Notes for editors of Real Punks Don't Wear Black.Most of these pieces were originally printed elsewhere, some many years ago. So, the question arises, can we cheat? That is, can we improve the prose, remove dead matter, and so forth? The answer is yeah, sure, but not a lot. Here's what we can do (and what I've already done a lot of):
--Correct typos.
--Correct mistakes, but in some instances I'll leave them in and call attention to them in brackets or at the beginning or end of the piece. (See my Guns N' Roses review in Part Six.)
--Make an ambiguous sentence clear by changing or adding a word or two. But if clarity requires more changes, that's because I didn't know what I was saying, and my confusion should stand.
--Add a word or two to make a cross-reference intelligible, though generally only where I'm excerpting from a piece rather than reprinting it whole.
--Delete an unintelligible cross-reference, but again, generally only from excerpts, and even then, a lot of the unintelligibility needs to stay. Rock criticism is built on unintelligible cross-references.
--Replace an overused word with a synonym. But again, not too much, since I don't want to change the character of my prose in, say, 1987 by giving myself a range of vocabulary I didn't have. "The Autobiography of Bob Dylan" and the PBS essays seem in retrospect to be written in the verbal equivalent of grunts and snarls, but that's part of their charm.
--Find synonyms for words whose sound clashes or that unintentionally rhyme with neighboring words. Again, I want to be sparing in these changes.
In general, I'm not using brackets or ellipses to indicate such changes, since I'm thinking of this as a book to be read, not as an artifact.
What we can't do:
--Change my bad ideas to good ones. E.g., in "Death Rock 2000" I embarrass myself by describing Eminem's vocals as "a slow talk, unlike 'real' rap not heavily into rhythm and rhyme," even while "Forgot About Dre" was scooting up the charts. My excuse is that I was thinking of "My Name Is." And even so, a couple of sentences on I quote him rhyming "tits off" and "Kriss Kross," so where was my brain? Too bad about my stupidity, but we'll keep things like this as is.
--Change the form of my sentences to give them a lilt they didn't have or to remove a self-conscious swagger they shouldn't have had.
UGA Press instructs copy editors to "reduce unnecessary use of the passive voice." Ignore this instruction, unless you really think that a sentence would be better in the active voice and that it would sound more like me in the active voice. There's nothing inherently wrong with the passive voice, despite its deliberately deadening effect in bureaucratic prose. For some reason I'll tend to say "I am wondering," "I am thinking," etc. almost as much as "I wonder" and "I think." So be it.
If somewhere below I point out the obvious (e.g., the Jay-Z/Gay-Z thing in Chapter 25), this is not 'cause I think you're likely to be an idiot (whoever you are). I'm just being careful, realizing that in today's glut of entertainment options there's no way that we can all share the same cultural knowledge.
UGA Press instructs copy editors to "Revise and query material that could be considered slanderous, dated, sexist, or prejudiced." You can query all you want, but absolutely don't revise on these grounds unless I give my OK, which I'm not likely to. I think it's usually clear that the performer is the one being misogynist and so forth, not me, but I'm not going to wreck a line's impact by putting words in quotes or changing them. As for slander, I'd think that'd be a lawyer's department; in any event, I've run Chapter 7 by Larry, Tom, Leah, and Tina, and they're all fine with it (and Larry's promised not to attack me with water pistols). In addition, I ran Chapter 8 by Tina, and she's fine with that one, too. My lesbian ex-wife Leslie has been "out" for a long time now, so my Corina review is cool. Nothing else jumps to mind as potentially slanderous. Sadly, Maureen Nolan, a key figure in Chapter 9, died last year of cancer; I doubt she'd have had any problem with the chapter anyway.
General: Sometimes not only did I repeat arguments, I intentionally or unintentionally lifted lines from earlier obscure pieces and put them into later not-quite-as-obscure pieces. There are three ways I've been dealing with the lifted lines: (1) leaving the repetition as is, so I'm keeping "three-chord glamour that anyone can play" (Madonna, disco) and "transvestites let loose in a kiddie-clothing store" (Poison, twice) unchanged; also "meta-use is use"; (2) re-wording; and (3) keeping as is, but adding "recall that" or "once again" or "as I said" (e.g., in Chapter 7 I've put, "Recall the Jagger example in Chapter 3, where the raping, murdering Midnight Rambler boasts, 'Honey, it's no rock 'n' roll show' and thereby denigrates the actual rock 'n' roller who wrote and is singing the song and the show at which he's singing it"). Your suggestions could be helpful here.
