Customer Reviews

Teenage Nervous Breakdown

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Do you know that old joke, "If you remember the 1960s you probably weren't there"? Walley thinks he remembers.

Looking for a book to use for a class on "Music and Politics," I was excited to come upon this title. What a disappointment. Walley, whose credentials as a historian escape me, says his book is "basically a series of word-jazz rock and roll improvisations and variations" on how rock created "an attitude as well a (sic) sonic environment for commerce." A few chapters have references, but there is little original research or theory. Chapters with more notes offer little more than the ones where Walley supposedly gives his imagination full range.

Walley uses commas like blunt instruments. Consider: "Really, it's just business, forget that other stuff, said the military-industrial complex, which, when the layers of obfuscation and self-serving rhetoric were peeled away and its corporate reports were scrutinized by peace activist historians and economists, was revealed to be the engine that motored the American ecnomy and had been motoring it since the end of World War II." Is this a jazz riff, or just awful writing?

You've also got to wonder about a music "expert" who is shocked that the Beatles "Revolution" is being used to sell "sneakers" (Does anyone younger than 50 still use this term?) today.

Listen to the words: "Revolution" was anti-revolution.

If you are looking for a book which will deal with the impact of commercial forces on the music industry and politics, keep looking. I was hoping for a book which would explore how commercial culture co-opts cutting-edge culture. This is just sludge.

This book makes a post-modernist Ph.D. dissertation read like a model of clarity.

This could be one of the most underrated works in modern social history. Walley has managed the astounding feat of combining first-hand insights and observations with a style that is totally unique -- practically free form. "Teenage Nervous Breakdown" should be required reading for students of sociology, music, or, dare I say, cultural anthropology. In an age when culture is very much a recycled and homogenized ghost of past trends and politics, this collection of essays is a rallying cry for anyone searching for a voice in a thunderstorm of corporatized consumerism and apathy.

Found this book in a bin outside a dollar store. Thought the title looked promising. Wrong. It's the most pretentious pile of horse wallop I've tried to read in a long time. If it wasn't such a long drive back to that particular dollar store, I'd throw it back in the bin it came out of.

Written by popular music and culture expert David Walley, who has documented the evolution of rock and roll since the late sixties, Teenage Nervous Breakdown: Music and Politics in the Post-Elvis Age is a close scrutiny of how rock and the rock lifestyle have been commercialized and merchandized, first to a teenage audience, and now to a worldwide consumer society. In particular, Teenage Nervous Breakdown explores how modern culture has been "adolescentized", and what the consequences are. How did the counterculture movement get commercially hijacked, what exactly is the "cool" aesthetic, and why has youth culture been elevated to the mainstream? Teenage Nervous Breakdown offers keenly aware answers to all this questions and more. From the marketing of politicians to the ramifications and cultural views of psychotropic drugs, no issue with a tangible connection to rock-and-roll goes overlooked. A "must-read" for rock-and-roll fans especially, as well as students and even businessmen interested in the dynamics of popular culture.

David Walley is one of the most exciting essayists I've ever read. To say that he's a cultural historian of the highest order is absolutely right and dead wrong. One thinks of historians as dried out hollow men, heads filled with straw. Walley's head is a dynamo generating electric sparks of insight, self-realization, and delight.