Bang Your Head: The Rise and Fall of Heavy Metal by David Konow
Books like this tend to be a bit difficult to review.
Very generally, the style of writing is excellent. There's a lot of time overlapping going on in the book and Konow does a great job of keeping it pretty straight. For the most part, chapters are divided into sections and each section covers a specific band.
This seems to be the best way to cover a history of a genre...covering specific bands somewhat chronologically. I personally find this to be problematic only when too much time is given to a band I don't care about. For example, Led Zeppelin is important to cover when discussing metal but I'm not really convinced they need more than a few pages. Sabbath, of course...Kiss, definitely...all of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal bands need coverage....Alice Cooper is obvious as well...but Zeppelin, to me, doesn't seem as influential and I don't feel they need much coverage. The same goes for Aerosmith. Aerosmith is important in the history of rock, but when talking metal...bands like Iron Maiden, it seems were an alternative to Aerosmith.
Bands covered at length include Sabbath/Ozzy, Kiss, Metallica, AC/Dc, Van Halen, Guns N Roses, Bon Jovi, Yngvie Malmsteem, Poison, Exodus, Megadeth....it goes on.
This leads to another fairly large problem with the book...heavy metal is not just one style. Slayer and Poison may both fall into the broad category of "metal" but they couldn't be more different. The fact that so much has been covered in under 400 pages tells you that while you'll get a bit of everything, you're definitely going to miss out on a lot.
For example, Slayer is talked about but really not a whole lot...around five solid pages, while Kiss has easily over thirty pages. I suppose Kiss is important because they opened a lot of doors, but Slayer is arguably more influential in modern metal than Kiss.
Black Flag is mentioned briefly...let me say this, Black Flag is far more important in the broad history of metal than Poison. Poison had pop radio hits and they made metal a joke in the 80s...Black Flag toured relentlessly and played towns in the middle of nowhere that no one before them had even come close to. They broke down walls and paved the way for many small bands in the US.
Of course, with all this complaining you'd think I don't like this book, in fact I do. It's put together well and though I disagree with some emphasis placed on various bands that doesn't mean the author is wrong. I think Black Flag needed coverage, he thought glam needed to be discussed...I think if you're going to talk about glam you have to give The New York Dolls significant press, he gave them a paragraph...I feel stoner rock is important to discuss when talking about metal, there is no mention of this at all. There is limited space, so he had to make cuts, it's necessary and it's certainly forgiveable.
There's quite a few history of heavy metal books and I have yet to read one that's ideal...each miss out on important points however each contain a lot of good information. If you want a solid history of the early days of metal, this is the place to go. If you don't want to read a book about Kiss or Black Sabbath or Metallica specifically, then this will give you a good overview. If you want to dig deeper, you certainly can.
The bottom line is this is a good book to get a solid overview...you can read this, find out what's interesting, and then pursue what strikes you further.
I learned a lot about bands I'm not a fan of but recognize as being important and I picked up some interesting info on bands I am a fan of.
