An Emotional Memoir of Martha Quinn

A thoughtful and entertaining look at how music and culture infect (“cross-pollinate?”) each other, Alan Licht’s An Emotional Memoir of Martha Quinn succeeds by being real. Paper, ink, binding – it’s all there – but Licht, a long-time musician — and writer of music-inspired commentary — has brought the lessons learned, the high and low-lights of the last few decades in the realms of popular music, back home again. 


As his preface is quick to alert you, Alan Licht’s An Emotional Memoir of Martha Quinn doesn’t shed any light whatsoever on what has happened to that charming MTV VJ in the last twenty years. It does, however, offer significant insight into what has happened to some of a few of the rest of us. In his own words, Licht’s book “is a highly subjective survey of the last two decades as seen through my prism as a music performer, listener, scenester, and, occasionally, writer. It traces the changes in the New York and national underground music scenes, paralleling my personal journey through adolescence to adulthood.” 


For many of “us,” music was (and continues to be!) how we divined our way through the general horrors of adolescence. It was how we defended (and defined) ourselves against classmates, parents, teachers, the dreaded Man, and even our very own friends. But what happens to your relationship with music once you “grow up?” Does it necessarily fade in its intensity as you become, to a greater or lesser degree, a part of the culture from which you worked so hard to distinguish yourself? Is it the nature of all subcultures to just disappear; or – worse, even — to be absorbed into mainstream culture and lose all meaning? In a series of interlocking essays, An Emotional Memoir of Martha Quinn follows the author as he traces the role that music has played in his own life, from a lockdown childhood in the “jail sentence” of the New Jersey suburbs to a career as a musician. 


That Alan Licht’s rock ’n‘ roll upbringing was concurrent with musical developments during the dark days of the 1980s, not to mention the dark days of grunge rock, and the extremely dark days of post-rock, makes this book one of the first of its kind. That it is penned by an active participant in these changing times, and a New Yorker to boot, makes it that much more prescient.


Licht manages to speak about his generation without trying to speak for them (a lesson this 1-sheet has failed to absorb). His style is simultaneously sharp and casual as he slips easily between such seemingly disparate subjects as A Flock of Seagulls’ (the band, not the flock) unfortunate haircuts (which he describes as looking “like some origami fantasia on a merkin”) and the effect of the dissolution of the Soviet Union on American youth culture (in short — the effect was grunge!). 


At once earnest and warmly sarcastic, An Emotional Memoir of Martha Quinn, Alan Licht’s deeply personal examination of the relationship between music, culture, and identity, reads like a long conversation you might have when staying up too late with one of your smartest friends, pausing only to hit the loo – there to discover the empty cardboard tube that surrounds the dowel, and a perfectly good 3/4ths of a roll sitting on the window sill. I mean, Jesus Christ — even Lester Bangs changed a toilet paper roll every once in awhile!