The Rise of Enlightened Sexism

2010, undated later edition, from St. Martin's Griffin
Susan J. Douglas
The Rise of Enlightened Sexism: How Pop Culture Took Us from Girl Power to Girls Gone Wild
Bought newish for $16.99
Slightly worn paperback
B-

This disappointing follow-up to Douglas's Where the Girls Are (1994) is not without its merits, but I do need to talk about its flaws first and foremost.  To begin with, the earlier book was written from her perspective as a fortysomething Baby-Boomer, while this time she's a "Vintage Female" and the mother of a then-twenty-year-old daughter.  She often writes here as if there was no generation of feminists in between, except for the riot-grrrls who produced music and zines.  Well, I was born in 1968, and I can't relate to any of the TV covered here, from Xena and Buffy to Survivor and The Real World, or even ER.  (I've seen more of the Elliott Gould sitcom of the same name!)  I have seen several of the movies she discusses, and I do appreciate, for instance, her appreciation of Clueless, but I think she missed the boat on Mean Girls and most definitely Down with Love.  I have seen a few celebrity magazines with the "baby bump" pictures.  And I sort of followed the way Janet Reno, Hillary Clinton, and Sarah Palin were covered.

But this all may be a flaw in me as a reader, rather than her as a writer.  So let's take a look at her title, which was changed from the hardcover edition, Enlightened Sexism: The Seductive Message That Feminism's Work Is Done.  Douglas's thesis is that the American media present the following intertwined messages:

• Women have achieved all of feminism's goals, as evidenced by all those women in power in real life and more particularly on TV.
• Therefore, we can now relax and enjoy sexism "ironically," by showing retrograde images, like of scheming, skinny, large-breasted blondes.  (Like in Marcotte's It's a Jungle out There.  Sorry, I couldn't resist.)

The first part is what she calls "embedded feminism," where female bosses, judges, and even presidents appear as characters.  She has a problem with this, because it doesn't reflect most women's lives.  Well, no, neither did Bewitched, but she seemed to appreciate that in the previous book.  Is the problem that what's shown on TV in recent decades, as opposed to the '50s and '60s, is meant to be real, even when it's contrived "reality TV"?  

And, yes, as the more recent subtitle indicates, she does discuss the Spice Girls, and the ambiguity of their message.  She doesn't even mention the equally British Hermione Granger, despite my earlier hopes, although there's quite a bit on Bridget Jones.  It's as if she doesn't want to include any recent positive images of girl culture.  Where the Girls Are was much more balanced.

Still, when she does what she does best, like examining the devolution of Cosmo or mocking Mel Gibson, the book is funny and, well, enlightening.  If she does another follow-up, some fifteen or twenty years down the road, I hope that either I'll be more into the pop culture of that time than I am now, or she'll pick a wider range of examples.

Here's the Story: Surviving Marcia Brady...

2008, first edition, from HarperCollins
Maureen McCormick
Here's the Story: Surviving Marcia Brady and Finding My True Voice
Original price $25.95, bought used for $20.76
Hardcover in good condition
B-

Although this book is partly about McCormick dealing with the mixed legacy of her role as Marcia, there's not terribly much about the show or her life during that time.  Mostly, it's about the years afterwards, as she struggled with drug addiction and other serious problems.  Her family seems to have been very dysfunctional, from the beginning to the end.  (The last few chapters discuss her brother's elder abuse of their father.)  

It's an interesting read but, like other books of its time, it could've used a better editor.  Not only does she make mistakes about The Brady Bunch, things any fan could've fact-checked for her, but she thinks her hair is "chestnut," which is not a synonym for blonde.  There are typos as well.  And it felt like she rushed through the last twenty years or so.

Although Susan Olsen (little sister Cindy) hasn't yet written an autobiography, she will have her say on the Brady legacy in the book she cowrote, Love to Love You Bradys: The Bizarre Story of The Brady Bunch Variety Hour, coming up in '09....

Typecasting: On the Arts and Sciences of Human Inequality

2008 edition updating from '06, from Seven Stories Press
Stuart Ewen & Elizabeth Ewen
Typecasting: On the Arts and Sciences of Human Inequality
Original price unknown, purchase price $14.00
Slightly worn paperback
B-

The Ewens take a look at the ways that people (mostly white male Europeans and Americans of the last two or three centuries) have tried to label others, using dubious science (some of which threw out data that contradicted the thesis), as well as various forms of art and entertainment.  I found the book to be a bit unfocused, and there were some distracting typos, most oddly enough involving the word "the." However, there is some interesting information, from a 1910ish intelligence test to the Russian attitude towards "Caucasians."  Some of it's funny, but some of it's tragic, like the fate of Saartjie Baartmann, the Khosian woman who was exploited during her life and mutilated after her death, all in the cause of "scientific inquiry."

