Night Moves 
 
Jessica Hopper 
 
University of Texas Press, First Edition edition 
 
Jessica Hopper collected up two decades of her music criticism recently and it’s a great read – covering hip-hop, pop and indie. She was a publicist, DJ, mover and groover before – and around – being a paid, published music writer. So for her next book she’s taken her own diaries from the early 00s when she was in her late 20s and created a memoir that mixes autofiction with nostalgic prose-poems in paean to a now lost time. 
 
Bob Seger’s Night Moves might come from a different era and be tied to a different place but it’s the perfect signposting, the mix of former glories and hero stories with a learned wisdom. Seger was singing of Detroit in the 60s and 70s, Hopper is reflecting on Chicago in the 90s and 00s and her sharp prose, cool stories, weariness and wonder transported me there and yet I’ve never been to the places she describes. It also had me thinking about my own time covering scenes in Wellington around the same time and only a little bit older. 
 
The music can be felt on almost every page, but this isn’t just a collection of pop-culture stories. It’s about town planning and gentrification – it’s about the loss we feel because of nostalgia’s pull, the loss of carefree times, before responsibilities, when weekends could sometimes run for four or five days at a time.  
 
It’s a slim volume, written in little bursts, page-sprints that are self-contained but all building towards the bigger theme and aim of this book. 
 
In just 200 pages Hopper puts herself and readers right in the sweat and pulse of the nightclubs, the grot and grit after all-night DJ sets, the heartbreak and excitement of bands imploding, new bands forming, of bars and venues feeling like a home away from home. 
 
It’s a superb piece of writing. Thrilling and sad and fond and heartfelt. It’s like watching a writer peek in on an earlier version of themselves – finding sadness within the joy and the amber-glow of happier times within the uncertainty of early adulthood and beyond, of walking streets and feeling connected to the heart of the city.
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