The Grammar of Rock: Art and Artlessness in 20th Century Pop Lyrics

by Alexander Theroux, Robert Crumb (Cover Illustration)

National Book Award nominee, critic and one of America’s least compromising satirists, Alexander Theroux takes a comprehensive look at the colorful language of pop lyrics and the realm of rock music in general in The Grammar of Rock: silly song titles; maddening instrumentals; shrieking divas; clunker lines; the worst (and best) songs ever written; geniuses of the art; movie stars who should never have raised their voice in song but who were too shameless to refuse a mic; and the excesses of awful Christmas recordings. Praising (and critiquing) the gems of lyricists both highbrow and low, Theroux does due reverence to classic word-masters like Ira Gershwin, Jimmy Van Heusen, Cole Porter, and Sammy Cahn, lyricists as diverse as Hank Williams, Buck Ram, the Moody Blues, and Randy Newman, Dylan and the Beatles, of course, and more outré ones like the Sex Pistols, the Clash, Patti Smith, the Fall (even Ghostface Killah), but he considers stupid rhymes, as well — nonsense lyrics, chop logic, the uses and abuses of irony, country music macho, verbal howlers, how voices sound alike and why, and much more.

In a way that no one else has ever done, with his usual encyclopedic insights into the state of the modern lyric, Theroux focuses on the state of language — the power of words and the nature of syntax — in The Grammar of Rock. He analyzes its assaults on listeners’ impulses by investigating singers’ styles, pondering illogical lunacies in lyrics, and deconstructing the nature of diction and presentation in the language. This is that rare book of discernment and probing wit (and not exclusively one that is a critical defense of quality) that positively evaluates the very nature of a pop song, and why one over another has an effect on the listener.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, Essays

352 pages, Hardcover

First published February 3, 2013

About the author

Alexander Theroux is a novelist, poet, and essayist. The most apt description of the novels of Theroux was given by Anthony Burgess in praise of Theroux's Darconville's Cat: Theroux is 'word drunk', filling his novels with a torrent of words archaic and neologic, always striving for originality, while drawing from the traditions of Rolfe, Rabelais, Sterne, and Nabokov.

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 1 out of 5]

REVIEW OF THE FIRST 103 PAGES – IT’S ALL I COULD STAND FOR THE MOMENT

Wow, this was like buying a new dog and having it bite you and die in your car before you got it home and then the bite gets infected and your whole arm swells up to twice its size.

Hardly ever has a book started so well and nosedived so fantastically badly, hardly ever have I started one with such loud lip-smacking and anticipatory aaahs only to be dragged into mute horror followed by unbelieving derision followed almost by a grand mal seizure. The evolution of popular song and its silly profound crazy zany gloopy tricksy dumb funny sunny stupid incisive precise drunken gleeful onomatopoeic purplish hip hick and gets on your wick lyrics is a subject very close to my heart, the only thing closer is a couple of major arteries, so I was very keen to read The Grammar of Rock immediately. Although I didn’t get on with the only Alexander Theroux novel I tried (Darconville’s Cat) he was clearly a man of large brain and he picked a great subject to write a 350 page disquisition about.

And it starts off crackingly, with ten helterskelter cultural references per paragraph. Quite quickly, I came across a great quote – it was about a writer, not a musician - after kippering the awful "Give Peace a Chance" as not so much a song as a dreadful nag, he says :


Many novels, of course, never cease to nag. Look at the books of that squarely-built near-dwarf Ayn Rand, a hysterical reactionary who affected a cape and cigarette holders whose didactic speeches went on for entire chapters. I distinctly recall once having helicoptered a copy of Atlas Shrugged clear across a room.

Wow, I thought, fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.