Yes, the Ewens discuss The Birth of a Nation, as well as other early movies.  Although there are times that they make connections to the present, such as wondering what "your face is destiny" theorists would've done in the modern world of make-up, contact lenses, and plastic surgery, the book would've been strengthened by more on the post-World-War-II era.

It's a Jungle Out There

2007, 2008 Seal Press edition
Amanda Marcotte
It's a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments
Original price $13.95, purchase price $6.98
Slightly worn paperback
C

I'm going to discuss the controversy surrounding this book, because I think it highlights something I noticed about other aspects of the writing.  Marcotte uses the symbol of the jungle to represent the sexism that feminists must battle.  That in itself is troubling, and related to her preference for urban over rural communities.  (Probably the result of her growing up in rural Texas.)  But wait.  What is the definition of a jungle?  "An area of land overgrown with dense forest and tangled vegetation, typically in the tropics."  So trees, right?  Yet almost none of the illustrations at the beginning of the chapters show trees.

Instead they display a busty, scantily clad blonde fighting the dangers of the African plains.  Suffice to say, none of these dangers look like Jerry Falwell or Bill O'Reilly.  They look like wild animals and menacing black natives.  Marcotte and Seal Press apparently didn't see anything wrong with racist imagery in a book promoting feminism, not even after the original cover, of a blonde being abducted by a gorilla, was criticized and withdrawn.  (This edition, she battles a crocodile.)  It's as if they couldn't see the trees for the jungle.  

I could cut Marcotte some slack, since she was young, but it's not as if she was fresh out of college.  She turned 30 that year, making her not much younger than Mary Wollstonecraft publishing A Vindication of the Rights of Woman at 33.  And if Ellerbee, Ivins, and Hightower have taught me anything, it's that left-wing rural Texans are definitely aware of issues surrounding race.  Perhaps the pictures from the '50s comic books about Lorna the Jungle Girl were meant in an ironic, campy way, but that doesn't make them non-racist, no matter how many anti-racist blogs Marcotte mentions.

It's three years since The Midnight Disease, where "blog" had to be defined, but this book is almost equally dated in its excitement over blogging.  As I think I've amply proved over the past couple years, any idiot with an Internet connection can have a blog, and blogs have not turned out any more remarkable than print books, except in the case of speed.  And you can turn a blog into a print book pretty darn quickly anyway.  This book seems to have evolved out of Marcotte's blog, and it shows signs of not being well edited, as in the "pubic" for "public" slip.  (It's still miles better than the editing in Forever Summer though.)

The racism and the giddiness contribute to a carelessness that I haven't seen in a feminist since Germaine Greer, almost 40 years earlier.  Marcotte shares with Greer a blindness to the full history of feminism.  (In Marcotte's case, "riot-grrrl" days are quaint, and the '70s are ancient, while no feminism existed before, say, 1965.)  Also like Greer, Marcotte (whatever mentions of lesbians and women of color she makes) is writing for women like her: white, young, straight, and a bit shallow.  Yes, anal bleaching, purity balls, and Girls Gone Wild manage to be both ridiculous and disgusting, but are they the biggest issues facing modern women?  Marcotte puts them almost on a level with reproductive rights and equal pay.

Still, I laughed at the book a few times.  Like Michael Moore, it's hard to tell how serious she is in some of her suggestions, so, as with Moore, I see this more as "funny politics" than humor per se.  I can't recommend it, but if you come across it, you might enjoy it if you just focus on the text and set your standards low.

