6.22.2015

Jessica Hopper - 'The First Collection of Criticism By A Living Female Rock Critic'

There's been oodles of praise for this book. And not without reason. Hopper is a tremendous writer with a true voice of her own. She has an incredible ability to make connections between various artists that I would never associate with each other. She actually made me care about reading reviews of Pearl Jam and Lana Del Rey and Miley Cyrus and Van Morrison. The collection is short, sweet, and rightfully gives her interview with Jim DeRo re: R.Kelley a needed print copy for posterity. The gilded edges of the pages are a bonus snazzy touch.

There's no reason to review the book because everyone else has already harped so much praise about it. So why does this feel like this is me leading up to writing something negative? Because it is...

What no one has seemed to mention about this book is the severity of typos that made it past both of the book's editors. I bought this book at the Empty Bottle a few weeks back. It says it's a first edition. This isn't a galleys or advanced review copy or anything like that. It's a book that was sold to me, by Tim Kinsella (one of the editors in fact, and who I was too nervous to say anything to that night about his own work) and this similar copy was probably sold to a bunch of other fans that night, or on the various nights of Hopper's extended book tour.

I'm not a huge stickler for these types of things generally. But there was enough in this book where I had to take notice. Repeated lack of album title italicization (reviews on Animal Collective* / No Age**). This piece on Tyler, the Creator dated as April 2005 instead of 2013 when it was published (this error is both on the table of contents and the article itself). The word "launched" repeated on page 160***. A quotation mark facing the wrong way on 187.

As a fan of Hopper, Kinsella, and Featherproof, I was sort of bummed that this was enough to detract from the content of the work; mostly because it happens once, twice, three times, and then I'm waiting for it to happen four, five, sixcetera times. But I hope all of the aforementioned take my nit-picking only semi-seriously (I won't even touch the inconsistency of Oxford comma usage), and appreciate the sentiment of one of my favorite Propagandhi  songs as much as I do. "I'll call you on your shit / please call me on mine / Then we can grow together / and make this shit-hole planet better / in time.

*Interestingly, the Reader's archive of the post doesn't have any of the album titles italicized.
**This whole piece is re-edited from how it originally appeared in LA Weekly. Is this common for books that are compiling already published work? Genuinely curious.
***This typo is not in the original piece.

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