Kill Your Idols : A New Generation of Rock Writers Reconsiders the Classics

Rating:
Summary: superb critical corrective
Review: A smart, witty, wildly entertaining evisceration of the mighty rock canon...this kind of irreverant criticism is woefully lacking in today's rock-crit groupthink. viva la hate!!

Rating:
Summary: Nothing worse than reading a bad critic whine ...
Review: Can someone please let this guy know that no one cares what he thinks. There is nothing worse than a someone rambling on about their opinion when they are uninformed. If there is a critics Hall of Shame, this gut belongs in it ...

Not worth the paper its printed on ...

Rating:
Summary: cranks here
Review: Criticizing the content of the book is one thing, but half of the people here are reviewing the book's editor, from the fact that's he overweight (who cares???) to mainstream Rolling Stone writers like Marsh and Puterbaugh who obviously hate the man. Did they even read the book? DeRogatis doesn't even agree with two-thirds of the writers' choices, and most of the readership probably wouldn't either (but The Doors do suck). Which is sort of the point, ya know?

Rating:
Summary: Interesting idea, bad execution
Review: I have mixed feelings on this book. While the idea behind it is interesting, most of the book isn't. Many of the reviews are poorly written and don't offer a clear explanation for why the writer dislikes the particular album they have chosen. As with any exercise like this, some of the discs in the book deserve to be here, i.e. Trout Mask Replica (ugh), Rumours, Kick out the Jams, The Doors. BUT c'mon people, Pet Sounds? Blood on the Tracks and (GASP!), OK Computer?? These are GREAT albums. Oh well, I guess that's the point, right? At any rate, it may have been easier to take had the reviewers presented thier argument a little better. The appendix with the contributors own top 10 lists was cool though. Skip the purchase, get it from your public library.

Rating:
Summary: Trash.
Review: I will honestly say i only scanned this book for about 10 minutes and i realized that i didnt need to read any furthur. This book is not about challenging your views on classic albums, these are pompus asses who acclaim themselves to know everything about music. They pretend music is an objective science. I went straight to Wilco's YHF album, and this woman completely trashed the album, which is okay, but her reasoning was sophomoric and she obviously knew nothing of the band. She claims people dont really like this album but are merely tolerant of it (strike 1). She starts by ripping on the song 'I am trying to break your heart', saying it starts good, she likes the instrumentation, and says the song completely falls apart as soon as Jeff start singing, saying he sounds like he is off key and crumbling. I dont think she knows ANYTHING about music. Hello! Look at the name of the song! "I am trying to break your heart', he is obviously in a lot of pain when doing this song and is illustrating that through his frustrated voice that IS crumbling and IS slightly out of key, that song would be trash if it was a polished jem, thats what his other pop songs are for. Doesnt she realize he could have made the vocals flawless while sitting in a studio? This was no mere half assed effort for an album, this was intentional. I guess shes never heard of transmitting emotion through music. Not everyone in the world wants to hear super polished music all of the time, she doesnt get that the raw quality of music is very appealing to a lot of people. How can she be paid to spread this crap all over America?

I didnt even have to read anymore of the book after reading the types of arguments they were going to present. I read the one review and knew nothing intelligent was going to come of this book, they obviously dont know anything about the artists or what they were trying to acheive aesthetically. It seems these are the people that are quick to dismiss music if they dont instantly 'get it'. The only element taken into consideration here seems to be wheather or not they love the album on first or second listen. Nevermind the broad scope of other factors the artist might be using, thats too difficult...

Rating:
Summary: Save your money, choose another book.
Review: It seems to me that Jim Derogatis doesn't like anything or anyone. This book is a waste of time to read just like his reviews. Jim seems to show us that he knows nothing about music and just has alot of anger built up inside of him.
Don't waste your money on this read, it's just useless.

Rating:
Summary: Like a bully
Review: Kill Your Idols is a childish book. It is like a bully who picks on whomever they can.

They have a few cute points, but overall, the book is worthless.

Who the heck is Jim Derogatis anyhow?

Rating:
Summary: Navel-Gazing At Its Very Best
Review: Kudos to Centerman -- this entirely self-congratulatory sham is in essence a very pale imitation of the sainted Bangs, and the arguments contained herein are self-indulgent at best, nonsensical at worst. The time to get outraged by what is at heart an adolescent stunt -- "Your favorite band sucks!" -- is very much past its sell-by date. While remaining a far superior writer and critic to his Chicagoland buddy Greg Kot (who's finally moved on from Mekons Toady-in-Chief to Wilco's court jester), DeRogatis is fast becoming this decade's Jimmy Guterman; "Bore Your Idols" is redolent of nothing so much as Guterman's execrable "Worst Rock & Roll Records of All Time." Can't wait for DeR.'s next weighty tome, due in -- what? -- six months? "Milk it" indeed.