1973 Nervous Breakdown

2006, first edition, from Bloomsbury
Andreas Killen
1973 Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of Post-Sixties America
Original price $24.95, purchase price $1.00
Hardcover in good condition
B-

This is only the second time I've read this book, and I'm still not sure if I like it, or even if it's a book that can be "liked."  Killen focuses on the pivotal year 1973, with some looks forward and back, but not only is this far from my favorite year of the 1970s, I don't think of most of the topics that he focuses on, Watergate aside.  POWs, skyjackers, and religious cults are not terribly interesting to me.  Even when Killen focuses on pop culture besides Warhol, it's things that I've never seen or heard, like the New York Dolls, Fear of Flying, Badlands, and An American Family (the reality-TV pioneer about the Loud family), or ones that aren't very meaningful to me, like American Graffiti.  (Even so, I felt like like I knew that movie better than Killen, since he thinks Wolfman Jack is "a person of color.")  Also, it seems wrong that Ronald Reagan is repeatedly mentioned, sometimes as being elected "at the end of the decade," while Carter merits only one mention, for pardoning Patty Hearst.  True, few outside Georgia knew who Carter was in 1973, while Reagan was a nationally known Governor of California, but couldn't Killen have connected Carter's election with the breakdown of three years earlier?

Still, I found the book well written and sometimes insightful.  I'll give Killen kudos for presenting 1973 as it seemed to him and making it more interesting than I expected.  And if it was true seven (almost eight) years ago that we were still experiencing the aftershocks of that earthquake of a year, it's still true now.

Barbra: The Way She Is

2006, first edition, from HarperCollins
Christopher Andersen
Barbra: The Way She Is
Original price $25.95, purchase price $7.80
Hardcover in good condition
B-

Not since Schorer's Sinclair Lewis: An American Life (1961), have I come across a biographer who seems to dislike his subject so much.  This book can be summed up as "Barbra Streisand is very talented and very bitchy."  Other than his attitude, and his frequent misuse of "proverbial" (hint, is the item actually in a proverb?), the book isn't bad.  Andersen traces Barbra's life through her unhappy childhood, her awkward adolescence, and on to more than four decades of (super)stardom.  Although I've followed her career off and on (seeing a movie or two every decade), I'm not a huge fan, and there was much here I didn't know.  However, Andersen does jump to conclusions, as when he strongly implies that Streisand had an affair with Bill Clinton.  (Not that that's implausible of course.)  And he seems to exaggerate her neglect of her sister.  

One thing that does come through the book, whether or not Barbra is a good person, she is very witty!  If she ever writes her autobiography, I'd love to read it, even if she doesn't quite tell all.  

Since Andersen discusses Streisand's creative endeavors, in between the gossip, I'm using all these "criticism" tags.  And, yes, I'm also using the "LGBT" tag, in honor of Barbra's son and many of her fans, and because of course the subject of homosexuality comes up repeatedly.

Album Covers from the Vinyl Junkyard

1997, possibly first edition, from Booth-Clibborn
A whole bunch of credits, but I'm going with Project Co-ordinator Phil Beddard
Album Covers from the Vinyl Junkyard
Original price unknown, purchase price $19.95
Slightly worn paperback
B-

Roughly a decade into the compact-disc era, Beddard and company present odd record album covers from (I think) 1952 to 1985.  They're grouped by theme, so, for instance, covers with dogs are all on one page.  The music is pop of many varieties, from funk to polka.  There are also some "nonfiction" albums, like advice about divorce, or records to test your stereo equipment.  There's not much commentary, other than in the introduction by Rob Chapman, but there are excerpts from back covers.  There are a surprising number of typos, in both the introduction and the excerpts, but they bugged me less than usual because they sort of added to the campiness.  The albums are reproduced in full cover, sometimes with back as well as front, with one to five on a page.  I'd guess them to be one-third American, the rest British, although it's not always easy to tell.  I'm using the "music criticism" tag because I think album art is part of music appreciation.

Includes an evaluation card that is hard to take seriously in this context, especially when you're asked to check off "I found this book of great interest_  of moderate interest_  of no interest_" and then mail it in.

Media-Tions: Forays into the Culture and Gender Wars

1994, undated later edition, from South End Press
Elayne Rapping
Media-Tions: Forays into the Culture and Gender Wars
Original price $15.00, purchase price $11.99
Worn paperback
B

I liked this book more than I recalled, even though Rapping does criticize Faludi's Backlash.  (I agree with her criticisms of Wolf's Beauty Myth.)  It's ironic that one of her criticisms is that some of Backlash was then "old news," considering that Rapping includes '70s pieces on soap operas and Tupperware.  And some of what she writes about has already been covered by other books I've read, such as Woody Allen's involvement with Soon-Yi (Goodman's Value Judgments collection from '93).  