But by page 35 we had drifted into the dreaded reefs of Rampant Nostalgia where the ageing writer imagines that the quiddities of his childhood and the amusing quirks of his childish perception are unusual enough to be worth writing down. In this case he was deluded. Oh the sweet twang that even the memory of the old radio ads of the 50s bring to Theroux’s sodden countenance. After that tedium he launches into a breathtaking bile-strewn pompous, high-handed and ill-advised attack on the entire population of ill-educated America for its poor grammar, mispronunciation and regional dialect, which he has a special loathing for, cranking up some full-bore sneers at Southern hillbillies and most newscasters, young people, and anyone else who isn’t exactly as old as he is and with exactly the same prejudices. So Theroux is just like one of those old bastards, usually retired colonels, who used to write to the newspapers in Britain denouncing the length of young men’s hair and how you can’t tell the girls from the boys any more. The only difference is, Theroux has listened to a lot of pop music.

Given his intolerance of linguistic inexactitude, I trembled to think what he would be making of the lyrics of rock & pop in the following 300 pages. I was right to tremble.

He accepts the hip mangling of such lines as “is you is or is you ain’t my baby” or Chuck Berry singing “working on a T-bone steak a la cartey” . He allows that “Mrs Jones and I” would have been correct, but would not have flavoured the song with the air of “back-street sordidness” which “Me and Mrs Jones” does. Yet still he can’t help spending a couple of pages bashing the solecisms, absurdities, oxymorons and redundancies of many songs – The Chords sing

Life could be a dream
If I could take you up in paradise up above

And Neil Sedaka sings

I’m living right next door to an angel
And she only lives a house away

Yeah, these are, from the prissy English schoolteacher perspective, hopeless, and those fools would have been telling the kids in their classes just that in 1962 whilst turning to page 58 of John Keats’ Collected Spoutings. But that would be to miss the goofy joy and the who-cares-ness that makes early pop worth listening to and celebrating in the first place. (And that should be oxymora, according to spellcheck. Theroux would have nailed me for that one.) Theroux hates modern American slang – innocuous phrases like “sleep in”, “ stressed out”, “fry up” – the last words in each phrase are irritating redundancies, he says – OMG Theroux, take a trank and mellow out, and also, check out the definition of

Phatic speech

Theroux knows a lot of fancy grammatical terms but he don’t appear to know that one – the meaning is :

of, relating to, or being speech used for social or emotive purposes rather than for communicating information

I would say that 60% of all pop and rock lyrics are phatic, they’re there for atmosphere, same as a perfume. They’re something for the singer to sing. I myself accept this 60% and love the 40%. Not Theroux. He’ll have all the doo-woppers in detention after school learning what a gerund is.

Okay so he’s thundering away at lyrical silliness, but then he cranks up his meanness until it borders on racism. It took my breath away. On p 85 we get a vicious phonetic version of Yoko Ono singing one of her own songs, “Kite Song”. Here’s how Theroux transcribes it :

I frew a kite, I hewd in tight wis stling
Each time I go an-where, I hewd on tie
In za midduw ob da nait, I wake up in fwwite
Thinkin maybe in my dleam I let go mai kite

Wow, just wow. How disgraceful is that?

P89:

In the perennial song classic “My Funny Valentine” what on earth do the lines “Is your mouth a little weak/When you open it to speak” mean? Is not that lyric a moon-desperate attempt for a rhyme but in the end one fundamentally far removed from logic?


Well, no, Theroux, it’s not, if you put the thing in context – as surely, surely you know :

Is your figure less than Greek?
Is your mouth a little weak?
When you open it to speak, are you smart?
But don’t change a hair for me
Not if you care for me

Theroux seems to be misunderstanding the lyric to be asking “is your mouth a little weak when you open it to speak” which of course is a nonsense. Lay the lyric out properly, with punctuation, to reveal the lines as rhetorical questions, and it becomes what it always was, very moving. So how are we to take this shit from Theroux? This is irony overload – he’s writing about listening closely and paying attention to lyrics and apparently he is not doing that at all. I give you another example

I like exactitude. Randy Newman in his plaintive song “Louisiana”, an account in a song of a flood in Evangeline, identifies President Coolidge as a “little fat man with a notepad in his hand” p100

Oh dear. Check out the lyrics copied from randynewman.com :

President Coolidge came down in a railroad train
With a little fat man with a note-pad in his hand
The President say, “Little fat man isn’t it a shame
What the river has done to this poor crackers land.


