Either way, it’s a fine piece of punk journalism, and a barrel of laughs for like-minded readers.
A splendidly ill-tempered assault on the music industry, nostalgic boomers, and rock stars who refuse to die.
Strausbaugh, the 50ish editor of the New York Press, establishes an axiom at the outset: “Rock is youth music.” His chief targets are therefore the doddering stars of old who, half a lifetime ago, had hits with gummy tunes such as “Hang on Sloopy” and “Young Girl”—and, for that matter, “Satisfaction”—and now, decades later, continue to trot them out for their fellow grayhairs by way of some mass refusal to acknowledge that none of them is young anymore. Fond of gory details, Strausbaugh exhibits for our consideration the case of Kim Simmonds, guitarist for the ’70s British blues-rock band Savoy Brown, who took a bunch of ringers out on tour a couple of years back to squeeze whatever dollars he could from whatever remained of his constituency. “He looked about seventy-five,” Strausbaugh writes, “with one of those terrifyingly runny melting-cheese faces old British guys get from a lifetime of hoisting pints.” Simmonds is not alone, and neither is he the worst of the lot; Strausbaugh gleefully name-checks a phalanx of geezers—Jethro Tull, Yes, the Allman Brothers, and the once-mighty Rolling Stones—who have no business prancing and preening like teenagers, but whose business it is to do so all the same. Business is good, he continues, because the children of the ’60s and ’70s, steeped in nostalgia and bent on recapturing the “magic” of their teen years, refuse to admit that they’re now the enemy; artist and audience are complicit in mass denial exercised in the form of an unholy musical genre that Strausbaugh terms “colostomy rock.” If you’re a fan of latter-day Bowie or the Boss, you’ll likely be irritated by Strausbaugh’s scattershot attack on your heroes—which means, Strausbaugh would probably say, that he’s done his job.
Either way, it’s a fine piece of punk journalism, and a barrel of laughs for like-minded readers.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-85984-629-7
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
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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