Still, it was fun and thought-provoking to get Rapping's views on Amy Fisher, Thelma and Louise, Beverly Hills 90210, and, yes, rapping with a small R.  The other feminist media critics I've looked at mostly haven't addressed (then) modern music, and I like that pre-Baby-Boomer Rapping (born in 1938) found positive things to say about not just Madonna but other aspects of Music TV (little and big Ms, Ts, and Vs).  In fact, this book is sort of the inverse of Smith's Misogynies, in that it's a little too upbeat and positive.  Still, it was a nice change.  And, although a straight mother of two, she addresses gay representation more than her peers.  (One element missing in Douglas's otherwise wonderful Where the Girls Are, an issue I'll be returning to when I get up to Enlightened Sexism in 2010.)

I think Rapping is the first to get the quadruple crown of all my "criticism" tags, since she also discusses romance novels.

The New Book of Rock Lists

1994, edition from later that year, from Fireside
Dave Marsh and James Bernard
The New Book of Rock Lists
Probably bought newish for $15.00
Worn paperback
B-

I guess this is about equally good to the 1981 edition, but it has some of the flaws of the earlier book, as well as some new ones.  Once again, there's no index, although I suppose you can guess where a list is based on what chapter it's likely in.  The thing is, some of the previous chapters-- like the ones on the Beatles and Elvis-- have been collapsed into other chapters, like "History."  And I found it somewhat annoying how the coauthors would say "rock & rap," like that's a thing.  Either rap is part of rock and shouldn't be privileged over other subgenres, or it's a separate genre in of itself.

In fact, I found a disconnect while reading this edition, that I didn't before.  Marsh and Bernard would agree with my comment that the earlier edition came out at a very transitional time in music, but we would disagree on what was significant about the baker's dozen of years of new music.  While I doubled my age (13 to 26), I mostly listened to the more pop-oriented end of rock, rather than the harsher sounds of rap/hip-hop and metal.  Yes, I was aware of those subgenres, but even the bands and artists I liked were lighter, e.g. En Vogue and Van Halen.  And I can't remember one reference to the Thompson Twins, and very few to even Culture Club.  Of the groups/artists that I have '91-'93 videos of on VHS, they're either not mentioned at all, or only once or twice, such as Tony! Toni! Tone! or Tom Cochrane.  To say nothing of Deee-lite and the B-52s a few years earlier.  Dave Marsh himself is on about half a dozen of the lists, and all he did as a musician was the Rock Bottom Remainders.

That all said, I did enjoy the book, finding it informative and sometimes amusing.  Some lists are updated while others are frozen in time, and of course there are new lists.  The Enemies List is probably the most significantly changed, since Tipper Gore and others drew their ire for efforts towards censorship.  And of course the list of "Famous Censorship Cases" expanded, my favorite example being Rhino Records' 1984 release of The Official Record Album of the Olympics, featuring the doo-whop band the Olympics:  http://www.ebay.com/itm/OLYMPICS-OFFICIAL-RECORD-ALBUM-OF-RHINO-SEALED-LP-/230815702823

Where the Girls Are: Growing up Female with the Mass Media

1994, 1995 Times Books edition
Susan J. Douglas
Where the Girls Are: Growing up Female with the Mass Media
Bought new for $14.00
Slightly worn paperback
A-

As you might guess from the condition, I haven't read this book very often, so I was very pleasantly surprised by how fantastic it is.  It's intelligent, witty, snarky, sometimes crude, sometimes sophisticated, and always aware of ambiguity and contradiction.  In fact, ambiguity is as much the subject as what it was like for Douglas, born white, middle-class, and American around 1950, to grow up watching TV and movies, listening to rock music, reading magazines.  It is her story (without being a biography as such), but it is also about other Baby Boom women.  I think there are things that others can relate to-- women my age and younger, women of other classes and colors, and some men-- but that is her focus.  She is the daughter of a woman who struggled with 1950s messages about work and home, and the mother of a girl who loved Disney princesses yet made Douglas change all the pronouns to female during bedtime reading.  She is also a professor of media studies, which she both takes seriously enough that she thinks it should be studied, and as irreverently as she takes everything else.

There's so much here that's quotable, but I'll try to narrow it down:

• "'Woman's bone structure and bodily proportions overwhelmingly lead her toward more passive interests and an inward life,' which I guess explains why American moms always sat on their asses, drinking beer and watching ball games, while our naturally more active dads chased the kids around the house, and drove them to scout meetings and Little League."
• "Now, since Lisa [on Green Acres] spent much of her time flouncing around in chiffon, ostrich feathers, and gemstones the size of Fig Newtons, completely unable to cook or manage the household, the viewer saw immediately that feminist generalizations about domestic life certainly didn't apply here, and therefore, they might not apply elsewhere."
• "In copy sounding as if it had been written by Alexander Haig, our skin was put in a bunker, or better yet, behind Reagan's version of Star Wars, as 'protective barriers' and 'invisible shields' deflected 'external aggressors.'"