Once again, Theroux is berating sloppy lyric writing for page upon page, actually saying “I like exactitude”, and then mishearing the song he’s quoting. (By the way, the song's actually called "Louisiana 1927"!) The President and the little fat man are two seperate people, Theroux. Listen again. What an idiot. He barks out on p 101

So many bits of obfuscation and inexactitude in popular music irritate and annoy me (his italics)

Well, Theroux, shove off and listen to something else then.

One last example -

P103 :

In the Marvelettes’ hit “Please Mr Postman, a song whose theme is urgency (Deliver the letter/the sooner the better) the refrain – inexplicably – goes “Wait- wait a minute!”

Theroux, seriously ? If you pay even a little tiny bit of attention you will hear that the postman is just about to pass the singer’s house without delivering anything and she’s asking him to wait and check his bag one more time for me.

I just have to stop reading this now, it’s not doing my blood pressure any good at all. I just can’t believe this book will continue to be as frankly shit as this for the next 250 pages, so I will return to it when I feel stronger.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

Artlessness:

In the wake of this review, cataloguing the inexcusable sloppinesses in this otherwise entertaining performance, I have chosen to dock a star. For those who find Theroux in attack mode amusing (none of this is meant to be taken seriously), The Grammar of Rock is pleasurable ramble—the inaccuracies, however, do seem to contradict his intention, whether he was cutting loose or not. Pedants need be mindful of their own petards.

Art:

Pure peevish pleasure. Theroux’s book doesn’t profess to be an authoritative or academic treatise on the pop musics—it doesn’t profess to be anything—but a loose and conversational tirade, a digressive breakless essay, unfurling like one all-night performance at a far-out punk dive. It simulates what “hanging” with Theroux might be like minus the slight stutter and Boston accent. Readers sensitive to his brand of scimitar-sharp satire, and his sometimes undeniably cruel and unnecessary pokes, will not find a friend in this book. Those willing to excuse (or indulge) his virtuoso outpouring of disdain and score-setting (and the emphasis here is on the grammatical boners in pop, not the victories), will find delight in his neurotic nitpickery, his self-confessed obsession over the sloppiness of lyric writers who have ruined many a song for him. Focusing mostly on music from the 40s-60s, Theroux’s book is a whirlpool of literary, cinematic, cultural, historical and philosophical references, astounding in their range and esoterica and hipness (about five mentions of Family Guy—who saw that coming?) Since the book takes this loose form some of the song titles appear to be wrong or misattributed in places, and the book is riddled with missing brackets, inverted commas and dropped Ts due to poor (or no) proofreading from FG. But the breadth of insult, reference and quotation is surprising and entertaining—Theroux is no fustian or anachronist (his professing a love for The Fall now has me signed up as a Theroux completist)—and makes Grammar of Rock a must-read for the eagle-eared audiophile and soggy-hearted misanthrope.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Alexander Theroux’s latest book offering, The Grammar of Rock is the book all of us wanted to write; a book about something we love, music, and why we love it and why it gets under our skin when it’s done so badly. Theroux does in his book what we all do here on goodreads with our books; we write about them, love them, praise them, complain about them, condemn them, mutilate them, misunderstand them, ask more from them than they can give, but mostly we write out of love, disappointment, and fandom. You want authority? You get authority from encyclopedias and university degrees. In this book you get Theroux. More than you can handle.

But why does Theroux get a BOOK and we while our time away on an obscure social networking site? Because what Theroux does he does so well.

What does Theroux do that he does it so well? The first urge is to place an appropriate label on Sir Alex that we might more readily anticipate correctly what the tin contains (sardines or pork-n-beans?). And the temptation is to slap on something like Robert Burton and his massive Melancholy, because therewith ANYthing can be accounted for in the stylistic choices of an essay writing. But we should hesitate just a bit if only because Burton lets in a bit too much, although Burton would be truth-in-labeling. No. More precisely would be to use that unknown etiquette, Lyly’s Euphues the Anatomy of Wit: Euphues & His England, because Theroux is a master of the arts of WIT, that uncanny Learned Wit tradition whose pale shadow is occasionally found among our peers here on goodreads. You will read his essay on Rock and its Lyrics and its Artlessness because Theroux does WIT like no one. No one.

