Rock Gods: The Greatest Showmen and Most Influential Songwriters of the Rock Era

In this tired debut, music journalist McCabe lionizes “larger-than-life” rock music titans from 1955 to the present. Each chapter covers a star’s early life, career, and contributions, beginning with Elvis Presley, whose controversial musical style and “slow-burning sexuality” spurred a younger generation to “break free of the sexual mores of their parents and kick against the racial inequalities which split American society.” Later chapters highlight such stars as Red Hot Chili Peppers’s Anthony Kiedis, whose struggles with drug addiction illustrate the contradictions of a rock lifestyle in which “creative brilliance” and self-destruction are often inseparable. Despite some enjoyably colorful anecdotes (including Iggy Pop vomiting on his audience during a 1970 concert), there’s not much in the way of a thesis tying these mini-bios together, and few new insights into the well-known group of men emerge. Even the more intriguing questions raised in the book’s introduction—“what does it mean to be a rock god in a world where the cultural geography is unrecognisable from the era in which the art form was born?”—feel rhetorical and go mostly unaddressed. The result is a superfluous collection of tributes to stars who’ve already received their laurels. Photos. (Nov.)