Hatred is a Virtue

"I Hate New Music: The Classic Rock Manifesto" by Dave Thompson isn't the longest rant I've ever read — almost any political book would top it —but at 224 pages it certainly is the longest smirk.

Thompson truly does hate just about everything recorded after 1976, finding punk, new wave, post punk, grunge, jam bands, and power pop to be nothing but recycled ideas. And synthesizers, he says, should be used only to make space and fart noises.

This is the book that the record store employees from the movie Clerks, with their smirking superiority, would have written, had they been capable of mustering the energy and the articulateness to do it.

Filled with in-jokes and too clever by half commentary — one would have to know, for example, that Eric Clapton wrote Layla about his infatuation with friend George Harrison's wife, and later stole said wife — to understand why it was so tacky for Clapton to play that song at a tribute concert for George following the former Beatle's death. One would have to share his distinction that 60's artists were "influenced" by their predecessors, while 80's musicians "copied" theirs.

I wish Thompson had taken his manifesto to the extreme and posited that the Beatles barely advanced Chuck Berry, and then it was all over. That, at least, would have been a defensible position.

Or not.