General: Excerpts from the Popped interview pop up in several places (Chapters 5, 8, 15, and 22). On my recommendation, Scott didn't clean up the interview to make it smooth and grammatical, since I wanted it to catch the messy exuberance with which I actually speak (and to contrast with my usual prose, which some people mistakenly characterize as "conversational"). So the reader gets to hack his way through a thicket of ums, you knows, and "[laughs]" and to deal with me interrupting myself and heading on long excursions whose relevance takes a while to assert itself. So I don't want you to clean it up either, though if you find a passage that you consider just impossible, let me know.
General: When I quote people, I let them speak in their own accent. So, if the spelling is British, keep it British ("organised, manoeuvring"). See Mark Sinker near the end of Chapter 7, for a prime example. He'll also make "rockband" one word and write "yr" for "your" and so forth. Let him do so. Watch out if you're working in MS-Word, since its template sometimes automatically change such things. I'm on a Denver Public Library computer right now, and it just changed "organised" to "organized." (You might play safe by going to "Autocorrect" to eliminate such defaults, though that can be a boring process.) If someone types everything lower case, keep it lower case. In Chapter 6, don't put quotation marks around song titles if the writers don't. If they don't put periods after their abbreviations, don't add periods. (That's becoming a Britishism as well.) If you have a question as to whether something's a mistake rather than a variant, ask me, and we'll make a decision.
General: When I'm adding new, explanatory text to a piece, I put it in brackets and italicize it, unless it's just a one- or two-word insertion, which I put in brackets but not italics. (These italicized bits, unlike quotations, are not indented.)
General, other brackets: I'm also using brackets for my original "editorial" insertions from back when a piece was first written (unfortunately, there's no good way to differentiate these from the latter-day explanatory text; I never italicize the former, but I sometimes don't italicize the latter, either) and also for mock editorial insertions from when a piece was first written (the Disco Tex Essay is full of fake explanations and bogus notes to self; e.g., "[Insert essay on how fans ran variations on the Madonna model. Use my girlfriend as an example.]"). Also, the excerpts from the Popped interview contain things such as "[laughs]" and "[pause]" and so on, which are self-explanatory. There may be a few places where an idea was so extraneous (or pretending to be so extraneous) that I put it in brackets rather than parentheses.
General, parentheses within parentheses: I don't use brackets for parentheses within parentheses, since I think the latter are OK, if a bit confusing. So I put an internal parenthesis within parentheses rather than brackets - otherwise I risk misleading the readers into thinking they're reading an editorial insertion.
General: When referring to a word or term as a word or term, I'm inconsistent as to whether I put it in quotation marks or put it in italics. E.g., either "when he used the term 'crunk' he meant..." or "when he used the term crunk he meant...." Let's stick with whatever I've got, though I try to be consistent within a piece. My preference is for quotation marks, but it wasn't always.
General: If I don't capitalize "muzak," "formica," and the like, you shouldn't either. In general, I keep such words lower case, no matter what the dictionaries and trademark lawyers say.
General: In headings, song titles, book titles, etc., if a preposition, article, or conjunction is more than four letters (e.g., "About" in "Forgot About Dre"), keep it upper case.
General: When titles are not italicized or set off in quotation marks, don't make prepositions, articles, and conjunctions ("of," "the," "and," etc.) lower case. Otherwise, we just confuse people as to when one title stops and another begins. E.g., Chapter 8, "...The Masters Of War Lie and The Communist Lie and The Free School Lie, but this time it's called The Next Verse Is From A Song Which Lie." Part Eight (the "Gore Gore Girls" review), "Detroit's East Central Death And Atomic Warfare High School."
General: The Village Voice has a policy of capitalizing the first letter of the first word after a colon if the clause to the right of the colon can stand as a full sentence. (E.g., "But rock was a vanguard in one way: To overdraw the distinction, r&b is a dance among musical elements, while rock can also be a battle among musical elements.") I decided to go with this consistently throughout the book, since I already had electronic copies of some of my Voice pieces. I'm not sure I like my own decision here, but it's done now, and would be a bore to undo.
