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Idol Speculation

Kill Your Idols: A New Generation of Rock Writers Reconsiders the Classics Jim DeRogatis, Carmel Carrillo (editors) Barricade Books, 2004 Rating: 4.5

Posted: July 21, 2004

By Kevin Forest Moreau

Those of us who get paid to write about music would like to think (and we'd like you to think) that rock criticism is a kind of bulwark against the mob rule mentality; that the critic is a lone sentinel at the gates, charged with the sacred responsibility of sifting through the tons of CDs that exist out there in the cold, unforgiving world of countless musical choices. We like to think that we discharge this duty pretty well: pointing you to music we think you'd like and steering you clear of something when we think it isn't worth your while.

The truth is that some of us do fulfill that function, but none of us ever does it perfectly. That's due, at least in part, to the fact that a lot of rock writers just aren't very good. Some are just hangers-on, looking for a way to stay connected to a particular scene; some are starry-eyed idealists who just love music, man, and we all know that zealots can't be trusted to think clearly; some just like receiving free CDs, and thus treat each one as the second coming to avoid derailing the gravy train. And some are just bad writers, or flat-out can't be trusted with their own opinions.

The thing is, not even the good ones get it right all the time. Occasionally, for whatever reason, otherwise clear-headed critics get caught up in the hype surrounding a mediocre, seriously flawed or just plain bad record; sometimes, their judgment just fails them, and they end up passionately championing an emperor without a stitch of clothing. (Hell, I've done it myself -- not that I'm presuming to label myself as one of the good ones.)

Which brings us to Kill Your Idols, a collection of essays that aims to loudly expose a pantheon of rock emperors for the narcissistic nudists they really are. Partly, the concept is wrapped up in the very rock 'n' roll notion of rebellion; in attacking albums that have been held up as canon, the book is, in its own way, indulging in the time-honored task of taking on The Establishment. But to its credit, Kill Your Idols doesn't simply engage in contrariness for its own sake. As editor Jim DeRogatis (rock critic for the Chicago Sun Times, and a contributor to many other publications -- including the magazine Harp, for which I also write) states in the Foreword:

"We ought to just abandon the whole stupid idea of a single rock canon, and instead stand ready to question and re-examine our values and assumptions at any time, while communicating with people who share our passions, thereby coming to a greater understanding not only of differing viewpoints, but of ourselves."

The real aim, then, is to encourage readers to re-evaluate their sacred cows, perhaps to re-examine the reasons they cherish certain records. To the book's credit, the essays hit that mark more often than not, even when their main arguments aren't that convincing. Nothing in Anders Smith Lindall's evisceration of Nirvana's Nevermind caused me to appreciate that album any less, even as I had to concede its flaws, including the fact that "too many good ideas are diluted by a lack of focus, and the band's subtleties are too frequently sacrificed for the sake of noise." (Nirvana's willful passive-aggressive approach to its accessibility does get annoying after awhile.)

Likewise, a pillorying of U2's The Joshua Tree by Eric Waggoner and Bob Mehr makes some good points about the album's unvaried, monotonous sound and "the band members' infinite capacity for taking themselves too seriously." But it tries too hard to introduce Bono's penchant for repetition of certain phrases in songs like "Exit" and "One Tree Hill" as evidence that the record is "on a lyrical level... one of the most relentlessly banal albums in the pantheon of the greats." It overstates the case that the album's thematic outlook is unremittingly bleak, and wrong-headedly equates liking the album with "pompous sensitivity:" "If you listened to The Joshua Tree, goddammit, you cared." (Actually, in 1987, I couldn't have given a shit about El Salvador or the disappeared, and as an agnostic, I wasn't particularly moved by Bono's spiritual questing on tracks like "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For.") Worse, it's sloppy with its facts -- you'd think that between two writers, one of them would have done the homework to know that The Joshua Tree was the band's fifth album, not its fourth.

Disagree with them though one might, however, those essays -- and, indeed, the bulk of those collected here -- raise valid complaints, and cause the reader to think. For instance, Arsenio Orteza critically weakens his deconstruction of Public Enemy's It Takes A Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back when he likens the "over-hyping" of the merits of "that notoriously dimwitted genre of aural graffiti known as rap" to Rush Limbaugh's infamous comment about the sports media's elevation of Donovan McNabb's merits because it wanted to see blacks do well. But he does manage to deflate Chuck D.'s daffier racial theories. Reggae aficionados might take issue with Dave Chamberlain's dismissal of Bob Marley's Exodus, but he makes a compelling case for that album's timidity in relation to the socio-political events at the time of its recording.

Indeed, taken individually, most of the essays here offer plenty of things to take issue with. I don't know many people who consider The Smashing Pumpkins' bloated Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness to be a great album, but then Rick Reger (the author of that piece), as well as the editors and a fair number of the book's contributors, live in the Pumpkins' hometown of Chicago, so perhaps they're reminded of that album more often than the rest of us. Likewise, it seems a waste to devote space to a deconstruction of Dead Kennedys' Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, and the decision to tackle an album that's never even been officially finished, much less released (The Beach Boys' Smile), seems dubious at best. But then, that's the nature of such anthologies: You're bound to disagree with something.

It's not unpopular stances that occasionally bog down Kill Your Idols, surprisingly, but a number of essays that undermine their central theses with weak writing. Adrian Brijbassi spends almost half of his piece on Led Zeppelin's fourth album in a pointless, self-indulgent anecdote about an unfortunate incident involving "Stairway to Heaven" at a school dance, and Jim Walsh hopelessly muddies whatever point he'd hoped to make about Fleetwood Mac's Rumours by constructing a fantasy scenario in which he smuggles a rifle into his local arena to assassinate the band during a tour stop. All appropriate praise to DeRogatis and his co-editor Carmel Carrillo for keeping their writers' voices intact, but a heavier editing hand would have been nice here and there.

(Oddly enough, Carrillo's own indulgent piece, "My Greatest Exes," doesn't even fit the theme of the book. It's not a dissection of an album, but a loose collection of anecdotes related to particular songs associated with ex-boyfriends. Perhaps its inclusion comes down to marital politics -- DeRogatis and Carrillo being husband and wife -- but on the plus side, she does at least prove to be one of Idols' more engaging voices.)

Regardless of yhr nook'd setbacks, there are enough solid entries here that the reader is likely to find something he or she agrees with just as often as not. DeRogatis' dismissal of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band as a "mostly boring set of songs in love with the past and saying very little about the present or the future;" Keith Moerer's meticulous dismantling of the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main St.; Rob O'Connor's eye-opening suggestion that Huey Lewis's News were a better outfit than Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band in his ruminative reflection on Born in the U.S.A. -- these and other articles prove both well thought-out and satisfyingly thought-provoking, two ideals to which rock criticism should always aspire. They're more than enough to recommend Kill Your Idols to anyone who's ever spun a critically hailed album and wondered what all the fuss was about.

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