In the end, even Lyly may be insufficient, and we should relax upon the uninformative label, Therouvian Essay. Should you ask for the meaning of “Therouvian Essay,” look to its use: Strange Case of Edward Gorey and Estonia: A Ramble Through the Periphery and his two color books (with at least a manuscript on Black and White waiting in the periphery of his desk drawers) The Primary Colors: Three Essays and The Secondary Colors: Three Essays. Rambling, erudite, informal, structured within its digressiveness, aged, baroque, succinct, smart, aristocratic (no fake-democratic values here!), anti-stupidity, generous, demanding, FUN; Theroux’s books should be treasured for the unique voice which sings from them, not condemned because he refuses to submit to the orthodoxies of either the correct or the stupid.

Sit down with a beer, tea if you must, and open a conversation with Alex. True, we are accustomed to being spoken to and not spoken with when we open a book. I’m tempted to blame this on the Television Culture, something which even the “interactiveness” of the internet has not overcome, a Culture which wants to sell you something. No. A book won’t sell you anything (leave those defensive measures in the cloakroom). With a book one speaks as with someone over a beer (tea) and Alex is that guy that you want to spend hours and hours with, swilling, because here is someone who Knows and who Loves and who won’t settle for “I don’t know wine, but I know what I like.” Let’s talk about wine, let’s talk about those songs and those lyrics; let’s ignore this bs about it’s all subjective and get behind the subject and let’s allow the subject to speak because I too am a subject, one spoken to and one spoken with and, Alex, I don’t know if you should really say it like that but..... And so, I was listening to the radio the other day... . No, not that new fangled satellite abomination radio.... Right. Now, here’s what I heard....






_______________
And because there’s still something WRONG with pop music and its unearned proliferation, here’s some Good Music: Mahler's Fifth, with Daniel Barenboim conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at Köln (we stumbled upon it over the weekend and listened/watched enraptured for its entire length):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URKGI...

[Zadignose]

I'm sorry to say this book is making me a little bit nuts. I put it aside before really getting into the meat of the text... and then immediately picked it up again.

Unfortunately, what is emerging is the strong impression that the author is not merely a pedant, but he is a severely ignorant pedant. While setting himself up to critique language usage, particularly in the context of popular music lyrics, he demonstrates that he doesn't know or understand nearly anything about grammar or linguistics. Or song lyrics. Or culture. Or what people mean when they speak.

The author has apparently had severe cognitive difficulties throughout his life, and may now be entering a phase of dementia. But he blames us all very harshly for routinely speaking a language that he can't understand: English.

Most of his criticisms are not nitpicks. They're just wrong. He doesn't understand the standard usage of words such as "that" (as a relative pronoun in a defining adjective clause) or "shall." He misremembers lyrics, mangles them, forgets their titles and the names of the people who wrote them, and then condemns them based on his own warped vision of what they say and are supposed to mean.

But, to be generous, let me admit that I understand how deeply-analytic thinkers and the philosophically minded can sometimes get so close to questions of language and meaning that the whole thing dissolves before their eyes. It's become a cliche--but true--that if you say a common word like "elbow" repeatedly it will soon seem strange, then entirely alien, and lose all meaning. For Theroux, this has apparently happened to his entire first language. Maybe on some level he realizes that a lifetime of radio-listening is partly to blame, and now he's lashing out.

The gap between fans and anti-fans of this book may be akin to the difference between those who were horrified and those who were entertained by the televised public meltdown of Charlie Sheen a couple of years back. Though, since I admit that did somewhat entertain me... perhaps I'll read on.

-----------------------------------------------
Okay, sorry in advance, but I've been inspired to write a bit of theater.

-------------Scene One-------------

(Hepcat A and Hepcat B are chatting on the corner. Hepcat A is smoking cigarettes and proffering the pack. Theroux looks on quizzically.)

HEPCAT A
"Hey, man, need a smoke?"

HEPCAT B
"Nah, thanks. I'm cool, baby."

THEROUX
"There is no baby here."

(Theroux reaches out and touches Hepcat B's forearm.)

THEROUX
"You're not even marginally cold."

HEPCAT B
"Man, your jokes are lame."

