The old, old face of rock journalism.
Hoskyns launches his cultural revolution by opening his anthology with a dull Saturday Evening Post article on the Beatles' arrival in America, and ends it with a lightly ironic piece about Abba by yuppie novelist Nick Hornby.
Wow, dude, you're really fucking up the system! Move over Marat! Step aside, Trotsky!
Hoskyns, as evidenced by his introduction and his choices of "dangerous" rock articles, is a moron of a recognizable type, one of those garrulous, aging classic-rock corner preachers, which, come to think of it, describes an alarming percentage of white Anglo-American males. He's been around forever: In high school, he was the kid who'd come over to your house, pick up your guitar and spend hours practicing a single difficult lick while not even pretending to listen to you. He was the pedant who could argue endlessly that Neil Peart was a better drummer than John Bonham. Even if you agreed with him, he wouldn't shut up.
I thought they built strip malls to keep people like him off the streets and busy selling car stereos, but I guess a few of the pushier ones like Hoskyns were able to convert their hippie-schmooze into print, where they could continue their mad assault, bombarding readers with a hodgepodge of hand-me-down 60s cliches and Life magazine hokeyness.
It's in the art of cliche regurgitation that Hoskyns succeeds best: "In a world where Britney Spears is the new Madonna, what does 21st-century pop culture promote other than celebrity as the illusory transcendence of mortality?" Whoa, man, so like, you mean that each atom in my fingernail contains an entire universe? Hoskyns can't stop himself: "The decentralization of new media may be disorienting, but we should all embrace it as a rock'n'roll lifeline." Apparently he still hasn't figured out how to program his VCR.
Reading through The Sound and the Fury can inspire real fury at times, particularly for its omissions. The Olympian Gods of Rock, such as Iggy Pop, the Fall, Guided by Voices and Lou Reed are passed over in favor of chapters on the Band, Grand Funk Railroad and Madonna. Reed is too important to completely omit, so Hoskyns includes a shallow article on Reed's safer mentor, Andy Warhol.
Even the few interesting figures represented are ruined. For example, Will Self, that talentless wordsmith for middlebrows, spends nearly his entire article smothering Morrissey's sublime persona with Self's flat egoism. Basically, Self is convinced that Morrissey wants to fuck him. Morrissey, however, is brilliantly coy, all of which goes over Self's head:
"I interject: 'But,' and he overrides me: 'I know you're about to say "but," but so am I. It's not really an issue, there's nothing to say, and there's nothing to ask, more to the point.'"
Self is convinced all this talk of "buts" is homoerotic courtship, incapable of accepting Morrissey's word at face value. So that when later, backstage at a Wembley Stadium concert, Morrissey sensibly refuses to meet Self, the author is convinced it's because he brought his girlfriend with him, and he's offended his seducer-superstar.
Greil Marcus, whose literary mission is to make punk safe for classic rock hippies like Hoskyns, is naturally represented, revealing his hippie heart in a gushing article on the Band, which he describes as "complicated, dangerous and alive." Dangerous: there's that goddamn word again. Marcus is famous for having said about the Fall, the most intelligent, untamed group in the history of the form, "They never did a thing for me." Ah, but when it comes to the Band!
The most excruciating article has to be John Mendelssohn's "Poison the Hood: Niggaz with Attitude." Mendelssohn is a middle-aged workshop writer-type (his introduction to the article begins lyrically, "In 1991, when I was four and forty?") who sleazily tries to cover his ignorance about NWA by "debunking" them, a cheap white ploy that not only gives false insight into the subject and a false sense that Mendelssohn is really in the know, but comfort for Hoskyns' white male audience. Let's face it: NWA was scary.
Everything about this book?hell, everything about rock journalism?makes me wince. I felt embarrassment for myself because I remembered how much rock journalism once meant to me back in college, when I was looking for my heroes' secrets or making sure I wasn't missing out on something good.
Why would someone elect to be a rock journalist anyway? It's as inane as signing up to be the backroom accountant for a Nevada whorehouse: A rock journalist is despised by the groupies, gets almost none of the trickle-down profits but is key to the business's solvency (in rock, fame is capital, and fame requires magazine articles).
Rock journalism is fatally flawed by design. The music is inevitably debased in the transfer to words, made worse by the fact that rock journalists are at the bottom of an already intellectually debased profession?most rockers are boring idiots.
The only interesting attempt at rock journalism I have ever read is Lester Bangs. He failed to match his subject, but at least he pulled himself out of the swamp. Which might explain why he's so noticeably absent from Hoskyns' anthology. This is a bedtime reading book for the aging classic rock demographic, shallow nostalgia designed to comfort his readers as they pass through a world they understand less and less.