Adam Brent Houghtaling – This Will End in Tears: The Miserabilist Guide to Music

2012 • It Books

If I haven't said it enough before on this blog, I love listening to sad music, to the point where it's often a conscious habit I get into. So I was naturally drawn to this book when I first saw it... and it's basically exactly what one would expect. It's quite informative, often entertaining, and easy to read, and even though it tends to focus a lot on lyrics (something I don't usually care much about) I found myself enjoying it.

One of the bigeest positives about this book is its huge scope when it comes to what kinds of music to cover. Many popular music books tend to just cover popular music (and always the same tired artists everyone already knows), but not here. Genres ranged from pop to rock to classical to jazz to country to ambient and even a touch of the avant-garde. Its broadness also means shorter chapters—each just a handful of pages long at most—making the book very easy to pick up and read casually in small sessions.

Unfortunately this also meant that, for its broad coverage, most of it isn't particularly deep; the artist chapters are mostly biographies without as much as I'd like in the way of more concrete musical descriptions. However, this is certainly made up for in the more specific chapters on lyrical themes (heartbreak, death, substance abuse, etc.) and individual works (such as "Taps" or Basinski's Disintegration Loops). Regardless, it's still obviously very much a learning experience—I doubt many people are going to be familiar with every artist included (I knew maybe half of them, and I consider myself relatively well-read—perhaps erroneously).

And of course unlike books that are more informative, history-based (like the ones I've already reviewed), it's tough to get a good sense of the music described here without actually hearing it. I'd love to have a mix CD of the top songs featured in the top 100. I guess it's the sort of book that's best read with YouTube readily available for some audial context; I didn't have that when I read it. Even still, it's an enjoyable read for sure.