(They examine Theroux's expression)

HEPCAT A
"He's not joking."

HEPCAT B
"That's not possible."

-------------Scene Two-------------

(Joe-One and Joe-Two are chatting. Theroux peers over their shoulders with a critical glint in his eye.)

JOE-ONE
"Where is she?"

THEROUX
"What!? Are you insane? From Cuckooland, or were you was educated in an ebonics school for blacks?"

JOE-ONE
"Huh?"

THEROUX
"Your sentence is a fragment. Worse. It doesn't even have a subject or a predicate! Just the adjective clause 'Where she is.' I can only guess, because of your proto-simian educated manner, but you're probably trying to say 'I know where she is.' Is that what you're saying?"

JOE-ONE
It was a question.

THEROUX
"..."

-------------Scene Three-------------

(Theroux is standing with a megaphone in Times Square, New York City. He wears a sandwich board littered with illegible scribble.)

THEROUX (Shouting)
"Hwe neev standoob!"

PASSERBY-ONE
"What's he saying?"

PASSERBY-TWO
"I think something like 'we need standards.'"

PASSERBY-ONE
"But we have standards."

PASSERBY-TWO
"True. But he's the only one who doesn't recognize them."

(Theroux becomes apoplectic. Somewhere offstage, Jesus weeps.)

CURTAIN.

[M. Sarki · Rating 3 out of 5]

http://msarki.tumblr.com/post/1482414...

What is immediately apparent are the abundant errors present in the text of this garrulous book. The typos and misprints are so numerous I am surprised Alexander Theroux allowed the trade edition to be placed for sale and remain in print. Critical of almost anyone that has had anything to do with a song being sung or a lyric written it seems Theroux would have been a bit more concerned with the accuracy of his own published word. It seems ironic to witness so many errors in a work that attempts to destroy one or more somebodies on every page. He never fails to point out an other’s errors and idiocy, relentless in his attacks on ugly, fat, and untalented speech-impeded celebrities. Theroux could easily be construed as cruel and mean if his attacks weren’t so absolutely absurd and bitingly honest.

Read within this circus season of North American 2016 politics, and the unlikely Republican nomination of an extreme jughead named Donald Trump, it would be wonderful having Alexander Theroux share the same stage with this bombastic businessman and contribute to a debate on say one of Bill Maher’s panels. Maher, no doubt, would gloat in this clownish entertainment and smirk in light of the simpleton’s intellectual prowess. Similarly, The Grammar of Rock confronts head-on the obscene world we live in these days. It is frighteningly real and upsetting. Theroux rather adroitly demonstrates the ineptitude and bad taste absorbing our culture, and offers more than enough examples. Obviously the book’s title fails to expound on what actually will be gnawing away at us between his covers. Theroux bites hard, and often.

The jacket flaps claim the book is about lyrics, grammar, and the history of our songwriters, but for me it is a diatribe against what has become accepted in our country, and emerging around the world, as common speech in our communication with others. Alarmingly funny and digressive, this book is a must-read for those of us who utilize an adequate measure of reason in our lives, or at the least, spiritually want to. However, the errors of our ways are quickly pointed out by Theroux, expanded on, and solutions given as to how to correct this awful disease of the mouth and mind. Theroux is not simply screaming at us as other buffoons on the radio and TV do, and certainly he is not presenting Fox-like News as falsehoods made true that we must adhere our principles to. It is astounding to me how little we really do know as we fervently persist in our struggle to learn all we can. It is humbling to say the least.

Surprisingly, little has been written concerning Theroux’s seemingly hate-filled attacks flung at every sort of character in the public eye, and stereotypical to the degree of absurdity. Of course, there is the typical critical judgment offered that Theroux is a racist or a bigot, which always resembles sour grapes as far as I am concerned. If Theroux managed to attack only black people or gays or people with lisps then I might agree, but Alexander takes no prisoners and equally destroys every type of anomaly in the spoken word and most often includes a disparaging physical description of the subject to boot. Complaints have been raised over fact-checking and the number of errors and untruths discovered in the wordy works of this gifted writer. Not unlike the great performance artist Ray Johnson, whose last act was his own suicide, Theroux supersaturates his volumes of work with more details than possibly could be examined for factual accuracy. Even if his accountings are made-up the mere density of the text proffers extreme feelings of amazement. And he tenders nothing less than hostility and disgust which is what I suppose gives birth and fanciful credence to some claims of racism and bigotry, but in reality his paragraphs are simply personal rancor unhinged and uncensored against the entire human race.

