German for Musicians Book

So, Rob, what the hell are you doing reading this book when you have so many on your To-Read list? No matter that you're a sucker for rock or jazz books in general, why this? And I still can't really answer that, but I got an inkling of what my exasperated subconscious was telling me when I saw the leap from Never Mind the Bollocks to Thriller. And the ending in 1997 for a book compiled in 2008. Having just read Rip It Up and Start Again, which postulated 1977-82 as a 'forgotten zone' of fervent creativity, here was canonicalist proof: punk jumped straight to Jackson. And Radiohead offered up the last classic.

So what was I doing here? The idea was promising: song-by-song rundowns, some context, a flavour of the heady times in which these great albums were released. But so little was new. Some of the comments on the songs could have come from a diplomatic barfly, they were so anodyne. The same old stories. Who is it for? Mags like Mojo or Uncut go over this ground regularly. And if it's for a young would-be 'rock scholar', well a 15 year old in 2008 was born in 1993, so the story 'ends' when he/she is 4. Or essentially: our argument is that rock is dead, in a nutshell.

These are all well-known rock critics, but aside from the lengthy and quite enjoyable Pistols piece (more of a mini-history, twice as long as the average essay here, with a bit more perspective), very little said much at all to me. And some of the insight was downright banal: U2 is presented as the only band pursuing a political stance in the mid-80s when all the others are self-obsessed. Excuse me? And only in Ireland could they read about Sandinistas... Really? Enough said. It would perhaps have been more interesting to look at how the trip into the past for U2 began an odyssey that took them to Iggy/Bowie (Achtung Baby) and then irony (Zooropa & Pop), which bloated them and killed their momentum stone dead. Maybe the seeds were here, in their looking back rather than riding their modernist instincts. Radiohead, by contrast, did the opposite: modernity all the way (Kid A and onwards), and somehow took a fair number of fans with them.

Basically, this book is the Official Story, puffed up with its own hindsight. If Harold Bloom listed rock albums he would perhaps provide a similar list. If you grew up with them, you know all this. If not, there are probably better places to get the lowdown. It's not bad, but it won't be getting into any rock book canons.