Bombastic Intro

I’ll read just about any musician bio/memoir, even about bands or musicians I don’t care about.* I can whip through them pretty fast, and since a lot of them follow a pattern (Individual artist bios almost always start in the middle, like, “I’m on stage at the Dillweed Festival in front of 20,000 screaming fans. But I still see myself as the son of a ragpicker from East Shefferdshire”), it’s not like I’m taxing my brainpower or anything.

I’m old enough to remember the days when the popular music section of the library or bookstore featured a gazillion books on the Beatles or Bob Dylan, and maybe some History of Rock and Roll tome that might mention the Ramones or the Clash for a paragraph. Now the situation is almost reversed, where I’m thinking I don’t need to read any more books on Joy Division, which would have blown young me’s mind.

I’m also old enough that the music scenes I grew up and participated in are getting their own books published – just last month I read a book with a chapter on Hot Water Music - like, actual people I know. Weird.

Sometimes my reading results in expanding my horizons and discovering I love genres that I had previously rejected, like “This is Reggae Music” or Peter Guralanik’s work on country artists. Sometimes they’re good for stories of shitty people behaving badly, like with “Hammer of the Gods,” “No One Here Gets Out Alive,” or “The Dirt.” For the most part, artists’ early days are more interesting to me – artists desperately trying to express an idea with limited means or interest from the wider world. Off the top of my head, there are a handful that are the gold standard – Patti Smith’s “Just Kids,” Peter Guralnick’s double book Elvis bio, “Satan is Real: The Ballad of the Louvin Brothers,” Henry Rollins’ “Get in the Van,” Nick Tosches’ dreamlike “Hellfire,” and David Lee Roth’s listening-to-an insane-person-on-the-Megabus “Crazy From the Heat.” I’m sure there are tons more I’m forgetting.

So those are the good. The bad? I don’t know. Most of those I tend to forget almost immediately. One way to piss me off is to make obvious Googlable mistakes or write sentences like this joker did in a Lou Reed biography: "Unlike nearly everything else in the mainstream, the Velvets refused to whitewash Marvin Gaye or Chuck Berry and suture the inchoate fragments into a palatable whole consistent with bourgeois repression, but as a result, they remained marginalized on the periphery of the hegemonic monoculture: it was the price of playing against the grain."

Why would anyone write a sentence like that? Why?

With those parameters in mind, and inspired by Moby’s humblebrag wrapped in a lie of a book that I picked up from work, I decided to launch a blog reviewing popular music books, because apparently it’s 1993 and that’s the best way to reach people. The goal is to get at least two reviews up a month, but we’ll see how it goes.

*I’ll also read anything about people surviving shipwrecks or horrible conditions for futile expeditions, but Big Publishing doesn't release as many of those as they should.