But often Theroux is funny and extremely clever. I doubt any dissenter, besides a foolish Donald Trump, would want to go head-to-head with the man in an argument. Theroux is smart and knows it. And maybe that superiority comes through in his writing? Perhaps there is a bit too much grandiose and admiring countenance for who this writer sees reflected in his mirror. But he is not lazy, and by the sheer numbers of words he employs he insists his readers work as hard as he does. And maybe this book is his version of a cosmic joke and we all fools for thinking his work might be otherwise? I am novice when it comes to reading Alexander Theroux, but I intend to take a good look at most everything he has published. And if I live long enough to accomplish my goal perhaps I will have more to say about this authentic artist. Meanwhile I slog through his long-continuing diatribe and attempt to find a celebrity he may have missed skewering.

[Bill · Rating 1 out of 5]

Why didn't you warn me, Goodreads? I saw this book on Amazon, and I thought "Wow, this combines two of my greatest loves in life: music and examination of the English language, this book is perfect."

But oh how wrong I was. How very, bitterly wrong.

I started reading it on a plane ride, and after about 15-20 pages, I had to put it down. I chalked it up to being tired, I chalked it up to the time change. "I must be the one who's wrong here - this book is supposed to be so good, I must not be in the right mindset to enjoy it right now."

So I tried again, a few days later, in the comfort of my own home. I got through about five pages and decided that folding laundry felt like a better way to pass the time. (In hindsight, I couldn't have been more right)

In the ensuing week or so, I have slogged through 72 pages, and I can slog no longer. This book is the closest thing to unreadable I have ever encountered. To my eyes, this is the written equivalent of your crotchety old know-it-all uncle who sits in his armchair and spews out what he thinks are absolute revelations, but are in fact just platitudes. Yes, lyrics are sometimes redundant. Yes sometimes people try to turn a phrase and fail in an attempt to maintain the rhyming pattern and meter of their songs. If anything, this book made me scoff at every example of his self-proclaimed genius and perception and find very cogent reasons why the lyrics actually make perfect sense. It got to a point where it was just infuriating.

It's not just the banality of the content - it's the way it is presented. There are no chapters, no breaks, nothing to mark a change in idea or theme. Yet somehow that is perfect, because the writing feels like unlinked chain of consciousness writing. "And this one - did you ever notice this? It's so grammatically wrong--get it? I can't believe the lyricist thought this was okay!"

There are more exclamation points in this book than insights.

The writing is poor at best, the ideas are nonexistent, the examples jump decades in a single phrase, and if anyone made it to the end of this book, or let alone gave it a five star rating, I tip my cap to you and pity you in equal measure. I've read a number of awful books in my day, but this may take the cake as the single most un-readable collection of prose I've come across.

[Taylor Harvey · Rating 1 out of 5]

Unbearable. Sort of like if the Misogynist’s library bit from Darconville’s Cat was played straight but was instead a catalogue of pedantry, idiosyncratic prejudice, and Old-Man-Shaking-Fist-at-Cloud-dom. I’m certainly somewhere in the class of yokel hillbillies endlessly lampooned here for minor quirks of my sociolect, so I’m sure any members of Theroux cult will disregard my disgust. The book is trash that edited down ~250 pages or so could make for some amusing polemical blog posts, but as is, muddling through this is exhausting and constantly cringe inducing. Theroux so frequently takes issue with such minor quirks of songwriting that it makes one wonder whether he understands either the poetic mode of language use or the realities of musical performance. The lyrics critiques here are often so blockheaded that it almost make me think the narrator of this book is supposed to be a fictional construction of a pseudo-intellectual hyper-curmudgeon rather than the author himself; I cannot conceive of a real person who could hold any of these convictions.

