Customer Reviews

Sonic Cool: The Life & Death of Rock'N'Roll

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

The basic premise of this book (that rock n roll has died several times and that the next great wave of music arises from the ashes from a totally unexpected direction) is solid and well explained. The problems with the book are two-fold. 1. This guy needed an editor and fact-checker in the worst way. DO NOT use any "facts" from this book as facts until you check them against another source. 2. He gets too bogged down in being comprehensive, and spends too little time on his interesting and well put forward premise. A must read for the music fanatic, but not a good place for a beginner to start. One of the vital points of the book is that most critics take it for granted that certain bands were important and great, when they haven't actually LISTENED to them. They take the word of the critics that they've read. Mr. Harrington, does not repeat the mistake, and his "discoveries" of obscure and forgotten musicians and bands are one of the joys of this book.

Joe Harrington creates a plausible context in which to place developments in 20th century popular music, with the emphasis on post WWII music. I don't care for other rock music writing out there - disconected prose that squeezes dubious meaning from music and lyrics in some overblown, comparative lit PhD wanabe (or drop out) fashion. Mr. Harrington, while clearly passionate about his subject, keeps his feet firmly planted on the ground, always aware of the reader's need for a connection to reasonable thesis. Lou Reed once made some off-hand quip about Robert Chistgau ("dean" of rock crits at the Village Voice) and how pointless his studying of rock n' roll is. However, my hunch is Lou wouldn't be saying that about Joe Harrington. Buy the book.

I just finished Sonic Cool and as a music history junkie it was probably the most important book I've ever read. For years I have been searching for a comprehensive history of rock, and this fit the bill nicely. Funny how it seems to be the only one of its kind. You think other writers would have tackled the subject before.

So yes, the book is engaging and will increase your knowledge of music, let alone rock music, immensely. Anyone who follows music should read it. But before I say anything else, I just have to get a few negative points off my chest:

1) As a journalism student, I was shocked by all the typos. We're not talking three or four, but one every few pages. I'm confused - I thought there were people called copy editors who checked this stuff before a book goes to print? Sure, you could say it's not a big deal, but all I know is, if I made these kind of errors (he mispells people's NAMES, for crying out loud) I'd fail my assignment. I would also be embarassed to have my name on a piece that makes me look so careless. Apparently Joe employs false bits of information as well - shameless. How do I know what else is untrue in this book?

2) Too much of the time I think he is being obscure just for the sake of being obscure. I consider myself pretty well versed in music, and a very large portion of the bands mentioned meant nothing to me. This kind of bored me at points because I had no frame of reference for the bands he was droning on about. You really have to motivate yourself to keep reading. He seems to think the band AntiSeen is the most significant band in the world, up there with Elvis and Nirvana, and I've never heard of them.

3) His structure got on my nerves. You would think he was done talking about a particular style, such as Folk or Punk, and then he would launch into it all over again. I personally would have liked to have heard more about Electronic Music, which I think also had an effect on the death of rock (thus contributing to his premise). He blathered on about Punk way longer than I was interested. Too repetitive, maybe he should have stuck to a more chronological style.

4) A more minor point: I did like how he wrote in a conversational tone, but some of his phrases were just stupid and juvenile i.e. "smelled the farts", "sniffed the butts". Considering most of the writing was pretty sophisticated, stuff like this broke the tone.

Ahhhh....it felt good to get that all out. Of course, I'm sure Joe would just tell me to "write my own damn book", anyway.

Compiled and written by music writer and historian Joe S. Harrington, Sonic Cool: The Life & Death Of Rock 'n' Roll is an impressive and detailed 595-page history of the rock 'n' roll music phenomenon. Smoothly penned and excitingly told, Sonic Cool presents the matter-of-fact rise and fall of the music style's popularity in a manner that reads like more like an enjoyable novel than a pedantic music school textbook. Sonic Cool is a sometimes funny, sometimes insightful, and always fascinating saga which is very highly recommended for all rock music buffs and students of 20th Century American Popular Culture.

