Joe S. Harrington Sonic Cool - Sonic Cool - Life & Death Of Rock & Roll

2002, English, Paperback, 15x23 cm, 596 pages, few b&w photos - In the Tradition of Nick Tosches, Tom Wolfe, and Lester Bangs comes an epic and riveting of rock 'n' roll that reads like a novel. 'Sonic Cool' presents the saga of rock as the closest thing we have to genuine myth in the modern world and it is the first bock about rock to be written in the spirit of rock. Immense, fierce, opinionated, and hilarious, the book portrays rock as a movement of near-religious proportions and masterfully presents it against a backdrop of social factors and important events such as the invention of the elcetric guitar, the jukebox, LSD, the 12-inch phonograph record, the Seventies recession, the Reagan revolution, the Internet, and the 9/11/01 attacks. This is the history of rock as it's never been told, as the legend of a massive cultural movement, one that had meaning, but ultimately fell prey to its own worst inclinations. In many ways Harrington's book reads like the raging polemics of Leroi Jones (aka Amiri Baraka). Radically egalitarian in its assessments-towering figures such as Lennon, Dylan, and Cobain stand alongside lesser-known but equally influential artists like the MC5, the Missfits, and Joy Division-Sonic Cool is gripping reading for anyone who ever believed in the music.