes in-depth interviews with Dave Davies of the Kinks and a previously unpublished interview with Mark E. Smith of the Fall.

Sample chapter titles:

• I Was Almost a Temporary Beastie Boy
• Meet the Beatles' First Left-Handed Bassist
• What Was the First Punk Rock Record?
• Weezer's cover of Toto's "Africa" Is the Most Repugnant Pop Recording of All Time
• How Kent State Helped Create the Template for American Indie Rock

With its diverse collection of subjects and entertaining opinions, this colorful, rollicking collection of writing will appeal to (and perhaps infuriate) a wide variety of music fans.

Billy Idol: "Tim Sommer goes deep on a whole century of rock and pop culture, from Bowie to Buddy Bolden, Spike Milligan to Taylor Swift, and everything in between. Punk was always a state of mind, as much as a sound or a look, and this book is punk AF."

Thurston Moore, co-founder of Sonic Youth: "It was the pleasure of noise, be it from the margins or from the mainstream, that inspired Tim to pontificate so excitedly. While his "dispatches" are modestly critical and discerning, they are essentially informed by joy, an aspect of shared dialogue utterly welcoming -- and one the world necessitates now more than ever."

Geoff Edgers, national arts reporter, The Washington Post and author of Walk This Way: Run-DMC, Aerosmith, and the Song That Changed American Music Forever: "Sommer is a throwback to when people writing about music wrote whatever they wanted, took shocking takes not to garner social media attention but because they really believed in them, and did not worry about industry repercussions. He's also a little insane. This is a truly original document of the kind of smart, free, joyous writing we so rarely find anywhere today. Tim Sommer writes because he has to, not because he's trying to impress anyone, and his takes -- on the Beatles, Glenn Branca, Kent State and just about anything that pops into his brain -- are refreshingly disinterested in scoring social media points."