Teenage Nervous Breakdown

In these freewheeling essays, Walley (No Commercial Potential: The Frank Zappa Story) looks at how corporate America cashed in on the mind-set of the 1950s and the years that followed--the time when rock and roll ""made its mark on the world: as an attitude as well [as] a sonic environment for commerce""--and the entertainment conglomerates appropriated music to use as a marketing tool for turning adolescents into dedicated consumers. As a result, he contends, there is no life after high school in America today; we are all in a permanently juvenile state of mind, needing instant gratification in everything from sex to our franchise-style, fast-food politics. He also laments that corporations have co-opted the idealism that characterized the early years of rock, asserting that not even the counterculture escapes commercial exploitation. Walley has clearly read widely and thought deeply about the addiction to consumption in contemporary America, but the essays, which he calls ""word-jazz rock and roll improvisations,"" are written in an overheated style that detracts from his provocative observations. (June)