Sonic Cool

Rating:
Summary: Pop history in a believable context
Review: Joe Harrington creates a plausible context in which to place developments in 20th century popular music, with the emphasis on post WWII music. I don't care for other rock music writing out there - disconected prose that squeezes dubious meaning from music and lyrics in some overblown, comparative lit PhD wanabe (or drop out) fashion. Mr. Harrington, while clearly passionate about his subject, keeps his feet firmly planted on the ground, always aware of the reader's need for a connection to reasonable thesis. Lou Reed once made some off-hand quip about Robert Chistgau ("dean" of rock crits at the Village Voice) and how pointless his studying of rock n' roll is. However, my hunch is Lou wouldn't be saying that about Joe Harrington. Buy the book.

Rating:
Summary: Unbalanced in focus, but it's difficult not to be changed
Review: Joe S. Harrington's Top 100 albums (though I am obliged to state I never intended it to be so) has certainly changed the way I view music forever. No other writer is so able to convince me (admittedly nobody would ever claim I am by nature sceptical) that what he says about music is true.

The key to "Sonic Cool", no doubt, comes from the manner in which it shows how the origin of almost all the major threads operating in rock'n'roll today are much older than one's everyday guidebook to the topic makes you believe. "Sonic Cool" suggests that by and large, most of these trends originated from two or three great flowerings, the most important of which date from the late 1960s and the "punk revolution" of the late 1970s. It argues that ever since disco emerged at the same time as the "punk revolution," almost all of what has charted has been manufactured, extremely derivative, totally soulless and passionless music that imitates in a highly synthesised and pre-planned style the rock of the 1960s and early 1970s. Harrington says this with language that can only be described as intense and emotional, even extreme, especially when it comes to describing the commercial music of the eighties (which I grew up with for more than twenty years).

However, his almost apocalyptic tone about the death of rock'n'roll, whilst argued with an intelligence that is extraordinarily rare among rock critics, does unnaturally split the book into a pre-"punk revolution" period where "art" and "commerce" seemed to merge reasonably well, and a post-"punk revolution" period where they were so far apart as not only not to merge, but also to create a vast space between them. Harrington clearly has not only no use (and vast scorn) for anyone who charted in the eighties or the 1990s, but also for many quite well known artists after the "punk revolution" who never had any mainstream success.

Among pre-"punk revolution" artists he offers an excellent, balanced focus that perhaps is much closer to the opinions of mainstream critics. In this period, he willingly praises artists who were and remain popular, and looks very closely at how rock and roll evolved when it (as he sees it) was "living" among the masses. The information about both major and minor artists is very good and worth reading, and we see that many of the well-known artists of the era were, like independent rockers of the eighties and nineties, part of large movements, which Harrington pieces together in a very logical and easy-to-understand manner that shows each movement (as he indeed does with everything about pre-"punk revolution" music) in a very precise, highly historical context that shows very clearly why everything that occurred happened as it did.

Nevertheless, as another reviewer has said, Harrington (unlike his contemporary David Keenan) does not think highly of any artist who "thinks outside the box" ie. has an attitude or philosophy different from the attitudes of 1960s rockers. This might be why his focus in more modern times is so limited: electronica, trip-hop, post-rock, and death metal are completely excluded, the first three genres undoubtedly because their quiet, yet original, sophistication does not blend well with his train of thought. His focus from this period on riot grrl and obscure indie rock does strike one as being unbalanced, especially given that writers like Pierro Scaruffi question seriously the originality of modern garage rockers. More detail on the eighties and nineties would indeed be good even if Harrington does not want it.

On the whole, an unbalanced book that still manages to make a naïve reader think many times more about what music they ought to be listening to.

Rating:
Summary: Rock And Roll Written As Rock And Roll
Review: This is a treat of a book. It's as long and unwieldy as "In a Godadivida" and at times you may get sick of it, but it always picks back up again. This is not an unbiased book. If you're happy with what you hear on your pre-programmed FM station, prepare to be insulted. Harrington has no use for Madonna, REM, U2, the hacks the Stones became or pretty much anyone who's charted in the past 30yrs. The Sixties were the last time Art and Commerce merged in his opinion.

The only drawback (aside from factual errors noted in other reviews) comes from some repetition. The way book is structured, though, makes it impossible to avoid. Harrington is more concerned with the progress of music rather than time.

Still, I spent far too many nights looking up at the clock flashing 1AM, which is always the mark of a good read.

Rating:
Summary: Ever wondered how we got from Hank Williams to Hello Kitty?
Review: You can tell that Harrington's been at this awhile. Like Joe Carducci's 'Rock and the Pop Narcotic', this book starts by explaining first how the structure of the music came to be from it's predecessors; Hillbilly, Blues, R&B, ect. and by tracing it's periodic fits and starts, arrived at the music's pivotal apotheosis: Punk. From then on out Harrington describes the music's eventual decline, from the non music of Disco, to prepackaged LCD 'safe bets', through the rise and fall of Grunge. (What he glibbly calls the music industries Viet Nam; ie., "never again")
The main stuctural difference between Harrington's book and Carducci's is that while Carducci focused on what made Rock tick as a musical language, and by comparison what is not Rock due to the lack of a viable syntax of that language, Harrington focuses on the inter-cultural contextualization of how Rock emerged as a byproduct of contempraneous forces in the culture, while simultaneously constructing that same culture. That this thesis should be advanced at all is not in of itself surprising, but I invite you to try and pull it off in such a colossal manner in the way in which Harrington does. It's all about time, effort, and as Warhol would have put it: WORK. In such a volume one would expect to find many glaring errors, or oversights. Amazingly the ones that I could find are trivial. Firstly how he uses the word 'implode' on several occasions seems suspect in regards to meaning. (he seems to want to mean 'explode') Secondly he gives very short thrift to the whole area of experimental electronic music's influence on the genre, Industrial music in particular. He even lists the seminal work of Cabaret Voltaire lumped together with the 'new wave pop' bands of the mid 80's. I detect an editorial bias here. Also for short measure, he lists the University of Washington as residing in Olympia. Gazing out my bedroom window I can attest that it is in fact in Seattle. All in all not a whole hell of a lot to crow about considering the scope. You will love the irreverent tone, and the refusal to offer praise to sacred cows. You will never listen to the music the same after reading this book. This is an absolutely necessary read for those of you who still care. For those of you who don't, go get a book on croquet.