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A A A Comments By Mikael Wood Tuesday, Apr 12 2005

Because they rarely pass up the opportunity to savage their (often deserving) targets in this "essential lexicon of rockological knowledge"—Zimmy fans are "shut-in Dylanologists," Gram Parsons is a "trustafarian pretty-boy," Paul McCartney deserves your hatred "for not being John Lennon"—I'll give snark-mad Vanity Fairscribes David Kamp and Steven Daly the bad news in its sugar-free variety: Guys, you're facing down obsolescence like a stack of unplayed Soup Dragons LPs.

illustration: David Camp

Kurtis Blow: Somebody scream!

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The Rock Snob*s Dictionary
By David Kamp and Steven Daly
Broadway, 149 pp., $12.95

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To be sure, many of the entries in the writers' breezy compendium of would-be hipster totems, an outgrowth of a recurring VF feature, are spot-on. They're good at crystallizing the thrusts of various rock movements in a few lines—their description of the late-'70s New York No Wave scene: "droll"—and enthusiastic enough as listeners that they'll get as hot and bothered about Jack Nitzsche's score for An Officer and a Gentleman as gay glam-rocker Jobriath's "overwrought, trash-operatic pop songs." Yet Kamp and Daly are unapologetic rockists at a moment when the good-taste ideology—albums, authenticity, paying one's dues: yea; singles, artificiality, selling out: nay—receives a splashy dismantling in The New York Times. As a result, they fill The Rock Snob*s Dictionary with so many scruffy roots-conscious folkies and bratty garage punks that it's easy to wonder if a rock snob not born before 1980 would even recognize himself in their middlebrow menagerie.

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