Leslie Simon's Wish You Were Here is a snarky, amusing, and entertaining book about various genres and scenes and the locales that spawned them. Every city gets a bit of a history, some notable locations/albums/bands, as well as "scene types" courtesy of YourSceneSucks' Rob Dobi. Cities and scenes mentioned are Omaha and the Saddle Creek thing, Chicago and pop-punk, as well as Lawrence and the emo-pop movement of the late '90s.
Now, while it's cool as all hell to have Lawrence included in a list of influential scenes alongside D.C. straight-edge, there are a few inaccuracies that make me question the rest of the book's veracity. Case in point: while Simon drops mention of bands like the Vitreous Humor, the entry on Love Garden makes mention of the fact that it is
"co-owned and operated by Kory Willis, his wife Katie Conrad, and Kelly Corcoran (husband of local All Things Considered host Laura Lorson, for all you NPR lovers out there)."
How the hell can you mention that Corcoran and Lorson are spouses, but not know that Willis and Conrad sold their shares of the business to them? Confusing. The whole book is amusing as hell, but it seems like many of the details were pulled off Google. The "scene types" are just reiterations or variations on what Dobi's been doing on his website for years, as well.
This book could come in handy, but not as what it's intended. It's not detailed enough to be a travel guide to any city mentioned, nor does any of the info on the venues within those cities mention anything more than what you could find on their website. However, the scene documentation, and the bands and albums mentioned do a fantastic job of presenting an excellent, short-form primer on the various genres discussed. If you want to delve into Long Island hardcore, there's something like 20-30 bands name-checked, and a healthy breadth of obscure albums mentioned.
Wish You Were Here is worth grabbing for the musical knowledge contained within, but if you're going to make a mecca to somewhere mentioned in the book, you might want to dig a little deeper. There are travel books out there that cater to every subgroup, and I'm sure you'll find something that goes a little further than this.
You can browse the book at Harper Collins' website.
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My wife liked it, which is funny, because she usually detests hyper-aware hipster prose.
Alas. Oh, alas. I was excited when this book first came out, with its chapter on Lawrence standing alongside similar chapters about DC, Seattle, et al. Then I read some of it. I couldn't stomach the prose. Simon knows her music, but I can't for the life of me figure out why the chapter on Lawrence's music history is interrupted in the middle with a section on dating. Right after a discussion of The New Amsterdams' Worse for the Wear record, suddenly there's a heading that reads "On Bended Knee" and contains the following opening paragraph, which is so bad that I am going to type it verbatim for you even though I have lots of other things I could be doing.
"Chock it up to wide-eyed optimism or good ol' traditional Midwestern values, but it seems as if everyone in Kansas decides to get married the day after they graduate high school. Though whether said scenesters stay married is a whole other topic altogether. According to DivorceRate.org, almost 40 percent of all marriages end in divorce, with the highest rate of dissolution happening when the couple is under the age of twenty. Thems some shitty odds, huh? So why bother getting married? Here are a couple of ideas..."
I'm not kidding. It says that, logic and grammar mistakes included. (So everyone in KS who graduates high school is by your definition a "scenester?") And right in the middle of a music book.
Even shittier: Simon calls KC her "least fave" city in a blog post. http://www.leslie-simon.com/au...
"Thanks to my new fave airline Virgin America, I�m currently cruising over my least fave city (Kansas City, MO) at 35,000 feet while surfing the interweb. No, it�s true. I�m using the internet from space! Okay, I�m not exactly in space, but I�m super-high in the sky and that�s close enough for me."
Leslie: 35,000 feet is too close for us.
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