As you might guess from that last quote, Douglas is building in part on Wolf's Beauty Myth, and of course Faludi's Backlash, although she sees the media as offering both pro-female and anti-female messages, sometimes at the same time, as with The Mary Tyler Moore Show.  She argues that living with the contradictions is part of what being a modern American woman and/or a feminist is.

This is the best book I've reread since Adamson's 1973 Marx Brothers book.  (Sorry, fiction just wasn't as good in the 20th century as in the 19th.)  Like that whimsical, cynical work of media criticism, this isn't perfect.  (I don't think I noted it, but Adamson was a bit sexist and homophobic, if not obnoxiously so.)  This book does spend much more time on the '50s and '60s than on the '70s, '80s, or '90s.  I do appreciate that it's the first book to actually get what was great about Roseanne.  (Even Roseanne's My Life as a Woman didn't, but then at the time that first biography came out, her show hadn't yet hit its stride.)  Yet there were so many other shows and movies Douglas could've talked about, even if this is her story.

The copyright page has 1994 and 1995, but I went with the earlier date because the main change from the hardcover first edition seems to be the addition of media contacts, and you can get much more up-to-date information on the Internet.  Yes, wouldn't it be great if this book went up to the Internet, not to mention the Spice Girls, Hermione Granger*, and Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign?  Well, as it happens, in 2010 Douglas published Enlightened Sexism: The Seductive Message that Feminism's Work Is Done.  I've got it on order and I'll let you know what I think of it when we get up to '10.  And no, I don't know what it includes, but this is one case where I am willing to buy the sequel without knowing the details.


*Douglas says of then-recent kids' movies, "Gutsy, smart, enterprising, and sassy little girls remain, after all this time, absent, invisible, denied."

The Wacky Top 40

1993, possibly first edition, from Bob Adams, Inc.
Bruce Nash and Allan Zullo
The Wacky Top 40
Probably bought new for $7.95
Slightly worn paperback
B-

This book brought back a lot of happy memories.  For instance, "Afternoon Delight" will always be the "Bicentennial Song" for me because I was too little to get the innuendo and the "skyrockets in flight" made me think of the Fourth of July.  And what could be more 1970s than "Junk Food Junkie"?  (Not that the sentiment is that dated, but the references to Euell Gibbons and Hostess Twinkies are, although apparently Twinkies just came back.)  Even the songs that are before my time, like "Monster Mash" and "Witch Doctor," were still frequently played in the '70s.  

This is definitely a case where an accompanying CD would've helped.  (I'm playing some of the songs on Youtube, as I write this review.)  Also, I wish Nash and Zullo had explained their criteria, not just what makes a song "wacky," but how they decided the order of their "top" songs.  ("They're Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!" is #1.)  Some of the songs in here are deliberate novelty songs, while others were meant in all sincerity, like "(You're) Having My Baby."  What makes a song about cannibalism ("Timothy") less wacky than "Sugar, Sugar"?  Also, while it's nice to get the backstories on the songs, the lyrics are sometimes inaccurate (if not worse than the average lyrics website).

Under the category of singers whose careers still had surprises in the years after this book came out are Randy "Short People" Newman, who won a couple Oscars, and Richard Harris, who, well, back to Youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tai2wRlmU7g

Who Put the Rainbow in "The Wizard of Oz"?: Yip Harburg, Lyricist

1993, 1996 University of Michigan Press edition
Harold Meyerson and Ernie Harburg
Who Put the Rainbow in The Wizard of Oz?: Yip Harburg, Lyricist
Bought new for unknown
Hardcover in good condition
B-

Harburg's son co-wrote this book that is more music criticism than biography.  (A second marriage for Yip is referred to just in passing.)  Nonetheless, the personality of the lyricist for The Wizard of Oz (among many other musicals, on stage and screen) clearly comes across in its all its contradictions and imperfections.  Harburg was both cynical and idealistic, sympathetic to feminism while stuck in old beliefs about women.  (He was born in 1896, died in 1981.)  He was also a socialist who was never a communist (yet blacklisted in an inconsistent fashion), and a pacifist who supported the U.S. involvement in WW II.

