My sense from rock critic Chuck Eddy's fans is that this treatise is a favorite in terms of either a kind of freewheeling zine aesthetic of come-what-may bricolage popular culture interpretation, or a unified field theory of pop music, or both. Or a man going mad. At its best the big think piece is a penetrating meditation on songcraft and all the incidental fragments that go into it. The subtitle, A Misguided Tour Through Popular Music, clarifies that the scope extends beyond the rock era as well as astride it. In places it reminded me of Charlie Gillett, whose Sound of the City may still be the best breakdown of '50s rock 'n' roll, and in other places it reminded me of Nik Cohn's Rock From the Beginning, which thrilled me when I was 15. More often it reminded me of Richard Meltzer's Aesthetics of Rock, which mystifies almost as much as annoys. I like the idea of iconoclastic debunkeration and the puncturing of conventional wisdom as much as the next guy, but inevitably some of the accompanying contempt for norms can splash around too much. In this case, the index (a work of art in itself, I must say) enables quick ways to them, e.g., Nirvana, Sonic Youth, Bruce Springsteen. I have some sense where the animus is coming from but it's wearing. Even when I'm on his side in terms of taste—his spirited defense of disco, notably, which really needed it in 1997—I'm not always comfortable with the regular dismissals of people as dorks, morons, and nitwits. He's still got the Moe thing going but it might not be as funny as it was in Stairway to Hell. Sometimes it works—I like "incomprehensible French discourse doofus Michel Foucault." But more often it chafes, especially when it's your objects of love. I know, it's just a joke, don't take it personally.
Chuck Eddy and I came up the same way at the same time, college paper rock critics in the early '80s, though I'm a few years older and he's much better (full disclosure, he contributed to my zine in the '90s). We were privy to sizable stores of free record company dross for many years and a lot of it was better than you'd think, though quite spotty. The center of gravity of the industry remains the star system, however (Beatles, Michael Jackson, Taylor Swift, etc.), and you can't fight City Hall. One interview with Beyonce is worth 27 erudite record reviews, even if the tunes are kooky irresistible fun and you'd be surprised. But Chuck is here to fight City Hall. In many ways his tastes run to a certain mainstream themselves, John Cougar Mellencamp and Axl Rose and country music, but the deconstruction / reinvention project at hand here involves hyphenated adjectival parts of speech and the approximations of music representing them, such as "-punk-," "-bubble-," "-country-," and of course "-disco-." Square that up in your mind, remembering they are often treated as somewhat interchangeable, and there is a big four-dimensional cube to fill of cross-section categories like "country-bubble-pop" and such. Chuck Eddy the force of nature and encyclopedic sponge of just-miss pop music goes to work connecting the dots of B product. It's an impressive high-wire act. I'm not sure it succeeds, but kudos to him for getting up there and doing it. He can work up some pretty funny bits with this material and make some surprising connections, though too many of the referents were unfortunately unknown to me. Apparently our 40 acres of obscure promos didn't have that much intersection. Accidental Evolution goes trailing down some weird byways of pop music. I believe there are still bins of dollar vinyl albums out there. You could do worse than this as a guide.
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