Joseph Bottum has written an excellent review of Chrissie Hynde’s new rock ’n’ roll memoir Reckless: My Life as a Pretender. Here’s a taste:

Chrissie Hynde clearly intends the book instead as an attempt to understand why she was so driven to seek powerful experiences.

To her credit, she indulges in none of the sentimentality that insists on risk-taking even as it demands that none of the risks issue in bad consequences. The narrative she lays out in Reckless is one of ceaseless motion. As a young woman, she saved up $500, bought a plane ticket to England, and dove headfirst into the nascent punk rock scene of the early 1970s. She sought what she imagined her Midwestern American upbringing had deprived her of, and she got it.

In England she had peculiar love affairs with Ray Davies and Iggy Pop, wrote music reviews, worked at clothing stores and other menial jobs alongside people like Johnny Rotten, did drugs with future members of the Clash, and got to know people in the London music scene from David Bowie to Nick Lowe. And all of it added up to . . . less than she expected. Less than she wanted. Less than she needed. The cool affect of her voice and stage persona were well earned. She had seen and experienced an enormous amount by the time she achieved stardom at age 27, but she never quite figured out how she was supposed to feel about it.

All the deaths along the way have made her realize, in the retrospect of a woman in her sixties, how reckless she had been—in the literal sense of the word: unreckoning of consequences. She was lucky not to have died herself, on several occasions. Lucky to have had success find her. Lucky to have met the people she met. Lucky to have had her parents. Lucky, for that matter, to have had opportunities for experience, however hard she had to pursue them.

That American cult of experience is an old one. I suppose it could be traced back to the pioneers, trailing off to the West—or back to the American Founding, for that matter. Such revolutionaries as Ethan Allen and Samuel Adams are hard to understand without it. At the beginning of the 20th century, the wanderings of Jack London formed a central part of his literary hero status, and after the Second World War, the cult of experience—the notion that many and varied experiences lie at the root of wisdom—reached new heights with the beatniks and their hippie successors. That’s the vision Chrissie Hynde pursued into the underground world of punk, and the vision she pursued in her music.

If you are interested in writing more on this topic — “What is the significance of the rock and roll quest for experience?” — then I encourage you to submit your own reflections on that topic (with reference to Chrissie Hynde, or to any other musician of your own choosing) in manuscript form to The American Journal of Semiotics for its Special Issue on Music.