The Accidental Evolution Of Rock'n'roll: A Misguided Tour Through Popular Music

The other negative reviews pretty much spell it out, why did I not listen to them. There are some critics that create heated debates as to the weight of their opinion (Bangs, Marcus, etc), but this guy is just bad. I think this book is made for teenagers who can't read more than a page or two without getting bored. I traded it in for a good book on Marvin Gaye, so the experience wasn't all bad.

book no good. Seller, great to buy from

To me, it seems that the author was too busy listing songs to talk about them in an interesting way. He comes up with categories -- some pretty inventive -- to slot songs into and then reels off list. It's as if he felt he was in a contest to show off how many titles he can reel off.. I'm awfully glad I borrowed this from the library. I hope somebody likes it, but it didn't make my time seem well invested.

If anything, the negative reviews are a testament to the greatness of this book. You may disagree with him, but I just want to make it abundantly clear that Chuck Eddy is putting no-one on with any of his opinions - even if he can be reactionary, the fact that he takes "Cotton Eye Joe" by Rednex more seriously than any Tricky or Massive Attack album is WHY he's so wonderful to read. I mean, go read 99% of the rest of the music critics out there if you want to hear about how great Radiohead or Pink Floyd or whoever are - even when I disagree with him (when I first read this in college, i LOVED Pavement, and was deeply irritated by his total dismissal of them), I dig being challenged; and honestly, he's wore me down over the years of reading and re-reading - back when I first bought this book, I actually BELIEVED there was such a thing as a guilty pleasure, shamefully enough. Plus there is SO MUCH music discussed in here - it's probably the most dogeared book on my bookshelf. Chuck introduced me to Lucifer's Friend AND Army of Lovers AND Spoonie Gee (alongside billions of other artists) - anyone who digs all three artists (and champions them) is cool with me. If you give a damn about popular music, read this book. It's the s***. Go read this with a youtube window open and look up any song that sounds interesting, and I guarantee you'll have a solid year's worth of entertainment and learnin' ahead.

This book is unbelievably bad by a writer who possesses possibly absolutely no talent or intelligence. Unfortunately, it's a sad reflection on rock criticism and writing in general. This book doesn't merit me sitting here wasting my time writing or thinking of it, I want to forget this book, this writer, everything about the experience as quickly as possibly and just pretend it was a very bad dream. I have nothing good to say about this book, except if I'm trapped in a bathroom with only this book, I could come up with one useful thing to do with this book. What's his next book going to be: how boogers are responsible for some of the greatest literary works of this century? I wish this was just some bizarre comment coming off the top of my head, but I could actually see this joker writing such a book of 'weighty scholarship'. Peace out, music lovers, the X Man

Chuck: Maybe "Me and the boys are playing all night" means that the band Kiss are playing music. He mentions that some of this book was written while sitting on the toilet bowl; unfortunately, it shows. Tho I admire his honesty saying he only owned 4 albums in college, it painfully adds to my conclusion that he is hardly an authority on the subject and that there are lots of gaps in his knowledge. He actually admits that he had never heard any Tricky before, while dissing stupid critics who praise him. But if he never heard any Tricky, then he never heard any of Massive Attack, arguably creators of the best cd of the 90's. Here is a clue: 11 pages talk about Debbie Gibson, but there is only one mention of the Marshall Tucker Band, 3 mentions of Creedence. So if he can flip off comments about brain-dead hippies, what the hell does he think he is? Totally tasteless is the way he raps about his own ideations about suicide while knocking Kurt Cobain. Unbelieveable. Positive side: Not many people are going to know who the Louvin Brothers or Andrea True are. This book is really packed with trivia, so rocknroll fanatics should really enjoy the memoribilia. And chapters about players who are missing various appendages are fascinating for anyone interested in this arcana.

Reading the other reviews on this page, one might well be confused: Some complain about Chuck Eddy's weak grasp of his subject matter, others delight in the obscurity of his numerous references. So what is it?Well, all of these reviews are accurate. Chuck slings names all over the place, and shows laudable contempt for genre classification (sure, he spends a lot of time on Debbie Gibson, but not everyone would compare her to, say, Von Lmo). But if you're actually going to him for information, you'll be disappointed, as there seem to be very few albums Chuck has actually LISTENED to. References abound, but are restricted to trite observations about song titles; in fact, he doesn't even make observations so much as group songs by some common word in their names. He doesn't seem to have any grasp of his subject matter because he doesn't seem to have grasped the notion that those plastic things inside album covers play music if you put them in a special machine.Rock criticism has always been pretty grim, being dominated by hacks who prefer to deconstruct song lyrics than listen to the music. (Just look at the praise lavished on Bob Dylan's "poetics" over the years, qualified by blushing "admissions" that "he's really not a great singer": If only these people realized that Dylan's VOICE epitomizes the rock aesthetic, his stoner ramblings being mere frills!) Chuck Eddy, while relatively unpretentious, represents the absolute lowest form of this tendency.This book is truly abysmal.

Eddy's writing itself is rocknroll, and some readers just can't handle that. If you're looking for footnotes and pseudo-erudite analyses, go to school. This one's for rockers. Read while listening to Ragged Glory, etc.