Last week, I published a review of the memoir by rock ‘n’ roll producer Tom Werman. It was 1909 words long. I wrote a review of Geddy Lee’s memoir, My Effin’ Life. It was 1676 words long. I reviewed Tom Templeman’s book, Rob Halford‘s book, Mark Lanegan’s book.
Obviously, I care about rock music, and I enjoy these lengthy trips down a memory lane – mostly the 70s, 80s and 90s – that I also miss.
But there’s more to it than that.
I used to review books like these in the Wall Street Journal. I reviewed Everybody Loves Our Town, an oral history about Seattle grunge, and Johnny Ramone’s amazing posthumous memoir Commando among others.
Unfortunately, book reviewing virtually doesn’t exist anymore. Twenty years ago, every major newspaper had its own book review section. The Chicago Tribune and Washington Post and LA Times had freestanding sections where they would review current books. Now there’s only one, the New York Times and it’s skimpy, and the only advertisements feature sad, little self-published things.
I got it, things change, and social media has replaced books. We can debate elsewhere whether that’s a change that benefits society, and I doubt I’d be able to find a serious person to take the pro side.
But what the book sections indisputably used to do is shine a light on local authors or those who had covered topics relevant to their cities. That’s gone. And nothing has replaced it.
They also took seriously the hard work it takes to write a book. Even a negative review was valuable consideration for the thousands of hours that typically go into producing a book one hopes will be lasting.
That’s just disappeared. No cultural elders got together and decided that the predominant means of conveying ideas since Johannes Gutenberg would simply vanish, with nothing to replace it except Twitter and TikTok. It just happened.
So my efforts to give longform consideration and context to these works is more about refusing to quietly acquiesce to the idea that nothing matters and nothing is worth considering beyond the “I read this It was good” reader reviews that pollute Amazon (and are mostly fake anyway). Or worse, solicited by authors who are now told if they cannot assemble meaningful armies of loud backers, their ideas, research, and reporting are no longer worthy of publication.
Even publishing here, my own little blog, is a fit of futile resistance. Very few people will read this, just as they read almost no one’s substack. But still I write, because reviewing these books—especially these memoirs of rock and roll lives, with their samey stories of excess and burnout—makes them kind of matter. If they took the time to write down what mixer they used for “Surrender” or what drugs they took during a Screaming Trees recording, I can take the time to consider it thoughtfully.