I used to read books almost constantly— when I spent a few months in Japan back in 1998, I’d bang out about one paperback novel a day on my commute to and from the lab (it was tricky to find a sufficient supply of reading material…)— but in the last several years that’s really dropped off. In part this reflects a genre shift— the most-talked-about SF of the last several years has generally been in modes that I don’t care much for— but it’s mostly a combination of being busy with work and the kids and reading way too much social media on my phone.
I do sometimes fire up actual books, though, and over the last several months I’ve finished a few. I wrote about American Prometheus recently, and am well into Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb right now. And I recently polished off a couple of books by two of my favorite music writers, books mostly about the era of my pop-culture peak.
Steven Hyden is a music critic who I’ve followed since he was writing for The AV Club and then Grantland, and I greatly enjoy his podcast with Ian Cohen. He’s a pretty reliable guide to music I’ll at least find interesting (though he does seem to have a thing for female singers whose voices I find grating), and I’ve enjoyed a couple of his past books. I am looking forward to his Springsteen book coming out this year, but the one I just finished is Long Road: Pearl Jam and the Soundtrack of a Generation.
I’m a little bit older than Hyden—the first Pearl Jam record blew up when I was a junior in college— but the bulk of this book covers the years in which I was most plugged-in to music criticism, and the genre I was most into. I was also very much on the Pearl Jam side of the split between them and Nirvana— honestly, I found Kurt Cobain kind of hard to take— so this is a book pitched squarely at me. It took me a good while to get around to it, though, because (like a lot of people), I sort of tuned Pearl Jam out in the early 2000s, after they passed their commercial peak.
On reflection, that’s a dumb reason to wait on a book about a band, of course, because not knowing what they’ve been up to is a great reason to read about them. And in a lot of ways, it turns out to be the most interesting part of their story— their imperial phase in the mid-90’s was exhaustively documented at the time in magazines that I was avidly reading at the time, so there wasn’t a ton of new stuff to be learned from it. Their evolution since those days, on the other hand, the turn from chart-topping album rock to perennial tour warriors, is fascinating, and Hyden does a great job of walking the reader through it.
One oddity of the book is that it does not feature any contribution from the band itself— there are no new interviews here, just references to previously published stuff and Hyden’s experiences as a fan. That was a little unexpected to me, and initially slightly off-putting— I had assumed that this would involve some element of the modern-day Eddie Vedder and Mike McCready reminiscing— but it basically works, mostly because I like Hyden’s writing in general. If you’re of an age to remember the “Jeremy” video before it got cut, it’s fascinating, and I think it would also work pretty well for people way on the younger end, who know them only as a live band, and don’t know about the angst-fest around albums like Vs. and Vitalogy.
(Fun fact: the CD copy I bought of Vs did not have that title on it— they changed it at the last minute, after a bunch of discs had already been printed and shipped. I’m 95% sure I still have the disc, with dozens of others in one of those CD binders, but I’m not sure I still have the case…)
The other recent pop-culture book I’ve completed is Rob Harvilla’s 60 Songs That Explain the 90’s, based on the podcast of the same name. This is another pitched-squarely-at-me product, and in a way the two are connected— in talking about the Pearl Jam book, Hyden made reference to an episode where he and Harvilla talked about “Yellow Ledbetter,” which got me to look up the podcast to check it out. (It launched a few years back as a Spotify exclusive, but I don’t use Spotify…)
This is, as the name suggests, a more expansive book (and podcast), looking at the full range of 90’s stuff, from the alternative-rock songs I fondly remember to Top-40 stuff that I remember hating, and a fair bit of pop-culture that just missed me completely. Harvilla works to put these in context, not just musically, but also personally. Like Hyden, he’s several years younger than I am, so the bits about his personal experiences don’t match up perfectly with mine, but they’re usually close enough to be fun.
The podcast episodes are, as you would expect, deeper dives into individual songs, where the book collects multiple songs into thematic chapters. The general approach is more or less the same, though— a mix of affectionate snark, ironic grandiosity, and genuine enthusiasm— and the book is undeniably a more convenient package. Harvilla excels at compact turns of phrase that capture a musical situation— a few from leafing randomly through the book just now: describing Cake’s John McCrae as “A C+ singer but an A++ front man,” describing Dave Matthews Band as “Jimmy Buffett for poli-sci majors,” and Counting Crows’s “Mr Jones” as “a warm and tuneful but tangibly uneasy song about wanting to be famous that made Adam Duritz famous, which in turn made him world-historically uneasy.” (I’m also fond of the recent podcast episode in which he describes 4 Non Blondes “What’s Up?” as sounding “like the karaoke version of itself.”) He’s also got the occasional deeper line, too, such as a few sentences after the “Mr Jones” line, when he says (also of Duritz) “what is charisma, really, if not the ability to convince other people that your narcissism is fascinating and relatable?” Things that, to not coin a phrase, make you go “Hmmmm…”
This whole project is one of those things that seems so perfectly pitched at me that I’m surprised anyone else would buy in. But, of course, I’m not actually all that distinctive— if we’re being honest, I’m as boringly normie as Gen-X gets— so there are a lot of people out there in the same general position with regard to pop culture. If you’re one of us, or in some way related to one of us, I highly recommend both of these books (and also the podcast).
(One important caveat, though: having spent a while immersed in this, I’m having to exert actual effort to not write prose in a poor imitation of Harvilla’s style. So if you’re also susceptible to this kind of thing— Chuck Klosterman lands me in the same state— take care…)
There are weightier things going on that I maybe ought to write about, but this has been a brutal week in a bunch of respects, so I’m going for fluff. If you want to see whether I come back to more serious stuff, here’s a button:
If you want to talk more about either of these, or suggest other things I ought to read, the comments will be open:
Re: Rhodes, I found it bloated. It took me a year to get through. There were bits that I found really fascinating, but there were many more sections of the book that just dragged. He spent a lot of ink on the characters and their stories, but mostly not in a compelling manner. The ending, though, with the series of first hand accounts from Hiroshima, was horrifyingly riveting.
Since you mentioned recent SF being not-up-your-alley, can I ask if you've read Alastair Reynolds's Revelation Space? I would be interested in hearing your thoughts given it's supposed to be hard(er) SF than the average (I found the description a bit generous but hey)