Born in London in 1963, Simon Reynolds began writing about music and popular culture as a founding member of Monitor, a pop journal based in Oxford, where he had studied history. Monitor lasted six issues before expiring in 1986, by which time he had joined the British weekly music magazine Melody Maker as a staff writer. Thinkpieces and interviews drawn from his late Eighties writing were collected in Blissed Out: The Raptures of Rock (Serpent's Tail, 1990). In 1990 Reynolds quit Melody Maker and started dividing his time between London and New York, moving to Manhattan permanently at the end of 1994. Since going freelance, he has contributed to magazines including The New York Times, Village Voice, Spin, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, The Observer, Artforum, The Wire, and Uncut. The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion & Rock'n'Roll, co-written with Joy Press, was published in 1995 (Serpent's Tail in the UK and Europe; Harvard University Press in America), followed in 1998 by Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (Picador), also known as Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture in America (Little, Brown, 1998; Routledge paperback, 1999). Reynolds' essays have appeared in over twenty collections and anthologies. Over the last decade, in addition to freelance writing, he had made regular pro bono deposits of discourse at the site Blissout (now retired but surviving as an archive of Reynolds' writing, including the Faves and Unfaves of the Year lists). In late 2002, he started Blissblog. And during the two years it took to complete Rip It Up, managed to generate even more blog text than book text. He lives in the East Village with his wife Joy Press and son Kieran.