An impressive variety of music is surveyed—rock, jazz, reggae, Afropop, Brazilian Tropicalia—in these reviews and interviews reprinted from the Nation, the Atlantic Monthly, and elsewhere. The collection starts, pointedly, with a Paul Simon interview about his collaborations with South African musicians on the controversial Graceland album. This story raises hopes for big topics from the essays to come: synthesis of international styles, cultural appropriation, politics, and music. But Santoro (Dancing in Your Head: Jazz, Blues, Rock, and Beyond, not reviewed) delivers a more diffuse collection. The pieces are about albums, or musicians, or musical ideas explored with particular musicians as examples—or all of the above. Sting discusses how ``there aren't any original ideas'' and where creativity does come from. The Bob Marley chapter serves as a short, informative history of reggae music, featuring Bob Marley. In the section on jazz bassist Tim Drummond, Santoro is content, for the most part, to let this outspoken man hold court. The jazz greats are perhaps best covered: John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, Thelonious Monk, and others. Perhaps the influences and heirs-apparent are clearer in jazz. Or maybe jazz musicians just have the best stories to tell—Mingus, for instance, checks into Bellevue for a rest, ``as if it were a resort hotel,'' and then has trouble getting out. Sometimes Santoro's hip, smart style threatens to distract. Trail-blazing saxophonist John Zorn's music, for instance, contains ``pieces of a subatomic jigsaw puzzle whose Heisenbergian reality is connected by dots in the mind of the observer.'' Intelligent coverage of major artists—Elvis Costello, Bruce Springsteen, and David Byrne are all included—will appeal to many readers. But the overarching theme of cross-cultural pollination remains merely a rough reference point for the volume—a title pasted across a disparate, if thoughtful collection of writings.
Pub Date: July 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-19-509869-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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