But Is It Garbage?: ON ROCK AND TRASH

Rating:
Summary: Paean To Pandemic Moronity
Review: I have rarely been as conflicted about a review as when reviewing this book. I really wanted to give this book four stars, but I just can't in good conscience. The author is an English Professor at Costal Carolina University, and for the sake of full disclosure, is a former colleague and friend of one of my best friends. Hamelman takes every opportunity to prove or reinforce his central thesis, which essentially is that America is a disposable culture and this is mirrored in the throwaway nature of rock music. In other words, rock music is the music of waste. Among my problems with the book is the self-aggrandizing pseudo-scientific analytical tone in the book which entirely fails to take into account other relevant or contradictory pieces of evidence. For example, a central problem for me is essentially ignoring rock's black roots with the sole exception of Hendrix. There are also questions of scientific objectivity in the ponderous section on landfills. I am not defending needless waste here, but the author goes on and on about all the stuff that is discarded without considering the entire environmental picture to make his point. Hamelman goes on at length about how many cars we discard in the US every year without mentioning that virtually all cars are recycled (over 90 percent). He also talks about disposable diapers like they are a scourge. The truth is that the phosphorous used to launder cloth diapers would be hugely more environmentally destructive than throwing away disposables. He alleges corporate greed as the reason behind using plastic jewel cases instead of environmentally friendly cardboard (which cuts down trees) because the cardboard is 60 cents more expensive. Earth to Steve: if the production uses cardboard the consumer pays that cost, which may not sound like a lot but amounts of billions a year; secondly the primary job of the jewel case is to protect the CD, which it does measurably better than cardboard. I don't have a personal stake in this (other than not wanting to pay more for CDs encased in flimsy cardboard), but I do care about valid and logically correct conclusions.

Hamelman falls into a trap so common in academic writing: the assumption of correctness. There is also a 1960s-centric view of the rock world: if you aren't a Baby Boomer you aren't really qualified to judge the body of rock as a whole, in other words. Dave Barry once fell in this same trap, much to his detriment.

I really wanted to give the book four stars because I thought that his central thesis and supporting arguments were interesting and (possibly) correct. As a scientist by education, I had problems with Hamelman's scientific methodology. The biggest single issue is presenting assertions as facts on which his arguments are then built. This is particularly true in his discussions of love and death in part two of the book. The conclusions from a logically correct argument are not necessarily true if the premises are false.

Other areas in the book that I take exception with are Hamelman's offensive and inappropriate comparison of Jesus and Hendrix. The author is, of course, entitled to his own opinions, but I personally find Hamelman's arguments about rock music being an adequate system of morality (and a replacement for God) to be illustrative of the morally bankrupt rock culture he so dearly loves. This all from the same author who admires Yo La Tengo (who I have seen in concert, much to my everlasting disappointment) and is apparently obsessed by, of all people, Lou Reed. I have to question any author who continuously refers to the greats of rock with references to the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Reed's Velvet Underground. He seems particularly smitten with later Reed work, namely "Berlin" (thank goodness it wasn't "Metal Machine Music") which he explains in grand speculative interpretations for pages on end.

In the positive column, Hamelman does explore uncharted territory, with interesting and at time logical proposals, although sometimes his evidence is anecdotal and sketchy (he points out that if you take the first three letters of "trash", you can rearrange them to spell "art," for instance.) I like the development of the art as trash theme, and think that there is support for his arguments, although the final two parts I found to be on vastly more dangerous logical grounds. I generally agree with Hamelman that most rock music is disposable, but with many exceptions, which tend to weaken his arguments. I still listen to the Beatles, Dire Straits, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Led Zeppelin. I think that these examples alone (among many more) tend to refute the "rock is trash" argument. Some rock is trash, some is not. Hamelman need not worry: history will sort out which is which.

The best section of the book is his chronological list of his "Trash Top Forty," a truly inspired labor of love that for me makes the book worth reading by itself. Certainly Hamelman had to listen to a lot of very bad music to make this book a reality, yet I believe that despite all the effort, there is a biased focus on 1960s rock, punk, and grunge (he is especially enamored with Kurt Cobain.)

Candidly, this is an interesting but ultimately fairly inaccessible effort. There is interesting analysis to be pondered and boatloads of information to digest, but it is all cloaked in academic over-verbosity, which will be an enormous turn off to the majority of readers. One reviewer likened this book to "London Calling" by the Clash. Due to the ponderous writing style and academic pretension inherent in this book, I think of it more as "Brain Salad Surgery" by Emerson, Lake and Palmer. I recommend this book only to serious academic students of music history.