A comprehensive yet pat and sometimes patchy tome that conveys a vicarious understanding of a gritty musical era.
Brisk overview of New York City’s rock ’n’ roll tradition, from doo-wop to hard core, mirroring the city’s transformations.
Former Seconds magazine publisher Blush (American Hair Metal, 2006, etc.) intuitively understands the rock scene’s perpetual mechanics. His interviews with many key figures provide the core of this survey, in which he argues, “New York rock musicians and scenesters deserve way more credit than they’ve received.” After discussing precedents like Tin Pan Alley songwriting, the author focuses on the cultural foment and urban decay of the 1970s. Moving beyond the era’s punk explosion, Blush explores broader tales of musical innovation and competition against the scary backdrop of pre–Rudolph Giuliani NYC: “Noise rock achieved monumentality because of New York’s monumentality—in this case, of something great gone to hell.” Later, as neighborhoods gentrified and alternative rock took off, local bands tried to stand out; Blush asserts, “ ‘East Village Biker Rock’ was different from the same era’s Sunset Strip glam metal.” Yet many interviewees agree that the city’s creative vitality has been quashed, and in the 1990s, as one indie rocker notes, “everything got expensive.” Blush concurs, explaining how “The Jewish Lower East Side became the alt-rock LES.” The book is structured in support of this narrative, with chapters grouped by genre (e.g. “Glitter Rock,” “No Wave”) and then divided into “The Rise,” “The Scene,” “The Music,” and “The Fall.” In each, the author focuses on some representational acts and then briefly describes others that never moved beyond their scenes. Blush ably controls his sprawling narrative but depends too much on fragmentary quotes from scene personalities, which become repetitive, offering variations of one hard-core skinhead’s recollection: “Back then it was so true, so street.” Blush himself also falls into generic maxims—e.g. “The ’90s were a tough time for rock music, and here were twentysomethings having sexy fun amid a decidedly no-fun era.”
A comprehensive yet pat and sometimes patchy tome that conveys a vicarious understanding of a gritty musical era.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-08361-6
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
Elegant essays marked by surprising shifts and unexpected connections.
Largely autobiographical meditations and wanderings through landscapes external and internal.
National Book Critics Circle Award–winner Solnit (River of Shadows: Edward Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, 2003, etc.) roams through a large territory here. The book cries out for an explanatory subtitle: “field guide” shouldn’t be taken as a literal description of these eclectic memories, keen observations and provocative musings. Four of Solnit’s essays have the same title, “The Blue of Distance,” but the first segues from the blue in Renaissance paintings to a turquoise blouse the author wore as a child, then to the blue of distance seen on a walk across the drought-shrunken Great Salt Lake. The second presents Cabeza de Vaca, a Spanish explorer who wandered for years in the Americas, and then several white children taken captive by Indians; their stories demonstrate that a person can cease to be lost not only by returning, but also by turning into someone else. The third blue essay explores the world of country and western music, full of tales of loss and longing. The fourth introduces the eccentric artist Yves Klein, who patented the formula for his special electric blue paint and claimed to be launching a new Blue Age. How does it all fit in? Don’t ask, just enjoy, for Solnit is a captivating writer. Woven in and out of these four pieces and the five others that alternate with them are Solnit’s immigrant ancestors, lost friends, former lovers, favorite old movies, her own dreams, the house she grew up in, harsh deserts, animals on the edge of extinction and abandoned buildings. All become material for the author’s explorations of loss, losing and being lost.
Elegant essays marked by surprising shifts and unexpected connections.Pub Date: July 11, 2005
ISBN: 0-670-03421-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The memoir of George Dawson, who learned to read when he was 98, places his life in the context of the entire 20th century in this inspiring, yet ultimately blighted, biography. Dawson begins his story with an emotional bang: his account of witnessing the lynching of a young African-American man falsely accused of rape. America’s racial caste system and his illiteracy emerge as the two biggest obstacles in Dawson’s life, but a full view of the man overcoming the obstacles remains oddly hidden. Travels to Ohio, Canada, and Mexico reveal little beyond Dawson’s restlessness, since nothing much happens to him during these wanderings. Similarly, the diverse activities he finds himself engaging in—bootlegging in St. Louis, breaking horses, attending cockfights—never really advance the reader’s understanding of the man. He calls himself a “ladies’ man” and hints at a score of exciting stories, but then describes only his decorous marriage. Despite the personal nature of this memoir, Dawson remains a strangely aloof figure, never quite inviting the reader to enter his world. In contrast to Dawson’s diffidence, however, Glaubman’s overbearing presence, as he repeatedly parades himself out to converse with Dawson, stifles any momentum the memoir might develop. Almost every chapter begins with Glaubman presenting Dawson with a newspaper clipping or historical fact and asking him to comment on it, despite the fact that Dawson often does not remember or never knew about the event in question. Exasperated readers may wonder whether Dawson’s life and his accomplishments, his passion for learning despite daunting obstacles, is the tale at hand, or whether the real issue is his recollections of Archduke Ferdinand. Dawson’s achievements are impressive and potentially exalting, but the gee-whiz nature of the tale degrades it to the status of yet another bowl of chicken soup for the soul, with a narrative frame as clunky as an old bone.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50396-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
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