Music Book Review: Do You Believe in the Power of Rock and Roll? by John Robb

Do You Believe in the Power of Rock and Roll?
by John Robb (Music 781.66 Rob)

As many music writers are reaching retirement age or nearing the end of their careers, more music journalism memoirs and article anthologies are starting to appear. Some of these books are likely to be among the most talked-about music books in coming years: co-founder of Rolling Stone Jann Wenner’s recent book “The Masters,” for example, has already found some attention and controversy in the press. Many of these writers are going to be less famous than Mr. Wenner, but due to the nature of their work, many have unique perspectives on music scenes of the rock era onward.

 

One such writer is John Robb, who got his start writing for smaller rock music magazines like ZigZag, Select, and Sounds, and later in his career even found himself at the helm of his own internet-based music site, Louder Than War. Robb interviewed many notable musicians throughout his career, focusing more on alternative and underground musical movements, and has been a musician himself in the bands Goldblade and The Membranes. He’s also written several music books before, perhaps most notably “Punk Rock: An Oral History.” Louder Than War has had an interesting life of its own since its foundation in 2010 as well: many music magazines have fallen in the last decade, or moved from print to online-only lives, but Louder Than War has done the opposite, adding a print version of their publication in 2015, a web radio station in 2021, and they’ve also occasionally released records as well. Robb’s new book, which features band interviews and profiles from throughout his career, is called “Do You Believe in the Power of Rock and Roll?,” and you can borrow it from Polley.

 

Robb starts the book with a brief introduction, in which he describes his own kind of DIY punk entry into both playing and writing about music. He refers to his early musical experiences as being part of the Baby Boomer generation, though he’s on the extreme young side of the generation, and most of his formative musical experiences came in the 1970s, compared to the 60s for most Boomers. After early experiences with the punk and post-punk scenes, he found himself writing for his own zine, which he called the Blackpool Rox Fanzine, and started playing in his own band The Membranes in the late 70s. He started writing for ZigZag in the mid-80s. He documents selections of his writing chronologically, starting with a 1985 piece about The Jesus and Mary Chain that he wrote for ZigZag, the first profile ever written about the band. This is followed by an early profile of the Stone Roses, who used to rehearse next door to his band, and a few more representative articles from the 80s. Of particular note, Robb includes a profile of the band Nirvana, in which he mentions that he conducted the first-ever interview of the band in 1988.

 

If you’re a fan of 90s music, you’ll find lots of familiar names in Robb’s profiles collected here. Although the book contains writing spanning the 80s to the 2020s, most of the artists represented were particularly well-known in the 90s music scene. When you get to Robb’s writing from the 2010s, for example, you’ll find artists such as Michael Gira from Swans, Daniel Ash from Bauhaus and Love and Rockets, and Steve Albini. As one might expect, more UK and Euro bands are represented overall, as most of these pieces were written for UK publications. Another claim to fame often attributed to John Robb’s writing career pertains to UK music directly, too: he is often considered the inventor of the term “Britpop” as it applies to the UK music scene of the 90s, a term that became associated with bands like Oasis and Blur even in the American music press. While UK DJ Stuart Maconie has sometimes been mentioned as the originator of the term, which he claims to have started using in 1993, it comes up in this book in the Robb-penned profile of Sonic Youth from a 1992 article in Melody Maker, which seems to settle that issue once and for all. Outside of grunge music, Britpop was one of the biggest musical movements of the mid-90s, so naming the phenomenon is certainly quite notable.

If you’ve read a lot of American music journalism over the years, I think that you’ll find Robb’s style both refreshing and a little different. We didn’t get so much exposure to UK music journalism in the States, especially in the pre-internet days, but there is a palpably different kind of style and approach used in a lot of UK music writing, and these pieces are great examples. The most obvious formal difference is in how interview materials are incorporated into artist profiles: while there are some pieces that use the more American convention of writing an introduction and then running interviews as a lightly edited kind of script, in many other instances entire pieces are written in a more narrative style, with quotes simply worked into the narrative. This creates a more personable, interactive kind of writing. In theory, there is a risk of this kind of approach causing the author to become more centered in the piece, rather than keeping the artist in question at the center, but Robb’s writing is an excellent example of how to make this work, using the narrative space instead to detail how the artists are acting, what they’re doing, or taking brief referential digressions into other aspects of their work or history, or deeper cultural contexts for the music or its broader history. Once you’ve read some pieces in this format, the back-and-forth interview script pieces featured here seem somewhat less interesting in comparison, though Robb’s insightful questions generally keep those thoughtful and entertaining, too.

 

In some cases, Robb has selected versions of the pieces featured in the book from his own notes, rather than the versions that were formally published. There are interesting stories behind some of these decisions: for example, the profile of The Cure featured here is presented as it was, “before I faxed it off to the magazine and it was edited.” Robb mentions that Select magazine apparently had some dislike of the Cure, and that his piece was heavily edited to be a more negative portrayal of the band than what he originally turned in. By the 2010s, of course, this was no longer a problem for Robb, as he was publishing in his own Louder Than War, which is represented through pieces in the last quarter of the book.

 

My favorite piece in the book is probably the conversation with Blixa Bargeld of the band Einsturzende Neubauten. Although this is one of the interviews that is presented in a back-and-forth script, it arrived at a pivotal moment in that band’s development, as they transitioned away from being a fairly harsh industrial project to a surprisingly gentle and even subtle band. Robb’s questions deftly guide Bargeld, who was often a difficult interview subject in his early days, into explaining their transition and how the band evolved over time into a more nuanced affair. The interview arrived with the 2000 “Silence is Sexy” album that represented the greatest change in their career, and I think even a person with no previous familiarity with the band would find this interview interesting enough to check them out. And that’s one of the fundamental goals of good music journalism.

 

(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try The Masters by Jann Wenner, There Goes Gravity: A Life in Rock and Roll by Lisa Robinson, or Addicted to Noise by Michael Goldberg.)

 

( official Do You Believe in the Power of Rock and Roll web page ) | ( official John Robb Instagram feed )

 

Recommended by Scott S.
Polley Music Library

Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?

New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!

Check out this, and all the other great music resources, at the Polley Music Library, located on the 2nd floor of the Bennett Martin Public Library at 14th & "N" St. in downtown Lincoln. You'll find biographies of musicians, books about music history, instructional books, sheet music, CDs, music-related magazines, and much more. Also check out Polley Music Library Picks, the Polley Music Library's e-mail newsletter, and follow them on Facebook!