Customer Reviews

A History of Rock Music: 1951?2000

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

The author is certainly knowledgeable and if you are looking for an encyclopedic book which mentions all bands in last 50 years you may enjoy the book. If you are looking for a story - how certain styles developed, why were they influential - then it is a painful reading. An average paragraph mentions 4-5 band names. If you know rock music well, the book may help to remind bands you have long forgotten and help to group the bands under specific music styles. But I'm not sure that you would learn much more than that from this book.

The author also comes out with strong opinions without argumentation, e.g. Elvis Presley is one of the most overestimated musicians. This may be true, but it depends what kind of influence are we talking about - music itself, music business, youth culture. Nobody can throw out a statement like this just with one sentence.

Really the most amazing history of rock I've ever come across. I don't really agree that this is a "listing" of all the rock musicians from 1951-2000: once I took the time to actually read it in chronological order, Scaruffi's bold, seemingly unsupported assertions about Elvis, The Beatles and others made much more sense, and I had the feeling that I really understood how rock music has evolved over the years. It can be so hard to look for all this information in other sources, and this book really layed everything out clearly.

But a warning: this is no coffee-table book - the information is presented in a no-frills, sterile way that compares to a textbook. Threre are books out there that are much more fun to read, but if you're serious about really knowing rock music, all its sub-genres and other musical styles that influenced it, this book is gold. The only down sides are its ungainly index and the density of the information... but how else does one fit so much information into one book?

This is a book i'd recommend, whether you're a specialist (I think I am) or a novice (my sister is, and she never was into rock music before she read my copy of Scaruffi's book).

I got five shelves of books on music, and this one ranks

with the ten best. First, its comprehensive: it begins a century ago, it ends with the year 2000. That's as recent as printed books can get. That's what I wanted: not the usual "history of rock'n'roll" that starts with rock round the clock and ends with the sixties... I disagree with the reader who wrote that this book does not deal with the evolution of a style.

What it doesn't have is the "mundane" story that so many rock

historians indulge in. If you want to know what Clapton

whispered to Beck when they produced the first guitar feedback, and what they were drinking, this aint the book. But just check out the first two chapters: I had never read all this stuff about musicians who predated everything from sampling to world-music... Its also the most detailed chronicle of rap, techno and house that I have found in print (his website has a lot more, by the way).

There are two main drawbacks:

1. No index. Who was the idiot who decided that a 600-page book with thousands of names did not deserve an index of names??? I would also like an index of songs and records.

2. This should really be 2 or 3 books. If you are familiar with his website, this dude has written a lot more stuff on all the bands you can think of. The book is summarizing long bios in a few short sentences.

Still, I can't think of any book in my collection that packs so much info.

Tahnks to this book I also discovered another great book, the A bient Century (its one of the few given as biblio).

This edition should no longer be sold, but Amazon won't take it down. Be sure to get the latest edition, in two volumes:
Vol 1: http://www.amazon.com/History-Rock-Dance-Music-Vol/dp/0976553155
Vol 2: http://www.amazon.com/History-Rock-Dance-Music-Vol/dp/0976553163

Original review:
This most intellectually influencing book I've read this year. Though some may be turned off by Scaruffi - the ultimate rock snob (who was first a classical music snob) - I was won over by his unparalleled knowledge and analysis. This is an extremely brief history of important "popular" music after 1950. Not music that is important to the record industry or nations and cultures, but music that is important to music: its language and form. For example, Scaruffi argues that The Beatles merely wrapped pop cliches in pseudo-psychidelia, whereas Captain Beefheart wrote a post-Cage study of tonality and provided rock's most important contribution to music in Trout Mask Replica. Don't be too intimidated, though; he loves The Doors. With Scaruffi's rock history, you'll learn the origins of all the major styles (including country, electronica, hip-hop, rap, metal, world music, folk music, etc.). Sometimes, the origins are buried in a rarely-heard recording 20 years ahead of its time. If there's a fault in Scaruffi's stunning work, it's that it's too brief (even at 550+ pages); he doesn't take much space to explain just what the different styles sound like (okay, Scaruffi, what is "post-post-rock" or "jazzcore"?). Nevertheless, Scaruffi's encyclopedic knowledge and unfaltering vision have made me a convert. The free online version is fully hyperlinked to exhaustive artist profiles. I exhort you to (at the very least) read the preface to understand Scaruffi's vision of artstic rock.

Piero Scaruffi is a writer on popular music who doesn't idolise pop stars. Indeed, this overview of popular music (essentially the entirety of the music portion of his website in book form) is as far removed from the gushing fanboy odes of rock journalism as is possible. He has noaffiliation to certain types of music, or rock stars he loved as a youth. Instead, his central criterion is that pop music's merits are invariably in inverse proportion to their commercial success.

