Why Rock Criticism Still Sucks

"...this essentially reactionary attitude became the prevailing orthodoxy in rock's critical establishment." And remains so to this day, I fear.

The dominant [critical] view came to be that of [Jon] Landau and Esquire's Robert Christgau, and it focused on two things: technical excellence and the primacy of the African American roots of the music. As Chrtistgau wrote, "the problem is that when poetry, musical complexity, and psychedelic basso-profundity come into the music, its original values - simplicity, directness, charm - are often obscured." This became code for limiting rock to three-minute songs with clever hooks, and the [Grateful] Dead clearly failed that test. That spring, Christgau wrote, "Most hippie rock and roll musicians exhibit the same in-group pretentiousness that characterized the folk and jazz purists who were their predecessors." Though Christgau himself would be more flexible in the future, Landau would not. In his defining critical manifesto, "Rock and Art," Landau declaimed, "Rock was not intended to be reflective or profound." Where this left Bob Dylan went unsaid, but this essentially reactionary attitude became the prevailing orthodoxy in rock's critical establishment.

- From A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead by Dennis McNally

(Art by Bob Thomas)

Goodbye, Summer Reading

Looks like my fellow LibraryThing members are (for the most part) putting aside the beach reads and cracking open a lot of Serious Literature for the fall.

WHAT LIBRARYTHING MEMBERS ARE READING - SEPTEMBER 2010:
1. Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins 58
2. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson 41
3. The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson 34
4. The Passage by Justin Cronin 29
5. Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert 21
6. Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert 18
7. Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins 17
8. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel 15
9. The Pillars of The Earth by Ken Follett 15
10. Freedom: A Novel by Jonathan Franzen 14
11. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larsson 14
12. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy 13
13. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë 13
14. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell 12
15. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee 12
16. Kraken by China Miéville 11
17. The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi 11
18. The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery 11
19. Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen 11
20. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak 11
21. Faithful Place by Tana French 10
22. The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton 10
23. Under the Dome by Stephen King 10
24. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace 10
25. The Help by Kathryn Stockett 10
26. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë 10
27. The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters 9
28. The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown 9
29. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins 9
30. Dracula by Bram Stoker 9
31. On the Road by Jack Kerouac 9
32. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley 9
33. Odyssey by Homer 9
34. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez 9
35. One Day by David Nicholls 8
36. The Children's Book by A. S. Byatt 8
37. The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver 8
38. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen 8
39. Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami 8
40. A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin 8
41. The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón 8
42. The Road by Cormac McCarthy 8
43. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov 8
44. Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer 8
45. The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger 8
46. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling 8
47. Nightshade by Andrea Cremer 7
48. The Clockwork Angel by Cassandra Clare 7
49. The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova 7
50. The City & The City by China Miéville 7

Heroes In The Wind - Robert E. Howard

I was just looking at the Wikipedia entry for Heroes in the Wind: From Kull to Conan by Robert E.Howard, which I see is being put out under the Penguin Modern Classics imprint. Wow - the guys that my D & D-playing friends and I used to read in high school sure have moved up in the world. First Tolkien gets a multiple Academy Award-winning film made based on his work, then Lovecraft gets a volume of his fiction published by the Library of America, and now Howard has his own Penguin Modern Classics volume. I guess it really is respectable to be a geek these days.

Anyway, here's the book's table of contents, according to Wikipedia (the notes in brackets are mine).

Acknowledgements
Introduction (John Clute)

Prelude
"Recompense" [poem]

I Black Dawn
"The Shadow Kingdom" [a Kull story]
"The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune" [Kull]
"Kings of the Night" [Bran Mak Morn]
"Worms of the Earth" [Bran Mak Morn]
"The Dark Man" [Turlogh Dubh O'Brien/Bran Mak Morn]

II Dark Interlude
"The Footfalls Within" [Solomon Kane]
"Pigeons from Hell" [a Weird West story]
"Graveyard Rats" [a Steve Harrison story]
"Vultures of Wahpeton" [Western fiction]


III High Noon [all the stories in this section are Conan tales]
"The Tower of the Elephant"
"Queen of the Black Coast"
"A Witch Shall Be Born"
"Red Nails"