"Kill Your Idols" -- new book

The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
— Jim DeRogatis

The Beach Boys, Pet Sounds
— Jeff Nordstedt

The Beach Boys, Smile
— Dawn Eden

The Who, Tommy
— Steve Knopper

The MC5, Kick Out the Jams
— Andy Wang

The Byrds, Sweetheart of the Rodeo
— Steven Stolder

Captain Beefheart and & His Magic Band, Trout Mask Replica
— Jason Gross

Derek and the Dominos, Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs
— Marc Weingarten

Led Zeppelin, untitled (“IV”)
— Adrian Brijbassi

Neil Young, Harvest
— Fred Mills

The Rolling Stones, Exile on Main Street
— Keith Moerer

The Eagles, Desperado
— Bobby Reed

Lynyrd Skynyrd, Pronounced Leh-nerd Skin-nerd
— Leanne Potts

Gram Parsons, GP / Grievous Angel
— Chrissie Dickinson

The Doors, The Best of the Doors
— Lorraine Ali (with Jim DeRogatis)

Pink Floyd, The Dark Side of the Moon
— Burl Gilyard

Bob Dylan, Blood on the Tracks
— Chris Martiniano

Patti Smith, Horses
— Melanie Haupt

Bob Marley & the Wailers, Exodus
— Dave Chamberlain

Fleetwood Mac, Rumours
— Jim Walsh

Paul & Linda McCartney, Ram
— Tom Phalen

John Lennon / Yoko Ono, Double Fantasy
— Allison Stewart

The Sex Pistols, Never Mind the Bollocks . . . Here’s the Sex Pistols
— Jim Testa

Dead Kennedys, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables
— Marco Leavitt

Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run
— David Sprague

Bruce Springsteen, Born in the U.S.A.
— Rob O’Connor

Elvis Costello and the Attractions, Imperial Bedroom
— Michael Corcoran

Various artists, My Greatest Exes
— Carmél Carrillo

U2, The Joshua Tree
— Eric Waggoner and Bob Mehr

Public Enemy, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back
— Arsenio Orteza

Nirvana, Nevermind
— Anders Smith Lindall

The Smashing Pumpkins, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness
— Rick Reger

Radiohead, OK Computer
— David Menconi

Wilco, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
— Allison Augustyn

PLEASE DERO DON'T HURT 'EM!

*DeRogatis' incessant bitching in the intro about the old guard of boomer rockcrits getting in the way of the younger generation. DeRogatis is 40 years old.

*In the Sgt. Pepper essay, on "Getting Better," DeRogatis: "McCartney is telling us he used to be mean to his woman, he beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved. This guy's a freaking misogynist scumbag, and I don't buy for a minute that he's 'changing his scene.' Like Travis Bickle, he's just waiting for an excuse to explode. That insistent piano is like a nervous facial tick, the waltz-like tempo is barely keeping him restrained, and it's time to run and lock the door when the tune dissolves into a psychedelic breakdown with droning sitar and echoed tabla. Hey, the Hell's Angels took LSD, but they didn't automatically start loving everyone. Remember Atlamont?"

*The Pet Sounds essay complains that the music is really poppy, but the lyrics are morse, and that doesn't make any sense!

More when I regain the stomach for it.

I think they've pretty much covered it above, though, with the exception of Zen Arcade

and The Best of the Doors? wasn't that, like, 486th in that Rolling Stone top 500, behind three other Doors compilations?

I want to be somewhat fair-minded about this and cling to the possibility that there are individual essays in the book that aren't bad, but if I buy this (and I'd buy this used), it's going to be the same reason I bought Sonic Cool, and that's TO FEEL THE HATE. DeRo can pose himself as some kind of rebel dude, but an attack on "the rock canon" or individual albums is just gonna curdle into mere pose if you're still going to share many of the same standards of measuring "good" and "bad" music that a lot of the listmakers and the canonbuilders do.

Is this why in every literature class from 8th to 10th grade, the only thing we would read would be about poor Mexican families who learned the value of tradition by passing down grandma's quilt?

