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36 of 40 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Clueless, pointless rock agitprop., April 30, 2001
As a longtime metal fan, this book managed to irritate me even more than the average Eddy product.
He goes to admirable lengths to avoid supporting his statements (read his especially entertaining explanation of why metal = whatever Chuck Eddy wants it to be), but there are times when that simply isn't enough. Sure, it's notoriously difficult to categorize music, and Chuck Eddy is notoriously arbitrary, but even in the face of his formidable steamroller of verbal ephemera, Stairway to Hell is often unconvicing.
You can't accuse him of lacking chutzpah; though Stairway To Hell purports to be a book of the top 500 metal albums, it includes about two hundred punk albums, a handful of "classic rock" albums, and some jazz-fusion. Moreover, around #50 of these "best metal albums in the universe," he starts sporadically attacking them. One gets the impression before long that the point of this book, to Mr. Eddy, was a lengthy screed against rockism.
Of course, that so misses the point that it's hard to call it anything but an argument in bad faith; metal can't be understood through popist lenses, and anybody who's been a fan knows that. Metal is tricky to reconcile with pomo irony, and it's certainly never been about "pow-pow-powerpop hooks." In one sense, metal is a sort of adolescent ethos emphasizing on earnestness, intensity and pathos, often at the expense of maturity. In another sense, it's Wagnerian romanticism obsessed with a particularly grim view of the sublime. What it isn't is: ninety percent of the things Mr. Eddy claims.
He blasts "Black Sabbath No. 4" and "Who's Next," dismisses Soundgarden, and includes as "heavy metal" acts like Weezer, Supergrass and Prodigy (all of whom would no doubt be offended). If that doesn't tell you everything you need to know about his lack of respect for the subject he's writing on, it's further reason to skip this book and find one better informed.
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15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Escalator To Pretentiousness, June 27, 2004
In a strange type of irony, reading "Stairway to Hell" is not too dissimilar from hearing an Yngwei Malmsteen album: during the first couple songs the reaction is, "Wow -- this kid can really jam!" but by the third or fourth song you're reduced to, "Okay, I GET IT already! Shut Up!" In short, it's stylistic overkill intended to impress, not enlighten. To that end this book is exempliary of the worst aspect of any critical offering, being far less about the designated topic and much more about the author himself. Eddy wants to wow, apparently, with snide similes and cleverer-than-thou descriptive wordsmithing -- mired in a vinyl elitist's smugness, no less -- but the resulting compendium displays far less acumen regarding its subject.
Purportedly that subject is a chronicling of that musical genre broadly defined as Heavy Metal's finest products -- but unless musicians like Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock and Tony Williams actually belong to a subset of Heavy Metal I'm unfamiliar with, this volume reads less like a cataloguing of Heavy Metal and more like an egotistical pretense for lumping a synopsis of every album in Eddy's collection into a "Best of Chuck Eddy" volume.
Reading through the entries one is not so much taken aback by what's included (although much of it does leave the astute -- and even not-so-astute -- Metalhead scratching his head), but what's not. As many reviewers have rightly pointed out, it's nothing short of blasphemy to compose a book about Heavy Metal that fails to include even one entry for Metal kingpins Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Saxon, Scorpions, MSG, Rainbow, Ozzy Osbourne, Alcatrazz, and countless others. But then, perhaps it's Eddy's intent not to take the compilation task with any modicum of seriousness, and instead simply thump the reader over the head with irony-laced quasi-descriptive blurbs replete with trademark Eddy hogwash. The astute -- and even not-so-astute -- Metalhead would rightly question whether NOT ONE of those Metal exemplars above has produced output that ranks among the best of the genre, worthy of being archived in a Metal encyclopedia. Eddy, apparently, doesn't care -- he's got his own agenda.
Seemingly that agenda is Eddy satisfying himself with hip, inventive, postmodern dissections of the likes of Bryan Adams, Prince, Neil Young, Funkadelic, Teena Marie, and Suzi Quatro. Not to mention extolling obscurity in such forms as Feedtime, Amon Duul, Glen Branca, Raszebrae, Head Of David, Pere Ubu, Roky Erickson, and Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments. Personally, I couldn't care less about Eddy's ability to self-indulgently flex his knowledge about fringe acts that have a questionably faint connection to things Metal. Where are Samson and Raven and Viper and TNT and Mama's Boys and Tygers of Pan Tang and Tora Tora and Grand Prix and . . . you get the picture. Oh, I see -- they've been displaced by Bo Donaldson, James Blood Ulmer, Sir Lord Baltimore, Dick Destiny and the Highway Kings, Plastic Ono Band, and those Metal luminaries The Chocolate Watchband. Puh-LEEZE. Lynyrd Skynyrd and .38 Special are about as Heavy Metal as a wet dish towel, as are The Divinyls and The Byrds and King Crimson and Argent and Lou Reed and Paul Revere & The Raiders -- yet all are included in this compendium. And even if Eddy's approach was intended to be ironically "eclectic" (to say the least), some of his choices are downright inexplicable: Poison, but not Dokken; White Lion, but not Ratt; Bon Jovi, but not Motley Crue. And why should Maryland AC/DC clone Kix (who mercilessly plunder Cult riffs for material) warrant FOUR entries, while Krokus and Helix deserve NO CREDIT for having trod the same stylistic ground much earlier? Under the auspices of "Best Heavy Metal Albums" we've been presented with a phony bill of goods.