Rating:
Summary: Changed my life!
Review: OK, it just changed my CD collection. This book really opened my eyes; you are the only one who has to listen to your music collection, no one else. I used to have a few of these albums but it hit me: I was just holding on to them to impress... who? My wife? My 5 yr old daughter? They could care less. I used to think "if I don't have 'Nevermind' in my collection, something is wrong with me". Pathetic, huh? So, I 86d that disc and picked up their best of. Why bother having stuff I'm never gonna listen to? And why should you? Maybe it's me in my middle age, but I just don't give a care what anyone thinks about my music. And YOU should feel like that too! PJ Harvey has to share shelf space with the Spice Girls on my CD rack and I can live with that.
Jim Morrison DID suck. He wasn't a poet, just a drunk who got lucky. Sam the Sham, however...genius. Sgt. Pepper is NOT the Beatles' best album the older I've gotten the less I've listened to it. 'Revolver' one the other hand is timeless. And ya know what, these are just MY opinions. You may disagree, which is cool.
This book drove home an obvious fact that I was too blind to see, critics are just guides; their opinion is not the be all and end all.
And yeah, I disagree with some of the reviews; I happen to love 'Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables' by the DKs, so what the heck does the reviewer know? See? There ya go.
About this new generation of critics: well, that's life. The new generation of anything is gonna be looked on as a bunch of snotty upstarts. So what? Marsh, Marcus, etc. used to be those guys once; now they're the elder (and in Marsh's case these days, insane) statesmen. "The Times Are A Changin'" to quote Bobby Z.
And how many of the amazon reviewers really read this? Did any of them miss that a lot of 'Kill Your Idols' reviewers had a lot of these albums on their top 10 faves?
Ahh, well. I LOVED this book. It helped me winnow down my collection to what I consider to be MY essentials, and for that it was worth it.
p.s. The essay on "It Takes A Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back" is one of the most incendiary music journalism pieces I've read in years.
p.p.s. My top 10 this week are (in no order) All Over the Place - Bangles; Fear of Music - Talking Heads; Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea - PJ Harvey; Crawdaddy - the Darling Buds; Houses of the Holy - Led Zep; Anthology - Chuck Berry; Dummy - Portishead; I am Shelby Lynne; Every Picture Tells a Story - Rod Stewart; Revolver - the Beatles

Rating:
Summary: a kernel of truth
Review: One of the goals of Kill Your Idols seems to be to fire a shot at the monolithic Rolling Stone and its limited-dressed-up-as-definitive perspective on the history of Great Rock Albums, while at the same time taking to task all non-RS critics who fall into line with the magazine's approach.

(A personal aside: I find it absurd to see albums like Kind of Blue and A Love Supreme mentioned in Rolling Stone's periodic greatest albums lists. Memo to RS: simply because you stick token recordings by high profile jazz artists in your predominately rock-oriented lists does not make you a genre-busting juggernaut; get over yourselves.)

Anyway, the whole perspective of this collection is intended to be contrarian at the very least. Unfortunately, some of the "revisionist" essays aren't all that revisionist, and some of the arguments are just plain sloppy. Several of the "classics" given a dress-down here are stretches, too. I don't think anyone other than an inebriated McCartney fanatic would call "Ram" its creator's best work, let alone a revered classic; Band on the Run and his first, self-titled album generally score higher. Led Zeppelin IV, Dark Side of the Moon and The Best of the Doors may be "hey-bruh" Soundtracks to Debauchery that have earned their fair share of disdain by being insanely overplayed, but they've never held up to critical scrutiny, entertaining as they may occasionally be if you don't think too hard about them. Let's also allow that these three albums DO have their place. So by attacking them, are the writers of Kill Your Idols subscribing to the same elitism they purport to be deconstructing?

The book assumes a familiarity with longstanding critical opinion and partially plays to an audience unmoved, and even disgusted, by the hyperbole. I'm personally delirious to see someone finally have a go at The Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street and Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica, two albums that have amassed considerable critical reputations despite the fact that they're absolutely no fun to listen to. The former, because of the altered states of its participants, is more a tribute to producer Jimmy Miller's ability to put together a consistent-sounding (but still ultimately unsatisfying) collection of songs the band didn't care to finish. The latter is simply music to kill house plants with; if I want to listen to atonal free jazz, I'll put on Ornette Coleman, who started down that course a full decade earlier (and doesn't seem like nearly such a wanker).

I'm equally happy to see a swipe at Sgt Pepper, though slamming that album is nothing new. Greil Marcus, way back in 1977 in his book Stranded (which is referenced several times in KYI), called Sgt Pepper a "cardboard tombstone for its time"; Rolling Stone is the only major entity that seems to continue ardently polishing Pepper's reputation, though the problem remains that there are plenty of people who still nod along mindlessly as Rolling Stone Tells You How It Is.

Let's get to the meat of the issue, though. Simply writing a bunch of essays that run counter to conventional critical opinion on a variety of albums doesn't really cut it. To be honest, most music critics are insufferably full of themselves, and Kill Your Idols only partially addresses this fact while at other times giving prime examples of that very insufferability. Would that DeRogatis have taken a more strict editorial stance on encouraging each of these critics to connect with his or her audience in a personal way instead of preaching, as if to the uneducated. I don't mean personal in the Lester Bangs style of avuncular discourse either (Bangs should get an editing credit for this book, so pervasive is his ethos). Some of these essays attempt to make that shift, while others are content to be catty. (Don't get me wrong, catty can be fun, but is that really the point of this book?)

Where Kill Your Idols earns its modest points, though, is in suggesting that establishing a canon of "essential" albums isn't nearly as important as encouraging us to develop educated opinions about the music we personally find indespensible in our own lives. A sense of history may be important, but that sense has to be balanced with our own experience. The writers contributing here thumb their noses at the idea of that prescribed list of "classics" and, even if most of the essays in this book don't completely convince, the very reasons behind the gesture are worth reflecting upon.