Since the emergence of “rock culture” in the mid-1960s, it has been a prodigious source of configurations of urban settings and characterizations of Buenos Aires, as well as of youth lifestyles that represent ways of being in the city. Although the usual name “national rock” tends to withdraw the local, urban ingredient, one of the fundamental goals of rock – as it is acutely shown by this book – was to provide a generational succession to tango in order to give Buenos Aires a modern and young identity. This is the first great merit of Te devora la ciudad: to restore, with analytical skill and interpretative acuity, the relevance of the city in rock music or even better – as the city is not a place but multiple interrelations – to reveal the cities of rock.

By resorting to rich and diverse resources, this book manages to address simultaneously the urban practices of the musicians and their audience (tours of artists around the city, their social relations spheres, their spaces of music production and consumption) as well as the geographic imagination of songs, lyrics, album covers, stories by musicians and texts of specialized journals that show the diverse identities of Buenos Aires created by this musical genre.

Specifically, this book proposes a journey through three periods: the bohemian rock of the sixties, the rock for the masses under the democratic transition, and the “neighborhood” rock of the young people of the Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires in the 1990s. By placing “rock culture” within the geography of Buenos Aires, Sanchez Trolliet finds a very original way to convey the impact of the urban, economic and political transformations on young people, the difficulties of middle classes and the different exchanges between high culture and popular culture areas during the second half of the 20th Century.