You can tell that Harrington's been at this awhile. Like Joe Carducci's 'Rock and the Pop Narcotic', this book starts by explaining first how the structure of the music came to be from it's predecessors; Hillbilly, Blues, R&B, ect. and by tracing it's periodic fits and starts, arrived at the music's pivotal apotheosis: Punk. From then on out Harrington describes the music's eventual decline, from the non music of Disco, to prepackaged LCD 'safe bets', through the rise and fall of Grunge. (What he glibbly calls the music industries Viet Nam; ie., "never again")
The main stuctural difference between Harrington's book and Carducci's is that while Carducci focused on what made Rock tick as a musical language, and by comparison what is not Rock due to the lack of a viable syntax of that language, Harrington focuses on the inter-cultural contextualization of how Rock emerged as a byproduct of contempraneous forces in the culture, while simultaneously constructing that same culture. That this thesis should be advanced at all is not in of itself surprising, but I invite you to try and pull it off in such a colossal manner in the way in which Harrington does. It's all about time, effort, and as Warhol would have put it: WORK. In such a volume one would expect to find many glaring errors, or oversights. Amazingly the ones that I could find are trivial. Firstly how he uses the word 'implode' on several occasions seems suspect in regards to meaning. (he seems to want to mean 'explode') Secondly he gives very short thrift to the whole area of experimental electronic music's influence on the genre, Industrial music in particular. He even lists the seminal work of Cabaret Voltaire lumped together with the 'new wave pop' bands of the mid 80's. I detect an editorial bias here. Also for short measure, he lists the University of Washington as residing in Olympia. Gazing out my bedroom window I can attest that it is in fact in Seattle. All in all not a whole hell of a lot to crow about considering the scope. You will love the irreverent tone, and the refusal to offer praise to sacred cows. You will never listen to the music the same after reading this book. This is an absolutely necessary read for those of you who still care. For those of you who don't, go get a book on croquet.

Joe S. Harrington's Top 100 albums (though I am obliged to state I never intended it to be so) has certainly changed the way I view music forever. No other writer is so able to convince me (admittedly nobody would ever claim I am by nature sceptical) that what he says about music is true.
The key to "Sonic Cool", no doubt, comes from the manner in which it shows how the origin of almost all the major threads operating in rock'n'roll today are much older than one's everyday guidebook to the topic makes you believe. "Sonic Cool" suggests that by and large, most of these trends originated from two or three great flowerings, the most important of which date from the late 1960s and the "punk revolution" of the late 1970s. It argues that ever since disco emerged at the same time as the "punk revolution," almost all of what has charted has been manufactured, extremely derivative, totally soulless and passionless music that imitates in a highly synthesised and pre-planned style the rock of the 1960s and early 1970s. Harrington says this with language that can only be described as intense and emotional, even extreme, especially when it comes to describing the commercial music of the eighties (which I grew up with for more than twenty years).

However, his almost apocalyptic tone about the death of rock'n'roll, whilst argued with an intelligence that is extraordinarily rare among rock critics, does unnaturally split the book into a pre-"punk revolution" period where "art" and "commerce" seemed to merge reasonably well, and a post-"punk revolution" period where they were so far apart as not only not to merge, but also to create a vast space between them. Harrington clearly has not only no use (and vast scorn) for anyone who charted in the eighties or the 1990s, but also for many quite well known artists after the "punk revolution" who never had any mainstream success.

Among pre-"punk revolution" artists he offers an excellent, balanced focus that perhaps is much closer to the opinions of mainstream critics. In this period, he willingly praises artists who were and remain popular, and looks very closely at how rock and roll evolved when it (as he sees it) was "living" among the masses. The information about both major and minor artists is very good and worth reading, and we see that many of the well-known artists of the era were, like independent rockers of the eighties and nineties, part of large movements, which Harrington pieces together in a very logical and easy-to-understand manner that shows each movement (as he indeed does with everything about pre-"punk revolution" music) in a very precise, highly historical context that shows very clearly why everything that occurred happened as it did.

Nevertheless, as another reviewer has said, Harrington (unlike his contemporary David Keenan) does not think highly of any artist who "thinks outside the box" ie. has an attitude or philosophy different from the attitudes of 1960s rockers. This might be why his focus in more modern times is so limited: electronica, trip-hop, post-rock, and death metal are completely excluded, the first three genres undoubtedly because their quiet, yet original, sophistication does not blend well with his train of thought. His focus from this period on riot grrl and obscure indie rock does strike one as being unbalanced, especially given that writers like Pierro Scaruffi question seriously the originality of modern garage rockers. More detail on the eighties and nineties would indeed be good even if Harrington does not want it.