General: "rock 'n' roll" not "rock'n'roll" (three words, not one). In real life, I'm totally inconsistent about this, but for this book I made an arbitrary call. Also, never change "rock 'n' roll" to "rock and roll" (the two have connotational differences), though keep the latter if that's what I used in a particular place.
General: Guns N' Roses has an apostrophe after the N but not before it. Don't ask me why; I'm not in the band.
General: 'NSync (squeezed, with an apostrophe before the N), not *NSync. The band uses the latter, but I went with the first as a kindness to the readers, to forestall their rushing off on a fruitless quest for a footnote. Be careful of MS-Word's autocorrect here.
General: "towards" not "toward"; "backwards" not "backward." But "forward" rather than "forwards," "inward" rather than "inwards." Don't ask me why. These are just my idiosyncrasies.
General: "buzz word" (2 words) not "buzzword."
General: "boyband" (1 word) not "boy band"
General: "Website" (1 word, capitalized) not "Web site," "website," or "web site."
General: "OK" and "okay." Go with whichever one I put, even if it doesn't coincide with what's on the previous page. I joke about this somewhere.
General: The "S" in "Superword" is always capitalized. This is because "Superword" is faster than a speeding bullet and has a big S on its chest. However, the related neologism "stupor word" (in Chapter 25) not only has its "s" small, but is fractured into two words. That's the price it pays for being less than heroic. (And where in Chapter 25 I'm quoting Sterling Clover and Tracer Hand and they keep the "s" in "superword" lower case, we should too, because it's their choice - however deplorable - not to indicate the word's exalted status.)
General: I refer to I Love Music, I Love Everything, and ILX as "chatrooms," though the correct terminology is "message board" or "forum," or something of the sort. But "board" sounds like "bored," and "forum" like "boredom," so I want to keep it "chatroom."
General: I don't remember if one is officially allowed to use "et al." for anything other than people. Anyway, such usage is allowed in this book ("relevant/irrelevant et al. aren't dichotomies") when I want to imply that the dichotomies or whatever are like people, are just as subject to whims and trends as we are.
General, hyphens: Hyphenating suffixes and prefixes. The rule that my dictionary (American Heritage, first edition, which is several decades old by now) seems to follow is that you squeeze suffixes and prefixes into the word they're modifying rather than hyphenating them (so, "nonfishy" rather than "non-fishy"), the exceptions being when you get two consecutive identical vowels ("anti-intellectual"), when the prefix is followed by a capital or by quotation marks ("non-Superword"), and if the word would look funny or confusing without the hyphen. But for some reason American Heritage always hyphenates "quasi-," so I do as well. And "pre-" uses a hyphen for one time uses, no hyphen for established uses. There's sometimes the question of whether something is a prefix, a suffix, or part of a compound word. (And what's the lexical designation of the "fucking" in the word "everyfuckingwhere"? Midfix?) The Voice's copy desk keeps reversing itself as to whether "ass" ("crazyass," "bootyfuckass," "wiseass") should be preceded by a hyphen. In this book I'm keeping the "ass" words squeezed rather than hyphenating them. When I use the same prefix in succession ("sub-sub-sub-microworld"), I keep the hyphens. In general, I tend to throw in a lot of hyphens in my first drafts and then take out a lot of them, and no doubt miss a few or choose to keep some that Chicago wouldn't approve of. You can do what you think best, or not worry about the issue.
General: Hyphenating compound adjectives that precede the word they're modifying:
(a) When "high-school" is an adjective preceding the word it modifies, I hyphenate it. I know this isn't necessary (what, are people going to think it's the school that's high?) (on second thought, maybe it is necessary). Actually, in real life when I'm not leaning heavily on the "search" function, I'm completely erratic about this, except I do it in my Voice pieces to annoy the copy editors.
(b) When "rock" is part of a multiword adjective ("rock-critic geek," "progressive-rock band") I hyphenate it - except of course I never hyphenate "rock 'n' roll."
(c) When "metal" is part of a multiword adjective, I hyphenate it ("death-metal band").
(d) I make exceptions in Chapters 12 and 13 (see below).
General: Always hyphenate "hip-hop," even when it's a noun. (Not that I care, or that there are any connotational differences. But that's how the Voice does it.)
Specific text:
Preface: In "better than anything I'm presently calling 'my words,'" don't change "presently" to "currently." We're allowed to use "presently" for "at this time," and no one's going to mistake its meaning here for "about to." The alliteration of "currently calling" would sound ugly.
