Dan Kennedy (2)

This was a whole lot funnier than I'd expected. Kennedy gets a job in advertising at a major record label just as the glory days of working at major music labels have waned. Everything's much less "rock'n'roll" and much more "bland corporate," but Kennedy's take on the whole thing is hilarious. The humor is deadpan and brilliant. And it's a reasonably telling peek into the music business during the clumsy transition from physical media to online.

While reading American Spirit by Dan Kennedy, I couldn't help thinking repeatedly to myself that this was what Fight Club would have been like if its nameless narrator had eschewed domestic terrorism and directed his mid-life crisis energy into designer coffee mugs (which surprisingly are not available for sale online). The comparison may not be fair to either book, but they both share the same narrative catalyst of taking a corporate upper-middle class white male, introduce them to rock show more bottom, and have their reaction be to see if they can drill down deeper.

Kennedy's anti-hero of choice is corporate pop-culture advertising executive Matthew Harris, whose crumbling marriage, dubious health, and sudden unemployment leave him in an existential free fall that, let's be honest, he doesn't handle very well. While many of Matthew's antics are genuinely funny, his rambling internal dialogue that comprises a decent majority of the book's narration is an awe-inspiring stream-of-consciousness philosophical diatribe that volleys back and forth between genuine insight and delusional rationalizing. Matthew's journey turns out to be a spiritual one, albeit not the same as you would find in Eat, Pray, Love (which Matthew reads and repeatedly references indirectly throughout the book). Instead, Matthew embarks on more of the emotionally-stunted vision quest through a soulless cultural wasteland, but far less cynicism and nihilism than you might expect. Kennedy sows enough compassion and hope into Matthew's paranoid tirades to keep him being a sympathetic character no matter how wildly off-target his path takes him. show less

American Spirit by Dan Kennedy is a clinical examination of a soul in crisis. Suffering from a potentially serious undiagnosed health ailment, Matthew, a fortysomething executive has additional complications to contend with: a cheating spouse, loss of youth and loss of job. Faced with these dire matters, Matthew tries to cobble together some meaning and direction in his life. Before taking his one-man sideshow on the road west, he attempts various balms for his soul: therapy, drinking, show more jogging, yoga and crafting classes until gun ownership and a foray into drug dealing seems like a wise choice. Though I admired the many searing and sometimes poetic observations about American culture and quest for self-help, the bulk of the story is told at a cold distance that doesn’t inspire compassion toward Matthew’s plight. Kennedy has proved his talent for the humorous in Loser Goes First, but don’t go looking for hilarity here aside from a few choice passages such as when Matthew tries to understand millennials or teenage girls’ fascination with vampires. From an ugly and sometimes tedious first half, the book improves along the way and ultimately reaches a satisfying conclusion. The book is worth experiencing mainly for the occasional but gloriously caustic indictments of American culture. show less

Dan Kennedy is a McSweeneys' staple. In extreme-short form, he's often laugh-out-loud funny. As a personality to spend some time with, bookwise, he's more often annoyingly snarky than funny. I read DK's first (and snarky) memoir, let's call it a "snarkoir", I read it a few years ago and I'm happy to report that "Rock On" is indeed funnier. So there's at least that progress.

DK's latest snarkoir, which is about his life in the last financially-viable days of the music industry, a kind of Rock show more Goetterdaemerung (i.e., with lots of Wagnerian bombast and Valkyrie-like predatory shrieks from above, all shot against a really beautiful but dying sun) really takes off in the last few chapters, when DK's humanity comes more to the surface, in terms of honestly-expressed vulnerability.

And then I just listened to DK's B&N Podcast interview, which I'm very sad to report is twenty minutes of painfully unfunny snark. Someone needs to stage a snark intervention on Mr. DK (a snarktervention, if you will), the goal of which should be to get DK to express some kind of honestly-felt emotion in front of an audience of at least 23 strangers and for at least five contiguous minutes. If successful, I predict that DK could go on to become David Sedaris popular. He's that funny and wise.

(And who the hell am I to make such predictions? I'm just a fan, and a stranger to Dan.) show less