On another note, has anyone ever bothered to fact check the many anecdotes he peppers into these nonfiction books? I did a bit of digging on some in Einstein’s Beets (which from my sampling is much more enjoyable that this) and could not uncover any sources for several of them. It makes me wonder if many of the juicier but obscure anecdotes listed here and elsewhere in the nonfiction oeuvre are wholesale fictions (EDIT: I now see that others here have graciously already pointed out many of these lies. Thanks!). Wouldn’t be too surprising of an intellectual dishonesty given his history of plagiarism and ironic racism. I guess if you’ve established yourself as an acerbic auteur genius only appreciated by 50 people globally you can forgo the tedium of creating an actual bibliography or citing any of your claims in any way.

Anyway, to end on a positive note: if you are looking a book that is doing what the blurbs of this one claim it is, try Michael Robbins’ Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music. Unlike this book, that one is funny, insightful, well-structured and focuses on music someone under 70 years old might be interested in.

[Kalle Vilenius · Rating 3 out of 5]

In The Grammar of Rock, Theroux has written a book commenting on the lyrics of popular music. Far from an academic study of the poetics in these lyrics (though he does quote from Roland Barthes and William H. Gass occasionally), The Grammar of Rock is one long (no chapter divisions!) ramble, moving from song to song, singer to singer, genre to genre willy-nilly, returning to one whenever a new thought relating to it strikes the writer, making this book a look into the way Alexander Theroux’s mind works, what paths it takes and what gyres it rotates in, rather than a disciplined dissection.

As one would expect from the author, he seems to know everything. He even nods to this fact, humorously, on page 318: “Don’t doubt me. I know almost every song ever written, as Marlon Brando’s mother supposedly did.” This factoid about Brando’s mother is a good representation of the little factoids, the little nuggets of trivia Theroux has sprinkled across the book. Anecdotes well known, such as how Robert Johnson came to (supposedly) sell his soul to the devil, or more interpretive, such as Theroux’s belief that Katharine Lee Bates wrote the lyrics to America the Beautiful to describe her yearning to get married and have children.

But more so than a repository of musical lore, The Grammar of Rock is an exhaustive (but never exhausting!) catalogue of the songs themselves, and of those who made them. There must be more names per page here than anywhere outside of a phonebook. There are songs composed in the days on antiquity to praise God, there are songs recorded in the early 20th century singing primarily about sex in as many innuendos as can be, songs from decade after decade up until the 2010s when the book was finally published, pop idols and metalheads. Few people can claim to listen to music with such variety, and the flood of unfamiliar names and titles can grow overwhelming page after page.

Then there’s the grammar portion. Theroux pays attention to poor, incorrect grammar, and once he gets going in this mode, he takes on the form of a terrible crank, despairing at the decline of the English language and the laziness of those who abuse it. He is an opinionated man, and whether it’s poor grammar or just singers whose voices he doesn’t care for or lyrics that don’t quite add up to coherent communication, Theroux doesn’t hesitate to make his views known. No attempts at objectivity here, just pure, unfiltered expression of one man’s personal tastes, and whether you find your tastes aligning or not might have a strong effect on your enjoyment of the book.

Cranky Theroux is still a very entertaining writer though, and if what you’re looking for is an entertaining read, even in the form of a rant about music and the people who make it, with an occasional digression or two or three, a rant that will move along breathlessly and leaves you smiling page after page, then The Grammar of Rock might be for you. It’s the product of a lifetime of listening and listening intently, filtered through a singular mind, the idiosyncrasies a pleasure and a pain in turn, but thanks to Theroux’s skill with the written word, it somehow avoids being boring. I spent a lovely week-and-a-half reading it while commuting.

[Tob Chuey · Rating 1 out of 5]

One star is at least two too many!
I managed to read a few more pages than some of my predecessors, but I had to put it down at about page 135. It's unbelievable how he rants on for page after page about the likes of Barry Manilow and John Denver – hold on, wasn't the book titled "The Grammar of Rock"? What on earth do Manilow and Denver have to do with Rock music, I wonder?!
Worst buy ever! Spare yourselves the torture!

[David · Rating 1 out of 5]

Don't waste your time.