ROCK SNOBS Book reveals rock's arcane side
The authors' mean streak shows through.
By SPENCER RUMSEY
LONG ISLAND NEWSDAY
You may consider yourself a true music fan, but if the words "coruscating," "plangent," "seminal" and "sun-drenched" don't effortlessly roll off your tongue when you're talking about rock, then your critical skills are in serious need of regrooving.
But don't be bummed, because David Kamp and Steven Daly, two very witty Vanity Fair writers, have compiled the perfect solution: "The Rock Snob*s Dictionary: An Essential Lexicon of Rockological Knowledge" (Broadway, $12.95).
This is the definitive lexicon of the rock-crit universe, running the gamut from those with music equipment fetishes (knowing what made Leslie speakers special, for example) to obscurantist obsessions (learning that the real names of Richard Hell and Iggy Pop are Richard Meyers and James Osterberg).
But be forewarned: "Just because a musician has enjoyed lasting success and critical acclaim doesn't mean he warrants inclusion here." You see, digging the music is instrumental, ahem, but it's not instructive.
The real deal
The rock snob, as Kamp and Daly explain, is someone "for whom the actual enjoyment of music is but a side dish to the accumulation of arcane knowledge about it." Now, for the sake of argument -- and that's what it's all about here, as the writers admit -- let's recall the man who popularized the term, William Makepeace Thackeray, in the 1840s. (He also gave the world the novel "Vanity Fair" from which the magazine got its name.) In his "Book of Snobs," Thackeray wrote, "He who meanly admires mean things is a Snob."
There's a mean streak to this newly released dictionary, which makes it so wickedly funny, but the writers' point is to be helpful. They want to let nonsnobs hold their own at parties while "sparing them the trouble of actually listening to the music in question."
Take Captain Beefheart's "Trout Mask Replica," "whose brilliance will reveal itself after you've listened to it 6,000 times or so." Such altruism is a gift.