I picked up Songbook (aka 31 Songs) by Nick Hornby. It's a sting of short essays about, well, I think it's him telling us what's on his mix tape. It's a bit disjointed in spots, but when he's on, he's Hornby:
This (the excessive use of current pop music as background in TV commercials and Starbucks) may partly explain the teenage fondness for the profanities and anti-social attitudes of hip-hop: neither Starbucks nor the Body Shop nor the Hotel Minimalist wish to assault their valued customers with obscene raps about Uzis and pussy set to beats that attempt to remove part of your skull, thus allowing contemporary youth to bond with their favourite artists in private.The disjointed nature (almost rambling) of the pieces make it a hard book to review (someone else had the same problem) and my personal opinion of some of the artists colors how I read the essays (notably, I got a little peeved when Ani DiFranco gets pretty much three whole pages while Aimee Mann gets a couple of sentences). I'd say check it out from the library, find all the songs on CD, then, to para those old kids books, "read along in the book as you listen to the music."
I have a list of ten songs that influenced me; I'll put them up over the next week.
