[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > anyone read jesse saunders book about house music? > > p
> > ***yep. > but unlike the book (Techno Rebels) written by our talented resident 313 book-writer (and a damn fine one at that), dan sicko, saunders' book (House Music: The *"Real"* Story; my ""s added :)) has a *few* (sarcasm in effect here) problems: a) it's extremely biased (his thesis is that *he* was the first person to release a house record and that's about his only point thrust-wise in writing the book) b) he's a horrible writer, and i'm not exaggerating; at times the writing is quite painful. it would be much more readable if an editor had gone over it first, but looks like that didn't happen c) it's not really "book"-y in feel ie he's just running with the "i'm the first person to ever release a house record!!!" theme and it's like a short story that has been s t r e t c h e d out just for the sake of saying it is a *book* (hope this makes sense); it's about 150 pages of big type and can be read in about an hour, to be honest; in short, it might have made a good magazine article series, but it ain't enough to make a book. the biggest beef that those in the house community have had with it is that the last half of the book is simply quotes from others about house music; he used these quotes without proper authorization (imagine if someone on the 313 list was collating our posts and used em to write the last half of his/her book; well, that's sorta what jesse did with the last half of his book, 'cept he was grabbing his quotes from Streetsound's Global House list and the House 2000 list and those posting (thank goodness he didn't grab a quote from me from those lists) never intended their posts to be reprinted verbatim in a book, especially without permission) I'm not saying avoid the book, or, if you have access *don't* read it, it's just that if you give a book written by a top writer like dan sicko a 9 or 10 out of 10, saunders' book would have to get like a 2 or 3 out of 10. comparing a proper book like sicko's (i know you didn't ask for a comparison, but it had to be done) and a "book" like jesse's is like comparing quality detroit techno with that friggin' "blue" song i was ranting about a few weeks back! sicko's book is a *real* book in that research was done, there's footnotes, an index, appendices, etc, ie some serious time and effort went into it and the results show this; saunders' tome looks and reads as if it was put together literally over a long weekend; i don't mean to dis jesse saunders, he was an important contributor back in the day, but i can't really recommend his book (and i got a "promo" copy of it, so it's not like i'm a bitter book buyer about the situation; i actually got the promo copy with intentions of interviewing him about the book, but after reading the book, didn't think the interview would be justified; with sicko, however, the second i started reading Techno Rebels, i knew i wanted to try to do my best to spread the word about the book sicko wrote; thus i *did* interview him for the show, wrote a review of the book, etc whereas i felt calling further attention to the saunders' book would be a big dis-service to a whole bunch of people). enough ranting :) hope this helps. when can we have more microworld music, philip ?!? thanks. andrew duke :) np joy division--closer lp -- Cognition/Andrew Duke's In The Mix mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://techno.ca/cognition 1096 Queen St #123 Halifax NS Canada B3H 2R9
