READING IS FUCKINMENTAL / Jason Matthew Smith

NEW AND NOTEWORTHY

New tomes concerning the Spice Girls, indie band survival techniques, and cool.

The Indie Band Survival Guide: The Complete Manual for the Do-It-Yourself Musician, by Randy Cherktow and Jason Feehan (St. Martin’s Griffin) 

Someday I’ll write a guide. It will be called, The Fuck Up’s Guide to Life: The Complete Manual for Underachievers, or How to Get Paid Spewing Bitterness and Invective on The Internet. Until that day, my fellow slack asses, you must content yourself with the Cherktow and Feehan manual—just the ticket your piss-poor band has been waiting for. Read up, learn how to market yourselves, build a cult following, stumble into obscurity, toss your musical hopes and dreams into the dust bin, and become an orderly at a retirement community earning minimum wage. How’s that for a career arc? Seriously, though, if you’re serious about making it in the music biz, and if you have a modicum of talent to pull it off, you might want to get a hold of this book. Useful as hell.

Clawing at the Limits of Cool: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and the Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever, by Farah Jasmine Griffin and Salim Washington (Thomas Dunne Books)

You like jazz? Yeah, me neither. But you gotta appreciate its role in American history and literature. Without it, we wouldn’t have Jack Kerouac and the dope-addled Beat movement of the 1950s and ’60s. And without that, well, we’d all still be reading Jane Austen and Evelyn Waugh with our thumbs up our collective asses. So any history of Jazz greats is at least worth a nod of respect. Plus it’s bound to have some great heroine-related tales, since Miles Davis injected enough junk to bring down a water buffalo. 

Spice Girls Revisited, by David Sinclair (Music Sales, 2^nd edition) 

WTF? This book required a second edition? Who are the assholes who bought all of the first editions? I lose faith in humanity a little more each day.

Jason Matthew Smith is a Texan who never developed an accent, thanks to a steady diet of television reruns during his formative years. He now lives in Utah, where everyone thinks he sounds just like John Astin, the original Gomez Addams.