Rock On: An Office Power Ballad

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.

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 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 show more 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

Kennedy writes with a highly aware, overtly insecure style that will appeal to some and turn others away. It is the tone that defines Generation Y, and though Kennedy avoids that label by a small span of years, he is in tune with the emotions of that culture. At the core of Rock On is a struggle with class, race, and feelings of inadequacy. It's a delayed adolescence taking place in the epitome of juvenility: the record industry. Kennedy writes with wit and a keenly sensitive radar for the absurd. But perhaps the best chapter of his memoir is a reflection on what music really means to him: when he sees Iggy Pop live, the reader can literally feel the sensations that Kennedy is feeling - they will want to run to their nearest concert show more venue and join a mosh pit. The book doesn't have much of a climax. The narrative stays level throughout, leaving the ending to be unexciting and leaves the reader with mixed emotions about music as a whole. With clever lists and recommendations for the industry strewn throughout, the adventure is episodic but truly genuine. show less

There is one transcendent passage in this book, where the author attends an Iggy Pop concert. Pick it up for that, the rest is dross. Self-consciously arch and constantly reaching for a postmodern hip ironic remove, it succeeds instead in painting a too-accurate picture of what reality TV has given us in lieu of interesting books.

Great book. Hilarious inside view of the evils of the music business. I really enjoy the way Dan Kennedy writes, it is a lot of fun to read.

Very entertaining book. It doesn't give out any 'business' secrets but he tells a great story. Be sure to read the reading group guide it's totaly hilarious. To give you an idea of the flavour of the book here is the 'suggested furhter reading' - the bathroom wall at the Continental, according to Pat Carpenter,
Flyers on telephone poles,
Fine print on the contract,
A decent map.

I enjoyed this book, and the honesty of the author. Sometimes the humor seemed a bit forced, but it was often hilarious.