Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

There are parts of the book that are thoroughly enjoyable and well considered and written. But the author’s seemingly constant need to advertise his wokeness is terribly off-putting in a book that aims to celebrate the whole concept of classic rock. No, James Brown and Marvin Gaye and Parliament Funkadelic were not played on the classic rock stations, but they weren’t making music for the classic rock audience either. Can R&B and funk be classified among classic rock? Based on the Rock n Roll hall of fame, the answer is yes, and you can add in hip hop too, but don’t reflexively play the racism card for those songs not traditionally being classified as such. When you had guys like the Stones, Clapton, the Beatles, and even Phil Collins publicly acknowledging their debt to black musicians, Motown, and the blues, they clearly weren’t racists seeking to appropriate culture. (What’s another word for “cultural appropriation”? CULTURE) Finally, the portrayal of Disco Demolition as some anti-gay, racist event is historical revisionism. It wasn’t a bunch of white dudes out there to protect their privilege, it was a bunch of drunken meatheads out to party. Simply put? They hated disco and wanted to advertise that fact. Again, it was 1979, not 2019, and that constant sense of grievance wasn’t part of the culture. There was racism then, as there is now and has been since the beginning of time, but we weren’t all being raised to hate each other and play the victim in every interaction. The constant need to look at different eras and judge them using today’s woke standards is lazy and is becoming a trope. I can’t recommend the book because of that; it just feels so forced and unnecessary that it detracts from the core narrative. It’s possible to write great books about a rock era or genre (like Dave Weigel’s “The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock”) without playing in the intersectional olympics. I wish this book had chosen to do so.