Preface: I use the word "haunted" in a quotation from my review of Rock Culture in Liverpool, then hard on its heels I use "haunted" again ("Not all the writing in this book asks that question directly, but much is haunted by it"). I'd like to substitute another word in this second sentence, if I can find a good substitute, but I've yet to come up with one that's satisfactory. I'd thought of "shadowed," but it makes the sentence feel overwritten, and I already use "shadow" on the previous page. I'm sticking with "haunted," at least for the time being, but let me know if you have a candidate to put in its place.
Preface: In this first preface, when I cross-referenced "parts three and four" I decided to keep them lower case - due to confusingly close proximity to other upper case - despite my making "Part Six" etc. upper case elsewhere. [Eventually we made them all lower.]
Chapter 3: Near the end I write, "Eminem seems to be the guy now. 'This guy at White Castle asked for my autograph so I signed it "Dear Dave, thanks for the support asshole."'" I've got one too many "guys" here, so I'd like to change the first one, but replacing with "man" or "fellow" doesn't seem right. If you have any suggestions, let me know. Otherwise, we'll leave as is.
Chapter 7: Leave as "96 Theses." I know it's really 95, but I'm echoing ? & the Mysterians' "96 Tears."
Chapter 7: The quote from "Visions of Johanna" near the end: I have "Ya sure got a lotta gall," and I'm keeping it that way, even though it misquotes the song slightly (Dylan'd sung "He's sure got a lotta gall," but "Ya" is what I wrote, and as a self-attack upon myself it's more effective).
Chapter 9: I deliberately use "roil" as a noun ("the clamor and the beauty were inseparable, all one big roil").
Chapter 9: In David Johansen's lyrics to "Vietnamese Baby," the line is, indeed, "maybe you never ever know what that was" - "know," not "knew." He likes to use deliberately strange grammar.
Chapter 9: On the off-chance that Mac or his dad still has the phone number and someone tries to call it, I deliberately misremembered it.
Chapter 10: "bad. It was ugly this evening" - Yup, that's how it starts, "bad" lower case and followed by a period, as if it's the end of a sentence (which it was).
Chapter 12: "So yeay." I think "yeay" hybridizes "yay" and "yeah." Leave as is.
Chapter 12: Denise Dee of "Lobster Tendencies" would put two blank spaces rather than periods. So, in the spirit of maintaining other people's idiosyncrasies, I'm leaving the two blank spaces in (and I'm keeping her aggressively self-abnegating "i" lower case, and "wasnt" without the apostrophe).
Chapter 12: Unlike the excerpts from the first two issues of Why Music Sucks, the "Feeling Yummy" excerpt is attributed to "Why Music Socks (WMS #3)"; "Socks" with an o is correct in this instance, rather than "Sucks." In the early issues of the 'zine I changed the name each issue, keeping the initials W-M-S. So for the third issue I went with "socks" and Leslie drew a sock for the cover.
Chapters 12 and 13: I'm not hyphenating "Punk Rock Lonely Hearts Club" here, even though elsewhere I hyphenate compound adjectives. Same with "Heavy Metal Lonely Hearts Club Band," etc. And keep the "A" in "And" capitalized in "Marginal Artists And Intellectuals Lonely Hearts Club."
Chapter 16: Don't replace "resultingly" with "resultantly"; the former flows better.
Chapter 23: In "ex-mouseketeers" keep the "m" lower case. But the G in "the inner Go" stays upper case, despite the neighboring go's' all being lower case.
Chapter 24: Keep "flippantry" spelled as is.
Chapter 25: There are parts of this chapter where I repeat myself and lead the reader by the nose. This is deliberate, but it can be irritating to the reader, since it implies that I expect him or her to be stupid. In fact, on this subject this is what I expect, though the problem isn't stupidity, but a mental block.
Chapter 25: I capitalize the F in both "a Fall from grace" and "actual existence were a Fall" so that I can simultaneously evoke the Fall from paradise and the band called the Fall, a lyric from whom sneaks into the chapter unannounced.
Chapter 25: "Hot in Herre" - two r's in "Herre" is correct. (Don't blame me; I didn't write the song.)
Chapter 25: "that Gay-Z Nelly faggot shit." "Gay-Z" is deliberate (i.e., the speaker is calling Jay-Z "Gay-Z"). Don't change it to "Jay-Z."
