Customer Reviews

Spin: 20 Years of Alternative Music: Original Writing on Rock, Hip-Hop, Techno, and Beyond

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i just got this the other day and have already spent a fair amount of time browsing thru it. sure it would have been great to have collected the best articles from the last 20 years; however the problem with that (and something the book acknowledges) is sometimes what is viewed at the time as important and groundbreaking turns out to have been not such a big deal. the great thing about this book is the advantage of perspective, being able to go back and identify what really turned out to have been influential and then weeding out the chaff. in the appendix section the editors show some magazine covers that in retrospect demonstrate that sometimes the "next big thing" often ends up in the "where are they now file" ie Lisa Stansfield, Creed, etc.

i found the book to be immensely readable, one you can pick up and start anywhere, jump to whatever interests you, and even learn about music or artists that at the time you didn't care about.

a great book about a great magazine, and should be of interest to any music fan, especially one like myself who when i was younger read SPIN religiously.

I have been reading SPIN magazine off and on since I picked up my first issue at age 15. It has been one of the more compelling periodicals available about music that tends to adhere to a non-biased approach that all journalists claim but none practice.
When I heard of a book from SPIN commemorating 20 years in the alternative music scene I was very excited. When I bought and read this book I was even more thoroughly pleased.
Mixing big name staying-power acts lie Prince and Modonna with live-in-the-moment scenes/groups like Nirvana and NWA, this book finally gives a great perspective on music and it's effect on American culture, just like SPIN magazine has been striving to do for decades (but not always succeeding).
I felt it covered all pertinent points of alternative music throughout the past several years and was well informative on music movements that I had missed out on.
I especially enjoyed reading about hip-hop legends like Run DMC, Public Enemy, NWA, and Tupac as I can be easily classified as a southern white boy sheltered from the extremities of rap music.
I also enjoyed the essays written about outside-music influences like ecstasy, heroin, and MTV (all equally mind-numbing)
Things I did not like was the fixation on Nine Inch Nails as the sole pioneers of industrial music (have we never heard of Ministry, KMFDM, or My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult). Also thought the piece on Radiohead was a bit much, I think they can easily be classified into Britpop along with Blur and Oasis.
This is definitely a great read, something new at each turn of the page to fuel both excitement and nostalgia.

Spin: 20 Years of Alternative Music is certainly interesting in parts (I enjoyed the bits about Courtney Love, Nirvana, Kurt Cobain, Foo Fighters, etc.), but my God the prose is almost impenetrable! These writers seem to know little about creating a flowing sentence. Run-on sentences abound. And many sentences are filled with so many asides that I was left glassy-eyed after one paragraph. Information dense and pretentious prose!

I was also very surprised by the inclusion of Madonna in this book. I love Madonna, but since when is the biggest selling female artist of all time an "alternative" act?

When I read that this was coming out, I was pretty excited, because there have been some amazing articles in Spin over the past 20 years. I thought that it would be a compilation of some of the best articles that they had published.

Instead, it's new writing on various topics and artists, with snippets of what I consider the classic articles thrown in. It's frustrating to read the R.E.M. chapter, for instance, and see two--and only two--paragraphs from an article from 1987 that you remember being really good.

Even so, it's still a somewhat interesting book. I just feel that if it had included all of content of some of the classic articles, it could've been so much better.

We had this book at my library and I wanted it so bad. I was happy to get the book, it came right on time...as a music love this book is great. It hits alot of different genres and you learn a bunch.

Since when does an unoriginal who has simply trend hopped and who has spawned more talentless airheads in her own image than one can role call and who has countless top ten hits, qualify as "alternative?" Someone at SPIN was obviously trying to kiss madonna's masculine behind because there is absolutely no reason for her to be mentioned in this rambling, misguided attempt at covering the alternative music scene of the late 80's to 90's. Ani diFranco, Courney Love, L7, Bikini Kill and PJ Harvey yes. madonna, a resounding no. This just proves that SPIN was a "madonna magazine" largely. No thanks!