*From the Public Enemy chapter: "It's too bad there's never been--and given our hypersensitivity to that chimera "hate speech," may never be--an equally public debate about the validity of that notoriously dimwitted genre of aural graffiti known as rap, the artistic merits of which the music media, in its zeal to see young black radicals do well, has been over-hyping for two decades now. Don't get me wrong, rap can be great fun. At its early best, before it became overrun by gangstas, thugz, pimps, hoez, and other types you wouldn't want to bring home to your grandma (or your spelling teacher), rap was the closest thing to a revival of the loose goofiness of Lieber-Stoller-era Coasters...Since then many rap albums have had their meager merits exaggerated by the press."

*More from the Pet Sounds one: "The biggest problem, though, is this: A great rock album should scare your parents...The problem with Pet Sounds is that Brian WIlson is about as intimidating as an episode of Seventh Heaven, and the album hardly solicits a PMRC-style reaction from anyone."

Did anyone mention that there's an essay about Smile, a record that never came out? Good lord.

draw your own conclusions from that one.

They were never SCARED by the noise, just vaguely annoyed.

Great record, but it just seems to have sort of fallen off.

Clearly they needed something from the past seven years to include...and that was all they could think of.

Can I be Ethan for a second, please?

A great rock album should scare your parents...

KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL ARRRGGHHHFUCK

Said writer once got into a blog war with me because I called said participants "morons" and "hate-filled." Said writer also exchanged several e-mails with me in the process, in which said writer came off as nice enough and all, but not too bright. Which would probably describe a great many people who would unironically participate in such a rally.

"Adrian Brijbassi's first novel, 50 Mission Cap (Trafford, 2001), was inspired by the music of the Tragically Hip..."

"Adrian Brijbassi's first novel, 50 Mission Cap (Trafford, 2001), was inspired by the music of the Tragically Hip..."

de gustibus non est disputandum. humor however. ;-)

I would say that is approximately OTM.

Not necessarily, especially given the rise of self-publishing. Who'd ever thought that a mini book about "Sign O the Times" would have a market? I'll bet an in-depth of Husker Du would push comparable numbers.

Blech.

"It's crap, sure, but let me pat this shitty book on its head in a kindly and condescending way by saying, you know, it really makes ya think, which of course is another way of saying it exercises your repetoire of knee-jerk responses, only a little quicker and sharper than usual. And that's a good thing, for some vague reason or another."

Is that online anywhere?

The worst mistake done by so many fans and critics alike throughtout rock history is the completely ridiculous idea express in this quote.

This thread displays a lot of anticipation for the book, but not much comment on the book itself. I read this when it came out, and decided to look at it again now that I've heard all the records discussed.
It was pretty dispiriting. Too many of the essays display a lot of snark but not much wit; I agree with the person on Goodreads who said, "there is not a choice paragraph or phrase one comes away with". It made me wonder if bad reviews should be epigrammatic, confined to a maximum length of a paragraph.
I'm always willing to read criticism, even of things that I enjoy, but there's something inert about a piece of writing designed to tell you why a record is bad, especially if the writer feels that the record violates some sort of First Principle of Rock; so Pet Sounds and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot fail because they don't scare your parents, while Kick Out the Jams and the Public Enemy albums fail because it's wrong to scare your parents.
There's also a disjunct between the writers who have picked an album they think is OK, but overrated, and those who hate the entire genre or the artist. The former group feel they have to puff up their "hate" to keep the reader's interest; the latter display the irrelevance of their point-of-view.
I'm looking over the table of contents, and despite having read the book twice, most recently in the past week, I can't remember a single thing about more than half of the chapters.
The worst essay is probably Jim Walsh on Rumours; although it contains a fantasy of assassinating the band, it's really more about the author's loathing of his job as a newspaper rock critic, which in 2021 is fortunately no longer a problem for him.
Best essays:
- Chris Martiniano on Blood on the Tracks - he makes a number of incisive observations on the point-of-view of the songs and the structure of the record, though he is obsessed with making all 10 songs describe a single real life relationship.
- Dave Chamberlain on Exodus - sees the record as an overrated lull in Marley's oeuvre, discusses it in relation to his biography, discography and the state of reggae in 1977.
- Marco Leavitt on Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables - a measured appraisal of the lyrical and musical flaws.

I prefer Kill All Your Darlings.