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.

Taboo – Fallin' Up

2011 • Touchstone

I received this book as a gag gift (on the cheap when Borders went out of business) but I thought I'd read it anyway just for kicks. I've never liked the Black Eyed Peas, but I figured if nothing else it'd be a look into how pop superstars run their music careers, and having heard a few of their songs before I'd at least have a bit of context to work with.

Hence my incredible disappointment when I found out that this book is not about music. At all. I was hoping for at least some discussion of songwriting or production techniques or anything, but no luck. For the purposes of this book the Black Eyes Peas could have been magicians or cabaret dancers or clowns; it wouldn't have made any difference. That leaves the only reason to read this book being if you were really interested in Taboo solely as a person, and I was not—even less so after finishing it, because that guy is an asshole.

The story itself is actually pretty dull; it starts out alright, if in a semi-cliché rags-to-riches ghetto tale, with Taboo rising in the ranks of b-boy dancing; but after he joins his bandmates just a few chapters in he basically rides their coattails the rest of the way. Aside from the copious descriptions of drug and alcohol use, nothing ever really happens to him (nothing interesting, anyway).

And when the partying and drug use is described, it only seems to serve to drive home the book's backwards moral: If you're successful and/or rich, you can get away with anything. There are plenty of cases in the book where this sort of thing happens; the worst offender is probably their trip to St Maarten where several band members and crew are driving drunk and/or high, get pulled over, thrown in jail, and are let go anyway simply because they had a show the next day. A combination of superstar-level fame and incompetent police work results in no consequences and no lessons learned. What's the point?

Yes, he does make a drastic improvement and sobers up at the very end, and supposedly works hard to get there, but it doesn't make me have any more sympathy for someone who has already proven themselves to be an utter asshole for 90% of the book. It all left a very bad taste in my mouth.

Additionally, despite having an editor help him out, the book is very amateurly-written. Its style seems to be some weird hybrid of a newspaper article and a campfire story—half of the paragraphs are one sentence long, making the book read in a very uncomfortable way. The patchwork vocabulary (it's pretty obvious someone broke out a thesaurus at random just to add impressive-sounding long words) and very jumpy storytelling (where the focus switches between events almost at random, perhaps in a ridiculous attempt to keep things chronological) doesn't help at all.

Needless to repeat, I was not remotely impressed by this book and I'm a bit surprised at myself for somehow making it all the way through. It is not even worth digging out of the bargain bin, regardless of how much one likes the Black Eyed Peas (in that case, wait for will.i.am's biography—he's the true hero of the story and seems like the one only deserving of his success).

Michael Moynihan and Didrik Søderlind – Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground

1998 • Feral House

I had been itching to read this book for quite some time now, having heard a lot of good things about and being a fan of black metal for several years. When I finally got a copy, it turned out to be even better than my expectations. I admittedly haven't read too many music-related books (I hope to change this in the future) but Lords of Chaos is already standing out among the best.

Being a book about a very niche musical scene, I was a bit wary about the its quality before I read it—after all, it's a subject that I assume few people (in the general scheme of things) would take seriously. However, Moynihan and Søderlind did a fantastic job writing the book, and it is very well written and put-together. Focusing exclusively on the history of the scene than the music allows the authors to explore the story in great detail, and there is a lot more to it than I had thought. In fact, the narrative goes all the way back to metal's beginnings in the '60s and '70s, discussing early Satanic music like Black Sabbath (and some non-metal groups like Coven). It relies less on just interviews for material than I expected (there is about half interviews and half regular narration) which is great for the book's flow and pacing and helps keep things interesting throughout, even for someone who is already sort of familiar with the stories. I also really enjoyed how the book keeps the reader guessing at what happens next, opting to give gradual clues as to how events unfolded; for instance, in the chapter about Øystein Aarseth's murder, it isn't explicitly stated right off the bad who did it—rather, the authors let the story unfold before subtly revealing Varg Vikernes' involvement through several interviews. Techniques like this also help to keep the bias of the book to a minimum; the authors let the reader come to their own conclusion about Vikernes' motive by offering different viewpoints from people involved and never state themselves if they think it was committed in self-defense or not. It gives the book a very honest feel to it, which I think is necessary and deserved.

Of course, good writing is no substitute for a good story, but Lords of Chaos definitely delivers. Even though I was vaguely aware of most things discussed in the book, reading about them here showed me that there was a lot more to what happened than I had thought. Even though the book focuses on a few particular things—church burnings, Aarseth's shop Helvete, Dead's suicide, the murders by Bård Eithun and Varg Vikernes, Vikernes' sentence, Satanism and pagan religion's influence, and the spread of black metal around the world—it goes into each with intimate depth, partly in thanks to the personal interviews. The book goes way beyond than just listing who was in what bands; it discusses a lot of how these groups influenced not only metal acts to follow but also the media reported it and the public's reaction, something that I haven't considered until now. I'd say it's a book that's a lot more about people than it is music; music only factors in incidentally. That's not a bad thing (unless you were really hoping for a book just about music) and it gives the book a very unique feel.

The book is not without its flaws; one of the most egregious is that the narrative has the tendency to go wildly off-tangent, one major example being a particularly long section about UFOs and ancient astronaut theory. It ties in to how many national socialist / fascist / racialist people also are interested in such topics, but I feel that it distracts quite a bit from the book's original purpose. This probably has something to do with the book's over-heavy focus on Varg Vikernes, which is understandable as he was very influential in the scene, but it was still a bit much for me. Additionally, for all topics the book covers, it doesn't once touch on the actual sonic qualities of black metal itself (as I mentioned above). Obviously the book is advertised as historical and not about music production, but it would have been nice to hear at least some about how black metal's sound developed alongside its ideals.

Regardless, it's still an excellent read all around and there was hardly a moment when I felt disinterest in the content. Highly recommendable; I can see this book appealing to anyone with even a passing interest in metal, Scandinavian culture, fringe ideologies, pop history, or good old murder drama. Just make sure to pop in some old Mayhem albums when you flip through it.