Hey Hey, My My, Rock ‘n’ Roll Will Never Die … Until Someone Tries to Write a Novel about It

Posted 13 March, 2008 in Literary Criticism, Music |

Reviewing Ibi Kaslik’s new book The Angel Riots on the CBC website, Kevin Chong ponders whether it’s possible to write a great rock ‘n’ roll novel:

Writing about rock ’n’ roll is, more often than not, a fool’s errand. Frank Zappa’s withering description of rock journalism as “people who can’t write interviewing people who can’t talk for people who can’t read” is not only pithy, but reflects the widely held opinion on the matter.

I’d argue that it’s really not possible to write a “great” rock ‘n’ roll novel, if by “great” one means authentic or capturing the essence of the source material. Great rock ‘n’ roll is built on a kind of anarchic energy that can’t truly be replicated in prose: as Craig O’Hara said of Warren Kinsella’s book Fury’s Hour, “a book about Punk is not Punk Rock”; in the same way, a description of a horde of sweaty, writhing, drunk and stoned headbangers can’t adequately capture the sheer body rush and sonic assault of a Motörhead concert.

Chong points out that Kaslik adroitly avoids this problem by mostly leaving the descriptions of the band’s performances out of her novel and concentrating instead on their personal interactions offstage, but there is nevertheless something oddly static about the result, and stasis is the very antithesis of the rock ‘n’ roll ethos.

In Chong’s conception, Don DeLillo’s Great Jones Street and Jonathan Lethem’s You Don’t Love Me Yet constitute enjoyable rock ‘n’ roll novels; I’d be more inclined to tilt towards Michael Turner’s Hard Core Logo or Ray Robertson’s Moody Food, which, although it too suffers from an unavoidable literary sedateness, is adept in capturing the mood of Yorkville in the ’60s, and his Gram Parsons stand-in is well-rounded and believable.

However, to come closest to nailing the manic energy and electricity of a great rock show, you have to look at novels that don’t deal with rock per se, but nevertheless brandish a youthful vigour, and work flat out to provide an adrenaline-fuelled body blow. In that sense, the greatest “rock ‘n’ roll” novels I’ve read — neither of which have anything to do with rock ‘n’ roll — are Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting and Craig Davidson’s The Fighter.

Ramble on.

(My own review of The Angel Riots appeared in the January/February 2008 issue of Quill & Quire.)

3 comments to “Hey Hey, My My, Rock ‘n’ Roll Will Never Die … Until Someone Tries to Write a Novel about It”

B., March 13th, 2008 at 8:23 pm:

• I’m giving a shout out for High Fidelity!

Steven W. Beattie, March 14th, 2008 at 9:42 am:

• High Fidelity is set in a record store, but it isn’t really a rock novel, per se …

Oliver Pocknell, April 9th, 2008 at 1:36 pm:

• I would argue that High Fidelity is a rock novel, simply viewed from the perspective of a fan. It’s an angle that Hornby also used effectively in his football novel Fever Pitch. The main characters are peripheral to the creation of the music, or the playing of the game, but their obsession with those is a integral to the plots. Fandom is a key aspect of both rock and sport.

  If a rock novel must have a band as main characters then Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments must count, though it deals largely with growing up in the poor working class of Dublin.

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