Chapter 25: "something that's both battle and dance"; I'm using "battle" and "dance" as adjectives in this sentence. I believe one can do this. (In fact, I know one can. I just did.)
Chapter 26: Here's a goof that I just caught. A couple of pages from the start, in the paragraph beginning, "Is it possible not to care," I write, "But I doubt that such a magazine would exist, since I doubt that a person analyzing pop music and African music and so forth would be willing to leave out the visuals. And whether they leave the visuals out or include them, they'll still worry about whether the decision was valid." "They" in the second sentence lacks an antecedent. You can make it "And whether such writers..." (Using "people" instead of "a person" in the previous sentence feels weaker.)
Chapter 26: In the quotation about "Stockhausen," "Xenakis," and "Boulez," don't add an apostrophe at the end of "somethin" and "makin." Don't add a "t" at the end of "jus." (And I'm kidding in the Acknowledgements where I say I'm quoting from memory. The quotation is exact, but I deliberately changed the names.)
Chapter 26: Keep the dollar sign in place of the "s" in "Ca$h Money."
Part Six: Final paragraph of "My Dream Date with Teena Marie" - "the sum is more than the total of the parts"; I botched the bromide, which in a way fits, since the whole piece is intended to give me an air of grasping for words that all turn out never to be adequate. So keep as is.
Part Six: Near the end of "Nietzsche with Tits," I say about Sa-Fire that "of all the performers, she was the one with the most Latino diction." Is "Latino" right, or "Latina"? She's a Latina, but is her diction Latina or Latino? (I don't know Spanish, obviously.)
Part Six: "Squeezed from the Tube" - Several paragraphs are total non sequiturs. Keep them. I like them.
Part Seven: I'm deliberately changing format here. Keep each review as a block paragraph, with a line space between them and no tab indent at the start. The exceptions are the few reviews in this part that are multiparagraph; for these, I've put a tab at the start of all paragraphs except the first (no tab) and not put a line space between the paragraphs. E.g., my reviews of Quarterflash's "Harden My Heart" and of Mariah Carey's MTV Unplugged EP.
Part Seven: "Martika" - Keep the "You've Eaten," even though it's inconsistent with the "Thy've" in the same paragraph.
Part Eight: Final paragraph of "So This Guy Walks into a Bar..." - Keep the w in "wretch" in the phrase "stench of wretch," because that's how it's spelled on the lyric sheet, and who am I to judge?
Part Eight. In the online exchange (Mark: "Brevity = energy, foax"; Frank: "Britney = energy, fox"), "foax" is correct with an "a"; it's an ILX variant spelling of "folks." And "Britney" is correct with an "e," even though I'm alluding not only to Britney Spears but also to a Britny without an "e" (and if you know who that is, you'll appreciate the fact that later in the convo I'd inserted a cryptic reference to Girlschool's version of "Fox on the Run." It went over everyone's head, I'm sure).
Part Eight: "Count Five, Have a Psychotic Reaction," where I say "'do' and 'so' notes of the chord," don't change "so" to "sol." You're allowed to use either spelling, and "so" gets about eight times as many hits on the Web (try googling "do re mi fa so" and "do re mi fa sol"). "Sol" will only serve to make the reader stumble.
Part Eight: "Count Five, Have a Psychotic Reaction": "boss kitty," "chyna chyna chyna," "take & free Miami." The "b," "c," and "t" at the start of these respective song titles stay lower case, even though each comes at the start of a sentence.
Part Eight: "Death Takes a Holiday": the phrase "drum 'n' bash" is correct (not "drum 'n' bass").
Part Eight: In "Scarred Old Slaver," the acronym ILX is correct (designates I Love Music, I Love Everything, and associated boards).
Part Eight: In "Scarred Old Slaver," where I write "Hear Em whip the dixie chicks just around midnight," the "E" in "Em" stays capital, and the "d" and "c" in dixie chicks stay small. And obviously this "Em," unlike the one in "Hear 'em whip the women just around midnight," is short for "Eminem," hence doesn't take an apostrophe in front of it.
Acknowledgements: "Talk and chew gum" is correct (not walk and chew gum, though I can do that too).
Acknowledgements: "Julee Cruise" is spelled correctly (two e's in Julee).
Frank Kogan, January 2005
― Frank Kogan (Frank Kogan), Friday, 27 January 2006 15:22 (nineteen years ago)