The Sound and the Fury: 40 Years of Classic Rock Journalism - A Rock's Back Pages Reader - Tapa blanda

More than 400 pages of highlights from the capacious and variegated rocksbackpages.com archive - MOJO stalwart and rocksbackpages co-founder Hoskyns' Intro reflects gloomily on rock journalism's former freedom and irreverence compared to, as he sees it, current collusiveness with "the entertainment machine". One can only hope that was a grey day talking and take inspiration from all the subsequent uproar. While the rehashed live reviews seem to have expired with time, otherwise it's a rush of a read whether the approach is Vivien Goldman's sweaty Northern Soul excitation at the Wigan Casino in 1975 or John Mendelssohn's aggressive 1991 reassessment of NWA as a cynical minstrel show calculated to snare white youth dollars. Virtually yellowed pages maybe, but they are alive with surprise and revelation, viz the extraordinarily cagey Bob Dylan's magnificent declaration of self-worth/egotism extracted by quiet old Mick Brown one night in a Madrid caf . "I don't think I'm gonna be understood until maybe 100 years from now," he said. "What I've done, what I'm doing, nobody else does or has done." - Phil Sutcliffe, MOJO, May 2003

"The Sound and the Fury" gathers some of the best and most entertaining rock writing of the last forty years, coming at rock and roll from several different angles and spanning four decades of Good, Bad and Ugly. Among the pieces are: Al Aronowitz documenting The Beatles' arrival in America; Glenn O'Brien dishing the dirt with Madonna; Nick Hornby reappraising pop deities Abba; Caroline Coon witnessing the birth of punk; Will Self sparring with Morrissey; Jon Savage entering the fractured mind of Kurt Cobain; Lenny Kaye riding Grand Funk Railroad Plus Greil Marcus on The Band, Mary Harron on Warhol, Vivien Goldman at the Wigan Casino, John Mendelssohn in South Central LA and many others.