Rock It

The thing about me is I really like to listen to music, but I have almost zero contextual knowledge. I never remember who sings what, what was on whose album, when someone was around, who is in the band, what other bands they were in, or what type of music anything is. This results in me constantly asking Josh "who is this?" sometimes more than once during the same song.

So, I was kind of interested when the next book that popped up in my random book generator was the rather goofily titled Rolling Stone's Alt-Rock-a-Rama: An Outrageous Compendium of Facts, Fiction, Trivia, and Critiques on Alternative Rock, edited by Scott Schinder and the editors of Rolling Stone Press (1996). This is an anthology of lists, essays and rambling thoughts by the critics, fans and purveyors of alternative music, very broadly construed (basically anything that isn't top 40, lots of punk and rockers, with a focus on the 1970s and 1980s and a little of the grungy early 1990s).

The first thirty pages or so cooled my fire of interest. Pages and pages of lists of albums and singles from bands that I couldn't really place, describing the sound in little blurbs that only referred to other bands I didn't know. List after list after list. Bleh.

I almost gave up.

I'm glad I didn't though, as once I got through the mucky first couple of chapters, the book really hit its stride. Some of the essays and things are pretty dated, and some are just goofy, but there is a lot of interesting stuff in there. The best bits are things that were actually written by musicians, the worst bits are the self-conscious claptrap of rock critics nostalgic for their young lives in New York City in the early 1970s.

And Henry Rollins' contribution was mercifully brief.