The two co-authors analyze Harburg's writing, including as librettist for some musicals, and his contributions to the script for Wizard (also discussed in Aljean Harmetz's 1977 book), such as the title character's speech while giving out the diploma, etc.  Harburg's music-- "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?", "April in Paris," "Paper Moon," "Down with Love," "Lydia the Tattooed Lady," etc.-- remains better known than he is.  But Ernie (himself now in his 80s) is still working to keep his father's memory alive, as a quick Google search shows.

The Heart of Rock & Soul

1989, undated later edition, from New American Library
Dave Marsh
The Heart of Rock & Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made
Original price $14.95, purchase price $5.95
Very worn paperback with split spine
B-

As the main title says, this is a more soul-based view of rock than usual for music criticism, with the co-author of 1981's Rock Lists showing why these are his favorite songs.  As he explains, even focusing on singles rather than albums went against the then common practice.  In one of the later entries, he ponders the future of singles, with CDs having for the most part replaced cassettes and records.  Although I don't follow pop music as much as I did 15 to 35 years ago, I get the impression that there are still "hits," and ironically the advent of Amazon and other downloadable music sites (including free) seems to have strengthened a piecemeal approach to music-listening.

As with Rock Lists, I don't have to agree with Marsh, or even have heard all of the songs here, to find this an entertaining read.  He goes from highest to lowest, sometimes grouping songs that he feels have a dialogue with each other (same song, same artist, or same theme).  True, there were times when a title would give me an earworm for the wrong song (often something from my '70s childhood rather than a more obscure r & b number from 20 years earlier).  Even with his #1, I'm less likely to think of Marvin Gaye's "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" than CCR's or Gladys Knight's.  His #1001 is "No Way Out" by Joyce Harris, which I just listened to on Youtube, and it does feel like a borderline classic.  His reviews range from the brevity of "Just say yes" for "A Lover's Question" to the almost four pages on "We Are the World." 

The songs go from 1951 to 1988, although Marsh admits that almost half are from the 1960s.  He was born in 1950, and it's very much a Baby-Boomer's perspective, politically and otherwise.  I do appreciate, especially after the sludgy sexism of '90s Look Back, that he respects feminism, even if he doesn't agree with some segments of it.  (The part about people not taking Madonna seriously enough would quickly became outdated.)  And of course the book is more racially integrated than a lot of rock criticism, then and now.

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today

1987, undated later edition, from Simon & Schuster
Derek Taylor
It Was Twenty Years Ago Today
Original price $9.95, purchase price $2.00
Worn paperback
B

Long-time Beatles associate Taylor, who died of cancer a decade after this book was published, looks back at not just Sgt. Pepper and the Summer of Love, but the whole kaleidoscopic year of 1967.  This book was sort of a spin-off of a twentieth-anniversary television documentary he worked on, so there are lots of quotes from Paul, George, and others who were there (most but not all of them recognisable names).  The book is very rambling, going back and forth across time, but the charm, humour, and optimism of both Taylor and those times come through.  The photos, some in color, add much to the book, and I like that they're not all the usual pictures.  (The shot of Janis Joplin and Grace Slick singing together is great, and balances out a bit the mostly male focus.)

Reading the book right after Great Cosmic Mother, I can definitely see "pagan" strands in the 1960s, from bright colors to catchy music to free love to pacifism.  I also found this book made the '60s and the participants (even Norman Mailer!) more appealing than my other "looking back" books, especially Generation in Motion (1979).  Not that Taylor ignores what was bad about the decade, but he has a point that '67 was the high (yes, in every sense).  One thing that surprised me was how inclusive Taylor was, not sneering at the Monkees, and even giving Bob "Gilligan" Denver a moment to shine.  (Denver and other celebrities supported the "kids" in '66's Sunset Strip riots.) 

Taylor has some deservedly harsh things to say about the 1980s, from cocaine (as in the SNL book, a drug that brought out much worse qualities in people than marijuana) to money-grubbing.  So the book is a product of its time as much as it is a nostalgia trip.

The Uncyclopedia of Rock

1987, first edition, from Ebury Press
Angus Deayton, Jeremy Pascall, and Geoffrey Perkins
The Uncyclopedia of Rock
Original price £4.95, purchase price unknown
Very worn paperback
C+

This parody of rock music is definitely a case of something being lost in the transatlantic journey.  Too much of the book references British acts that I've never heard of.  Also, a lot of the humor is of the "It was very this, except that it was that" form, with a pun or reverse of expectation, which gets old.  My favorite jokes were the ones about Elvis movies and the Abbey-Road-gone-horribly-wrong cover, although it was nice to see the book include Live Aid.  The Michael Jackson jokes only got more ironic with time of course.

