A canny blend of punkish attitude and discographical smarts that blasts boys-club assumptions about pop music.
A wide-ranging assortment of essays and reportage on rock, pop, country, and hip-hop, conscientiously putting women front and center.
The title of Hopper’s book (which revises and expands a 2015 edition) isn’t a brag but rather an air horn announcing a problem: Just as female musicians have been dismissed, marginalized, and abused by a patriarchal industry, Hopper is just one of many women music journalists who was told “it was perverse to tangle up music criticism with feminism or my personal experience.” So being “first” is as much a lament as an assertion, but the best pieces show how thoughtfully the author has used her position. Essays on Liz Phair, Kim Gordon, Miley Cyrus, and Lana Del Rey underscore how the negative “personas” applied to them are often used to obscure and undermine their talent. In one emotionally intense interview, Björk reveals how, more than four decades into her career, she’s had to prove she writes her songs. Hopper elevates underappreciated women-led acts like D.C. punks Chalk Circle and calls out misogyny in the system: Her landmark 2003 essay, “Emo: Where the Girls Aren’t,” chastised the scene for confusing sad-boy sensitivity with proactive feminism, and she reports on women country artists’ oft-futile efforts to gain airplay. The author convincingly argues that staying silent on such inequities has consequences, a point underscored by an interview with journalist Jim DeRogatis on R. Kelly’s track record of sexual assault and music journalists’ turning a blind eye to it. Hopper is stronger as a reporter and cultural observer than a track-by-track reviewer; the collection is padded with reviews that reflect her wide range of tastes but are stylistically flat. However, as she points out in the fiery conclusion, the book exists in part to expose other female writers to what’s possible with diligence and a refusal to compromise. In that regard, it’s essential reading. Samantha Irby provides the foreword.
A canny blend of punkish attitude and discographical smarts that blasts boys-club assumptions about pop music.Pub Date: July 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-374-53899-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
A fun if overly flamboyant appreciation of a TV giant.
A biography of American late-night television’s biggest star.
Zehme, author of biographies of Frank Sinatra and Hugh Hefner, had a lifelong love of Tonight Show host Johnny Carson. In 1973, at age 15, Zehme was “already a full-blown Carson fanboy.” As a reporter for Rolling Stone, he tried unsuccessfully to secure an interview to coincide with Carson’s 1992 retirement after a 30-year run. In 2002, Zehme, now with Esquire, “gets extended face time” with the star for a piece to mark 10 years since Carson’s departure. Shortly after Carson’s death in 2005, Zehme began work on a biography. The task was overwhelming—“there was always more to be gleaned”—even before Zehme’s 2013 diagnosis of stage 4 colorectal cancer. He died in 2023, having finished only the first three-quarters of this biography. Thomas, a longtime Chicago arts reporter, has completed the book in time for Carson’s 2025 centenary. The result is an admiring work that nonetheless acknowledges the lows as well as the highs of Carson’s life—he had three divorces—and career, from his ill-fated 1955 variety program The Johnny Carson Show, to his 1957-62 stint as host of the ABC game show Who Do You Trust?, to his taking over The Tonight Show from Jack Paar in 1962. It’s easy to tell where Zehme left off and Thomas took over. The tone changes dramatically, from Zehme’s florid style to Thomas’s drier approach. Those florid passages, which make up most of the book, are baroque in the extreme, with lines like, “And so, like sun and moon and oxygen and ionosphere, Johnny Carson was always there, reliable and steadfast.” Despite the purple prose, the result is an entertaining look at not only a unique figure in 20th-century popular culture but also a bygone era in American television.
A fun if overly flamboyant appreciation of a TV giant.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781451645279
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2024
The choir is sure to enjoy this impassioned preaching on familiar progressive themes.
Essays on current political topics by a high-profile actor and activist.
Milano explains in an introduction that she began writing this uneven collection while dealing with a severe case of Covid-19 and suffering from "persistent brain fog.” In the first essay, "On Being Unapologetically Fucked Up,” the author begins by fuming over a February 2019 incident in which she compared MAGA caps worn by high school kids to KKK hoods. She then runs through a grab bag of flash-point news items (police shootings, border crimes, sexual predators in government), deploying the F-bomb with abandon and concluding, "What I know is that fucked up is as fundamental a state of the world as night and day. But I know there is better. I know that ‘less fucked up’ is a state we can live in.” The second essay, "Believe Women," discusses Milano’s seminal role in the MeToo movement; unfortunately, it is similarly conversational in tone and predictable in content. One of the few truly personal essays, "David," about the author's marriage, refutes the old saw about love meaning never having to say you're sorry, replacing it with "Love means you can suggest a national sex strike and your husband doesn't run away screaming." Milano assumes, perhaps rightly, that her audience is composed of followers and fans; perhaps these readers will know what she is talking about in the seemingly allegorical "By Any Other Name," about her bad experience with a certain rosebush. "Holy shit, giving birth sucked," begins one essay. "Words are weird, right?" begins the next. "Welp, this is going to piss some of you off. Hang in there," opens a screed about cancel culture—though she’s entirely correct that “it’s childish, divisive, conceited, and Trumpian to its core.” By the end, however, Milano's intelligence, compassion, integrity, and endurance somewhat compensate for her lack of literary polish.
The choir is sure to enjoy this impassioned preaching on familiar progressive themes.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-18329-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
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