Eddie's pint-sized explanation for the vast array of empirically (despite what he says) non-Metallic inclusions is to insist -- in a tone which seemingly protesteth far too much -- that "genre-naming equals corporate categorization equals a shortcut to false order." Apparently the fact that stylistic differentiations provide a foothold for individuals seeking to compartmentalize their preferences is a whopping no-no imposed by the Big Business Powers-That-Be, not a useful system created by music aficionados who'd prefer to know that when they buy a Boz Scaggs album it ain't gonna sound the same as W.A.S.P. His rationalization serves to do nothing but let him off the hook of attempting to adhere to any constrictors (that'd be too close-minded!) and justify, therefore, how in his universe REO Speedwagon can be obliquely counted among the Metal hordes.
Thus, based on what's presented in this book, Eddy apparently cares as much about what constitutes the 500 Best Heavy Metal Albums in the Universe as my cat. In fact, I'd bet my cat cares more. It's maddening for those of us with a proud insight into Hard Rock / Metal esoterica (which would allow us to know, for instance, that Riot's 1981 Elektra release was actually titled "Fire Down Under," not "Fire Down Below" -- the "Below" was a misprint on the album jacket spine, making it NOT, as Eddy suggests, a title "nicked" from Bob Seger) that this type of psuedo-encyclopedia might wind up in the hands of impressionable tots who don't know any better. But it's also redeemingly satisfying that Eddy shows he doesn't know as much as he'd like you think, despite the crafty word-slinging.
All of which leads me to the conclusion that this tome is not so much an empirical guide towards anything resembling what could be called Best Heavy Metal Albums, but more a collection of Stuff Chuck Eddy Likes. And even at that, it becomes evident in rather short order that he's not really all that fond of the majority of the entries included. Instead of helpful exegetical analyses, we get 500 snotty screeds that while at times seem to bear some relation to the album under discussion, most are just stuffed with Eddy's self-indulgent linguistic inventions that 90% of the time make sense only to, well, Eddy. Hardly a useful enterprise for us Earthbound music fans who can only shake our heads wondering what "squishing drums" and "razorback-nudging-your-pup-tent guitars" actually SOUND like.
Ultimately, any book purporting to catalogue a definitive "best" of ANY artistic endeavor can only be subjective, but such endeavors should at least be counted on to adhere to some semblance of stylistic continuity. You won't find that here -- you might as well just stick to the comprehensive All Music Guides for all the diversity presented in "Stairway To Hell." The only worth I see in this book is that it's inspired me to review my entire music collection -- from Abba to Zappa -- dress it up in cutesy crypto-jargon, and chronicle the tastes it represents in a book entitled "The Best Jazz EVER."
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19 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
A Must (To Avoid), November 18, 2001
When Chuck Eddy wrote this, he was a regular at The Village Voice....thus I knew what to expect from STAIRWAY TO HELL. For those unfamiliar with the Voice, two rules apply:1) No matter what the 'subject' is, it's ALWAYS really about sociopolitics 2) Any Voice writer purporting to dig metal is ALWAYS a poser pretending to dig metal...as a jumping-off point for looka-me essays showing off their sneering superiority to the music and its fans Eddy's a good writer, but he's also a phony. His intention with this book was subversive - to sucker Judas Priest & Megadeth fans into buying this so he could slyly steer them towards punk & hardcore bands. As if those of us who don't write for The Voice and drink at dives on Ave C are too dim to tell the difference. Bad job all around. One add'l note: I'm no metalhead, and if anything I share a lot of Eddy's disdain for bands like Iron Maiden. But a book so titled (and expressly target-marketed to the metal fan) should play fair with its audience: this one blows a raspberry at its readership after suckering it out of the cover price. Let's see a critical history of hip-hop that blows off Wu-Tang & Ice Cube in favor of Jimmy Osmond's "Killer Joe" & Blondie's "Rapture" and see if the critics respond with the same hosannas...
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