Come Together: John Lennon in His Time

1984, first edition, from Random House
Jon Wiener
Come Together: John Lennon in His Time
Bought newish for $10.95
Worn paperback with broken spine
B

Wiener not only writes of how Lennon wanted to bring people together to make a better world, but he tries to bring together all the contradictions of Lennon's complexity.  He points out, for instance, when John is not living up to his (JL's) ideals, but he also looks for reasons why.  If you're bothered by how John treated Cynthia at the time of the divorce, well, so is Wiener, but he's not about the deep-dish gossip like Peter Brown.

Wiener has a good sense of humor.  (Yes, I suppose he'd have to with a last name like that.)  In particular I like when he makes fun of the lack of pop-culture knowledge, and sometimes other knowledge, of the FBI.  Yet there's definitely a serious side to the book, focusing as it does on Lennon's politics, especially from 1966 onward.  The music is discussed, but from a political viewpoint.  (So he's a bit harsh about McCartney's music, although more often he's comparing Lennon to Dylan and Jagger.)  Interestingly, Wiener agrees with Schaffner and others that Some Time in New York City is a weak album.  (I've never heard it though I have Mind Games and some other Lennon solo albums on cassette.)  But he argues that it's not so much that Lennon's politics ruined his music but that Lennon needed to connect the personal with the political, as in "Give Peace a Chance," "Imagine," and "Watching the Wheels."

Speaking of which, I like that Wiener took the time to interview Kate Millett, who provides insights into not just feminism but New York at that time, Japan in the early '60s, John and Yoko separately and together, and the art world.  There's also a nice interview with Yoko at the end.  Some of the photos you've seen elsewhere, but check out the official FBI photo of "John Lennon," actually New York musician David Peel.

Wiener battled the government for over 25 years to get them to release information on the FBI's harassment of Lennon.  (This book was sort of Round One.)  The Reagan administration thought it was a security issue.  But Wiener eventually succeeded, and along the way wrote Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files (2000), which I've never read but would like to.

The Art of the Beatles

1984, First U.S. edition, from Beech Tree Books
Mike Evans
The Art of the Beatles
Bought newish for $17.95
Good condition hardcover with worn dustjacket
B

Evans (no relation to the Jeffersons actor) looks at visual art by and about the Beatles.  This book was inspired by a Liverpool exhibition earlier that year, including "photography, painting, sculpture, book illustration, film animation, graphic design record sleeve art, poster art, theater, fashion, and comic strip cartoons."  So it goes from Stu Sutcliffe's paintings to the then most recent art inspired by the Beatles.  In fact, the best piece is the one that graces the front and back covers, Barry Agar's The Trojan Horse, a collage-like painting of nearly every well-known image of the Beatles from the '50s and '60s:
http://childofnaturebeatles.blogspot.com/2007/05/trojan-horse.html

The writing is overall good, although like so many books lately, this has a number of typos.  By concentrating more on the look than the sound of the Beatles, Evans is able to offer a different perspective than usual.  Himself a Liverpudlian, he writes from that view, although he includes artists from the U.S. and elsewhere.  Not all of the artwork is great-- including the "hotel" painting by all four Beatles-- but it's always interesting.  As well as Stu's work, there are pieces by Astrid, Cynthia, Yoko, and Paul's brother Mike, although not Linda.  Understandably, the band's break-up, followed a decade later by John's death, froze the images of Beatles in time, so that while there are contributions by artists showing the solo Beatles, the art more often reflects the group as a group.

If I had to pick one page other than either page of Trojan Horse, I would recommend p. 101, an Abbey Road photo outtake, the Beatles walking to the left of the picture rather than the right, with more of a skipping movement than the almost regimented legs of the famous cover.  As Evans writes, the "Paul is dead" brigade would've had a field day if they'd seen all the alternate photos, including "the zebra crossing empty (now that could have signified all sorts of calamities)."

