George Case's Blog, page 14

Unreliable Narratives

What do COVID, the Ukraine war, monkeypox, climate change, trucker protests and systemic racism have in common? They are all topics of ongoing news coverage in many forums, and they have all had the veracity of that coverage challenged by critical commentators and ordinary people. These days, regular media consumers – which is to say, […]

You’re Bloody Well White

A quick Google query, or a study of news and magazine articles, should demonstrate how prominent the term whiteness has become over the last ten years or so. Whiteness, as it is lately used by educators and writers, does not refer to the glare of Arctic snow, but to hitherto unexamined presumptions around race and […]

Takin’ Care of Business: A History of Working People’s Rock ‘n’ Roll

My most recent book, Takin’ Care of Business: A History of Working People’s Rock ‘n’ Roll, grew out of a post I originally wrote for this blog. I have long enjoyed (in addition to plenty of other music) the unpretentious, unrepentant sounds of AC/DC, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Aerosmith, Motörhead, and other guitar-based raunch from the 1960s, […]

Here’s To My Sweet Satan: How the Occult Haunted Music, Movies, and Pop Culture, 1966-1980

One of my most popular books (relatively speaking), Here’s To My Sweet Satan was conceived as a way of bringing my Led Zeppelin-related credentials to a broader social history of the occult boom of the 1960s and 70s.  I had read a 2011 title, Jason Zinoman’s Shock Value, about the same era’s horror movies, and I […]

Calling Dr. Strangelove: The Anatomy and Influence of the Kubrick Masterpiece

After authoring three published books on classic rock and contributing to others, I was eager to branch out into another area of popular culture, and I developed a proposal for a monograph on a classic film, Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 black comedy Dr. Strangelove, or:  How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.  The […]

Beware Fake Readers and Fake Reviews

Like other Goodreads authors with modest readerships, I've noticed a flurry of recent 1-star ratings for some of my books listed here. Apparently this is a common problem: fake or bot accounts artificially lowering a product or service's public reputation by "review bombing" with numerous negative reviews. Some writers whose books are on Goodreads have reported being approached by mysterious users who offer to delete the bad ratings in exchange for a payment.

Whatever the rationale behind review bombing - mercenary or just malicious - I encourage the Goodreads community to assess all the ratings and writeups given to my books by a range of genuine readers. Fake accounts may have generic names, no avatar picture, and don't offer any original critical insights. Not every real review or rating is favorable, and that's fine with me; but a sudden rush of hostile, deliberately manipulative entries (especially for books released ten or fifteen years ago) looks pretty suspicious. There's no accounting for taste, but some tastes should be taken with a grain of salt. Thanks for reading.

Led Zeppelin FAQ: All That’s Left to Know About the Greatest Hard Rock Band of All Time

Following the releases of Magus, Musician, Man and Out Of Our Heads I continued to pitch music-related proposals to my US publisher Backbeat, but the one they settled on was an entry in their FAQ series, intended to be a go-to line covering various rock artists, film and television franchises, and other entertainment.  While I […]

Beware Fake Readers and Fake Reviews

Like other Goodreads authors with modest readerships, I've noticed a flurry of recent 1-star ratings for some of my books listed here. Apparently this is a common problem: fake or bot accounts artificially lowering a product or service's public reputation by "review bombing" with numerous negative reviews. Some writers whose books are on Goodreads have reported being approached by mysterious users who offer to delete the bad ratings in exchange for a payment.

Whatever the rationale behind review bombing - mercenary or just malicious - I encourage the Goodreads community to assess all the ratings and writeups given to my books by a range of genuine readers. Fake accounts may have generic names, no avatar picture, and don't offer any original critical insights. Not every real review or rating is favorable, and that's fine with me; but a sudden rush of hostile, deliberately manipulative entries (especially for books released ten or fifteen years ago) looks pretty suspicious. There's no accounting for taste, but some tastes should be taken with a grain of salt. Thanks for reading.

Dumbing Down Dissent: Fads and Fallacies in Political Discourse

After a few rejections by traditional publishers, I elected to make my short manuscript of Dumbing Down Dissent available on the print-on-demand platform of CreateSpace, owned by Amazon, in 2011.  Since the publishing industry was and is being transformed by the Internet, it seemed an option worth pursuing:  rather than invest in producing hundreds of physical […]

Out Of Our Heads: Rock ‘n’ Roll Before the Drugs Wore Off

Riding on the relative success of 2007’s Jimmy Page:  Magus, Musician, Man, I was offered further writing contracts by the publisher Hal Leonard / Backbeat, and the editors and I settled on my idea of chronicling the Beatles’ smoke-filled first meeting with Bob Dylan but expanding it to cover the broader topic of rock ‘n’ […]