Reading Diary
Kelefa Sanneh has been one of the best music critics for a couple decades now, so when I saw that he'd published a book last fall, I automatically put it on my Christmas wishlist, and soon after received it as a gift. I hadn't looked closely at the title and kind of assumed the book was about actual record labels, which would've been interesting too, until I sat down to read it and realized that it was about music genres, which is a topic a little more closer to my heart (every year I write lists of the year's best pop, rap, rock, R&B and country singles and look at how the main U.S. radio formats are doing). Because he's really attempting to synthesize the last 70 or so years into one digestible book, Sanneh isn't saying a lot here that I didn't already know, but he pulls all the disparate strands of the story together in fairly elegant and inventive ways to make these messy complex histories form a coherent narrative.
When I was a kid, there was a gigantic dictionary in my mom's house where I'd regularly look up unfamiliar, and when I was a teenager I'd write in notebooks that invariably had a page or two where I'd just keep a list of favorite words that I found especially interesting or chewy or fun to say/write. So I'm enough of a word nerd to want to read about how dictionaries are written, but former Merriam-Webster associate editor Kory Stamper is young enough and has enough of a sense of humor about her work to write a book that's accessible and entertaining enough about the topic that I'd recommend it to just about anyone. I learned a lot of little nuggets of trivia and insight about the English language that I never knew, and laughed out loud a few times. Stamper was also by far the best talking head in the silly "History of Swear Words" thing on Netflix with Nic Cage.
Please Kill Me was published over 25 years ago and remains seemingly unchallenged as the definitive book about punk rock, so I finally got around to reading it. And it definitely lives up to the hype, I love a good oral history where the participants get to just tell things from their perspective (sometimes even contradicting each other) and the writer compiling it all never pokes their nose in to clarify anything or tie it together. I often get annoyed when books or articles about music focus too much on biography and too little on the actual music, but Please Kill Me is precisely great because it's so tawdry and full of weird tangents about hangers-on and torrid affairs and petty feuds, it helps deflate a lot of the stuffy mythology around the Velvets and the Stooges and the Ramones and so on and give you a really visceral sense of who they were as people and how that influenced the music.
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