Hey! Hey! We're the I'm So Hollow

1984, Cox & Wyman edition
Denis Doyle
Hey! Hey! We're the I'm So Hollow: Group Names and Their Origins from Abba to Zoo
Original price £1.95, purchase price £1
Worn paperback
B-

This is a rare case where the main title makes no sense until you think about the subtitle, in this case playing off of the Monkees theme, for a hypothetical band called "The I'm So Hollow."  Doyle doesn't explain Spooky Tooth, but he offers backstories and theories on why various rock groups are/were called such names.  Although many bands from the U.S., and a few from non-English-speaking lands, are covered, the perspective is definitely British, particularly in the first section, where he traces a general history of group-naming.  His suggestion that perhaps lower-middle-class American homes of the 1960s each had one car and "two garages," as an explanation of garage bands, will make Americans of any age shake their heads.  But he does provide some insights into how the class system affected British rock.

The book covers roughly the same period as British Invasion and Rock on Film, with additionally some bands from '82 and '83.  Doyle maintains that the 1950s weren't an especially creative time for band-naming, partly because a band as one unit of musicians (not just a back-up group with a lead singer, or an a capella singing group) was relatively unknown in rock & roll till roughly 1963, yes, with the rise of the Beatles.  But he does include the Crickets et al.  I found his explanation of The Lovin' Spoonful, along the lines of "Spoonful of Sugar," to be naive compared to the Rock Lists version (think 10CC), but then Wikipedia claims it comes from the song "Coffee Blues," so who knows?

There are a few errors, mostly of dates, but overall the book is a fun and enlightening read, a different look at rock history than what we've so far.  And, yes, it counts as "criticism," because Doyle offers opinions of some of the music, not just of the names.

The British Invasion

1983, undated (but probably that year) McGraw-Hill edition
Nicholas Schaffner (and friends)
The British Invasion
Probably bought newish for $14.95
Worn paperback
B-

Although this was first published in 1982, and is listed as such on, for instance, Wikipedia, I'm going with the 1983 copyright.  Schaffner and his collaborators (including two with his last name) use December 1980 as a cut-off point (because of John Lennon's death), although in some profiles a band's releases and other actions for '81 are mentioned.  As such, I found it worked on two levels for me.  One is as a glimpse into a time of rock history (a term that Schaffner finds himself defending, though this is a decade after the Christgau book I reviewed) when I was either not yet born or too little to follow the charts.  (I would say 1975 is when I became aware of, in particular, Paul McCartney and Elton John.)  The book is also, in the second section, with its short profiles of the "Hot Hundred" a glimpse of British music shortly before I became a fan of Culture Club, the Thompson Twins, Dexy's Midnight Runners, and others, that is 1982 onwards.

Oddly enough, some of the artists, including the Kinks (one of seven bands and/or soloists that Schaffner has longer profiles of), seem not to have "invaded" the U.S. all that well, in that their music often flopped on American charts and had no more than cult status, a hit or ten aside.  This paradox, especially as it played out in the aggressively non-commercial punk movement, could've been explored in more depth.  Also, there are many bands here I just don't care about.  Still, the writing is good, with Parke Puterbaugh (a Rolling Stone reviewer) probably the best after Schaffner, as with his remark that "no one would own up to the origins of [Spooky Tooth's] name, which suggested a regrettable dental episode."

Schaffner's other 1983 collaboration, with Pete Shotton, is not mentioned on the back cover, so this probably isn't a much later edition.

Rock on Film

1982, first edition, from Virgin Books
David Ehrenstein and Bill Reed
Rock on Film
Original price unknown, purchase price £5 (in Oxford)
Worn condition
B-

An intelligent, sometimes funny look at a quarter-century of rock music and musicians on film.  The authors are at least as generous as Dave Marsh in their definition of rock, including (as he does) country, reggae, disco, and punk, although they draw the line at Pat Boone.  The focus is mostly on American movies, although British cinema is well-represented, so it's not too odd a book for me to have found in an Oxford shop.  The role of racism in music and film is addressed, and it's notable that Ehrenstein is biracial and in fact in 2007 wrote the article "Obama the 'Magic Negro.'"

It's good that he and Reed appreciate the beauty and absurdity of rock, especially on screen.  (Where else are you going to read that in Shake Rattle and Rock Margaret Dumont "lets fly with a mean funky chicken at the film's conclusion"?)  Unfortunately, there are some avoidable errors, not just punctuation, but things like saying that Joplin, Hendrix, and Morrison all died in '68, when they actually went (all at the age of 27) in '70 and '71.  Still, the book holds up pretty well, even if music videos are still being called "promotional films" a few months into the MTV era.