Books
Mikael Wood
Tuesday, April 12th 2005
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illustration: David Camp
Kurtis Blow: Somebody scream!
Details:
Most Popular
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Scientology's Crushing Defeat A previously unpublished saga of an $8 million check
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Heath Ledger Peers Into The Abyss in The Dark Knight Christopher Nolan's Batman returns, delivers the kick-ass goods
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The Harrowing Adventures of President Obama Looking back on his first term
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Andrew Cuomo and Fannie and Freddie How the youngest Housing and Urban Development secretary in history gave birth to the mortgage crisis
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A Teen Private-In-Training Is Crushed to Death . . . and his father fights for answers
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 Fair scribes 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.
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.
Recent Articles
More by Mikael Wood
ON THE ROAD AGAIN
David Berman’s back—sans Pavement pals
TUNE IN
EVR celebrates five years of eclectic listening
NEXT AMY WINEHOUSE?
The British press adore Adele. But will you?
THE BUZZ
Catch this foursome before they go all Franz Ferdinand
Lucero+Justin Townes Earle
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