Scaruffi's language is invariable blunt to the point of inflicting Grievous Bodily Harm on such holy cows as the Beatles and Elvis. Perhaps this is because English is not his first language, but it only adds to the impression that this is someone who has no time for reputations. His tone and appreciation is as cold and uncompromising as his intellect is sharp and insightful. Other rock journos should be scared -or maybe just ashamed.

After having read Joe S. Harrington and David Keenan writing some remarkable lists of the best albums of all time, I was eager to investigate the source of what at the time seemed to me to be a completely different school of music criticism from what I had known from such magazines as Rolling Stone, Spin and Q. Harrington and Keenan seemed to me (and still do) to know the history and evolution of rock music in a manner which was completely foreign to the magazines and books I had read, with the result that I could no longer ever trust them deeply.

Looking for information on albums praised by Harrington and Keenan, I found the Italian cultural critic Piero Scaruffi to have a wealth of information on albums praised by Harrington and Keenan - and on quite a number of others which I had heard of but were not included by those two critics. For a long time I absorbed his material and was able to much more effectively appreciate a large number of bands whom I had vaguely heard of in such books as The Rough Guide to Rock and Musichound Rock: The Essential Album Guide.

Although Scaruffi's history of rock is all up on his website, being something of a traditionalist I do prefer to be able to keep book copies of it - and in fact admit it is probably better for my body which often tends to suffer for being at the computer for long periods! In any case, "A History of Rock Music: 1951-2000" aims in Scaruffi's words to be a much more authentic history of rock music than popular histories which Scaruffi (rightly, I have come to feel) thinks focus too much upon popular artists.

In the process of writing this history, Scaruffi offers an extremely good overview of the history of rock music between the late 1960s and the early 1990s, showing how the more experimental rock groups of the period were able to expand the sound of the genre to something approaching its present limits. He looks in very good detail at the more famous experimental artists like the Velvet Underground, Can, Captain Beefheart, Tom Waits, Hüsker Dü, Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine, besides giving very good overviews of much lesser-known figures like Nico, John Martyn, Pere Ubu, Morphine, Cop Shoot Cop, the Royal Trux, Fugazi and the Vampire Rodents. I can at times flaw his views because it often seems as if Scaruffi likes experimentation for its own sake: some albums I have bought as a result of his recommendations have disappointed me as too slow-moving to be remotely enjoyable even after a large number of listens thereto. Still, as a source of information on the history of music Scaruffi's work can most definitely be said to stand out because one can learn about many bands - even those of very marginal importance - and become curious even if one makes no pretensions to wishing to listen to them.

The problem with Scaruffi's book is that it is historically rather unbalanced at both ends. The 1960s is covered only moderately with not enough background concerning how the rock underground replaced free jazz during that decade - nor is there any look at how the FM radio boom undoubtedly contributed to this state of affairs. The period from the middle 1990s onwards is covered much worse still. Even though the book was written before one can seriously make much of an assessment of who are the important bands of the period since about 1995, there still should have been more coverage of the period - something with which is still struggling Scaruffi on his website today. Whilst I can see that many of the more popular - and even critically-acclaimed - bands of the period since 1995 are rather derivative, it is possible to find very interesting music if one looks really, really hard and Scaruffi has not done enough in this line.

All in all, this is a good history for the general reader - although it certainly needs a serious update to prevent it from becoming really dated.

A long overdue history of the most important phenomenon of the 20th century. I have the house full of books on rock music: they are mostly collections of more or less fictionalized biographies. The few books that are truly "histories" are usually limited to a brief period (eg the excellent Sound of the City). As far as i know, this is the first history of the entire 50 years. Like it or not (and most people won't like what he writes about the stars of rock music), this is where rock legend ends and rock historiography begins.

My only criticism is about the title: the book covers blues, soul, hip-hop and lots of electronic/avantgarde music. Clearly much more than just "rock".

Heve you ever noticed the annoying sensation of missing something when you read reviews and books about music ?
Have you ever felt you couldn't fully understand the meaning of genres names, of changes in style ? New wave, new age , paisley underground, slo-core, lo-fi, garage and many ( many ! ) others are discussed here.
But above all there's an accurate study of the causes of these changes, and an incredible care for details.
Maybe sometimes the positions of the writer are a little strong , ( especially about Beatles and followers ) , but it's only a matter of personal taste and, however, it's all related with the philosophy of the book. Read the preface and you'll understand.
Not simply a grat music book : this is THE Music book !

Note that there is a newer expanded edition available: A History of Rock and Dance Music 1951-2008.

I always thought that a truly complete history of rock was an impossible task : too many bands and records and fads ...
This book cover anything and it does it very logically.
A must-read for any music fan