The Kennedy Chronicles: The Golden Age of MTV Through Rose-Colored Glasses

Former MTV VJ Kennedy offers a backstage look at her glory years, 1992–1997, when she came to fame as the music network’s only self-proclaimed virgin Republican. The book is chock-full of excerpts from her many on-air (and off-the-record) interviews, where she perfected her signature style of “striking a balance between being the girl who will do what takes to get a laugh and the devil that can’t be trusted.” She dishes about her encounters with a huge range of ’90s music culture heroes, including Henry Rollins, Courtney Love, and Dweezil Zappa, as well as her MTV colleagues such as news reporter Tabitha Soren (“Let’s just say that for a bottle ginger she was every bit as fiery as her strands when things didn’t go well”). But while Kennedy states that “there was never a greater collision of culture and media” than in the 1990s, she doesn’t really explore this idea, preferring instead to equate her privileged life with the decade itself. And while she states that she wrote this book “for all the people who came of age during that time,” she is invariably dismissive of those same people when describing MTV’s liberal bent: “I virulently opposed what most of these yahoos were championing”. Overall, her account is thin and superficial. (July)