Rock and Roll Always Forgets (2011)

Chuck Eddy's third book—and his fourth for that matter, which came a few years later—is a collection of published pieces from the '80s, '90s, and forward, and finds him in a more professional mood. He has sanded away some of the sharp edges and elbows (there's less name-calling) and he might even feel more confident advocating for the things he likes, like Bob Seger, Kid Rock, Def Leppard, etc. We always knew he was a good writer, prolific with the hot takes and willing to bend a baked pretzel into shape whatever it takes, but he also turned out to be a pretty good journalist as well. I understand he objects to being called contrarian or iconoclastic. Who wouldn't? The implications of his basic argument remain mostly true, consistent from the first two books and articulated better all the time: social forces guide music taste more than we like to admit. He pushes back, by instinct, against all conventional wisdom. That's his thing. He's like a photograph negative. If everyone else sees white, he shows black. He's right too, in a way—his arguments hold up, even when he's off something I like or talking up something I don't. He's not afraid to take a stand. I'm still often not in synch with his taste but that's all right, isn't it? I appreciate at least his appreciation of Eminem—well, the truth is Eddy is a bit of a Detroit and/or Michigan homer, and the truth is also that you could do a lot worse than that for bias. His writing is always straightforward and illuminating, he can spin up a good feature story, and it's possible there is more music that I actually want to chase down in this book than in his first two combined, which means it might be the best at the basic job of music journalist. The next one, Terminated for Reasons of Taste, is a pretty good roundup as well.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic. And go get Terminated for Reasons of Taste while you're at it.

The Accidental Evolution of Rock 'n' Roll (1997)

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.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

Stairway to Hell (1991 / 1998)

Chuck Eddy's list of the 500 best heavy metal albums ("in the Universe," it says) is a monumental undertaking by any definition. Five hundred is a lot of anything—600, actually, because this second edition I've got updates the original list with 100 more albums released after the first edition, more or less. On one hand the book is a stone clinic in writing album reviews—from the materials of hustling freelance gigs for a dime and working zines for the outlet, this book honed Eddy's album review writing into an art form unto itself. He likely got the book contract in the first place because he'd spent much of the previous 10 years as one of the most tireless, prolific, and unique jukebox fountainheads in the annals of rock critic journalism. There was just one slight problem here. While Eddy's rampaging consumption of music made him an eclectic sponge for pop and rock music of many stripes, his taste in fact stands somewhat athwart of actual heavy metal currents. It made and still makes for some strange results, perhaps most famously putting a Teena Marie album (Emerald City) audaciously into the top 10, albeit at a judiciously modest #9, while entirely shutting out Iron Maiden and Judas Priest (from a list of 500!). The problem is not made better by Eddy's various terse put-downs and constant baiting, gleefully and cavalierly dissing hippie shibboleths as well as the intelligence of many of his review subjects and their fans too at alarmingly high rates. He's a bit of Moe to the rest of us Larry and Curly. It's no wonder they're mad in places like Amazon reviews and metal forums. He makes me mad too once in a while. He says, for example, the only worthwhile Jimi Hendrix album is one of those label-dictated cannibalized best-of jobs, but then proceeds to include most of the rest of Hendrix's catalog, including posthumous titles and albums even I don't like, though often with glancing insults. Hey man, which is it? Do you like Jimi Hendrix or not? (We know now, from a later book, that Eddy had little or no budget for this one and had to work basically with what he had on hand, which likely explains the Iron Maiden and Judas Priest MIAs. He wouldn't have liked them anyway, because he already doesn't like a lot of the albums he includes here.)

Still, if you take Eddy and Stairway to Hell on their own listy album-review terms, it's pretty impressive, mostly coherent, and often a gas to breeze through. He's plunged well into the physical pleasures of sonic assault and writes about it vividly, almost always with made-up words, e.g., "kaboomeration," that instantly make more sense than anything that overpraised lavender-suited nitwit Lewis Carroll ever came up with (as Eddy himself might observe of the British children's author). He's translating aural experience into words as well or better than anyone has ever danced about architecture. And anyone who's ever tried to be a rock critic can tell you one of the hardest parts of the job is describing the music and the experience of hearing it. He's often making it look effortless here. The book and all its referents are older now—there are lots of titles I just don't know and likely never will at this point (especially the cassette and EP releases). But as far as the eccentric picks I knew go, I had little problem with them. Prince's Purple Rain, for example, isn't only metal but it's certainly also metal. Ditto the Miles Davis picks Agharta, Pangaea, and Jack Johnson. On taste Eddy and I are widely separated, which has always been generally true. In this realm I like Motorhead, Slayer, Judas Priest, and Black Sabbath. He likes AC/DC, Def Leppard, Poison, and Guns N' Roses. He really doesn't like some of mine. I really don't like some of his. To each their own—the truth is that metal probably has about the same priority for both of us, which is not high. Stairway to Hell may be a little sour and constricted in some ways, but it can also be a blast, honestly laugh-out-loud funny like the best Three Stooges episodes, and full of amazing surges of writing.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.