On the whole, an unbalanced book that still manages to make a na?ve reader think many times more about what music they ought to be listening to.

This is it. The first written record of the action that rock n roll and rock manifested which has changed the course of human evolution. Even if you were'nt there, and don't know or care to know, this book will help you to understand why you are the person you are today and why there may be hope for us yet. (I think that's what he saying....). Anyway if you have an open mind, aren't too politically correct, are interested in music, and are honest you will benefit from reading this book. Here's to ya..

anyone know where i can submit my resume for employment as a free-lance editor of books that attempt to present any sort of cogent picture of punk? judging from the back cover, harrington should know his stuff, as he's supposedly written for the likes of seconds, reflex, raygun "and numerous fanzines" i hope he's had good editors in those forums, as apparently was *not* the case at hal leonard. while it's nice to see the likes of crass, the fall, the mekons, wire, naked raygun, et al. mentioned in a book one can find on the shelves at a major chain store, i'm starting to think that's about *all* this one has going for it.

a few examples gleaned just from skimming the book, which arrived only yesterday:

* unless my memory is playing particularly perverse tricks on me, the statement that jello biafra's mayoral campaign "was cut off when some opposition thugs broke his knees" is completely wrong. that, or i'm confusing such an incident with an an attack about a decade later that i believe (a) resulted in one broken knee, not two, (b) was inflicted by hardcore punk purists, & (c) had nothing to do with a mayoral run.

* "the problem with all these bands (soft boys, echo & the bunnymen, teadrop explodes & the psychedelic furs) was that their more melodic inclinations tended to meld easily with the less-aggressive
pop-oriented new wave bands that were also pouring out of the uk at the same: new order, soft cell, ph.d (who?), spandau ballet, human league, the cure, a flock of seagulls, cabaret voltaire, the
smiths." geez, & here i thought cab voltaire, for one, had started making noise (as opposed to proto-new wave) in the early '70s & sounded pretty bloody aggressive &/or disorienting for at least a couple of albums). and yeah, with 17 seconds & faith, the cure *definitely* was hard to distinguish around 1980 from spandau ballet & afos (did they even exist then?). ... etc etc etc.

there's
more, but i'm giving myself a headache, particularly from the perspective of
a veteran newspaper editor originally trained to edit books. if i ever let urban dance squad appear in print as "urban *death* squad, gilman street be spelled "gillman," or "the crass" (don't think i've ever see them use the direct article, & i'm a veteran of the whole early '80s circled-a scene that they engendered) be lumped in with the exploited, anti-nowhere league & skrewdriver as part of "the 'oi' spirit that led to a whole second wave of brit-punk bands," i hope i lose another job.

of course, those are errors of *fact* -- i'm not
overly impressed, either, with such judgments as "t. rex (aka marc bolan) ... without a
hint of musical knowledge, claiming to be the biggest thing in the world." that complete lack of musical knowledge is no doubt why bolan was recruited to play guitar with john's children years before glam began.

maybe it's appropriate that mekon/waco brother/lone valley cosmonaut/etc jon langford did the illustrations (at the very least, i hope he was paid well). certainly, harrington's presentation seems as revisionist as jonboy's "great pop things" strip, though of course the latter is *deliberately* inaccurate. *sigh*

This is a treat of a book. It's as long and unwieldy as "In a Godadivida" and at times you may get sick of it, but it always picks back up again. This is not an unbiased book. If you're happy with what you hear on your pre-programmed FM station, prepare to be insulted. Harrington has no use for Madonna, REM, U2, the hacks the Stones became or pretty much anyone who's charted in the past 30yrs. The Sixties were the last time Art and Commerce merged in his opinion.

The only drawback (aside from factual errors noted in other reviews) comes from some repetition. The way book is structured, though, makes it impossible to avoid. Harrington is more concerned with the progress of music rather than time.

Still, I spent far too many nights looking up at the clock flashing 1AM, which is always the mark of a good read.

Harrington's irreverent writing style makes what is essentially a history book a more than pleasurable reading experience. Not only will you feel smarter upon finishing it, you'll probably be inspired to write. This book could do for writers what the Velvet Underground did for a thousand kids with guitars.