Music Books

The Rock Snob's Dictionary: An Essential Lexicon of Rockological Knowledge

by David Kamp and Steven Daly

Broadway Books, 151 pp., $12.95 (paper)

Living in Austin, we've all been there. You're enjoying a latte at Little City, or would be if not for the god-awful noise issuing from the speakers. Daring to ask the barista its provenance, you get a 10-minute lecture on why the Fugs' failure to become household names is one of the central travesties of rock history. Or maybe you don't understand why Chronicle writers use strange words like "plangent," "seminal," and "coruscating" in their reviews. If either sounds at all familiar, The Rock Snob's Dictionary is your salvation. Though rock snobs, defined as "pop connoisseurs for whom the actual enjoyment of music is but a side dish to the accumulation of arcane knowledge about it," are an insufferable, humorless lot, self-admitted snobs David Kamp and Steven Daly's sharp-witted tome is neither. Both snarky and scholarly, it translates snobspeak like "E-bow" and "No Wave" into plain English, contains fun lists like "The Rock Snob Hall of Shame," and outlines the achievements of Snob figureheads from Steve Albini to the Stanley Brothers. An invaluable resource for the next time that guy at Emo's starts nattering on about Nick Drake or the Last Poets, though a good smack upside the head works just as well.