Rock and Roll Always Forgets: A Quarter Century of Music Criticism

When Lester Bangs died in 1982, music criticism lost much of its sharp edges. Just two years later, however, a young critic with a rapid-fire wit and uncanny prescience about pop music’s future delivered a eulogy for rock and roll in the Village Voice. Chuck Eddy, who started writing about music only a few years after he started listening to it, declared, for example, in his 1984 Voice piece, “Over and Out,” that the “Sex Pistols were the worst thing that ever happened to rock and roll—they demanded anarchy and got it... it’s also given us a situation in which you can’t tell the artists from the poseurs.” This wide-ranging collection of essays (from the Voice, Rolling Stone, Spin, etc.) captures Eddy’s cantankerous, spirited, enthusiastic, and forceful takes on music from rap to country and musicians from Michael Jackson to Brad Paisley. In early 1986, Eddy reviewed Aerosmith’s Done with Mirrors, suggesting that “Walk This Way” was rap music before rap music existed and proposing that an enterprising deejay might segue the song with the Beastie Boys’ “She’s on It.” Producer Rick Rubin eventually had Run-D.M.C. cover “Walk This Way” on its next album. Eddy’s far-reaching insights into rock music push the boundaries of the rock criticism, showing why he remains one of our most important music critics. (Oct.)