Music critic Michael Azerrad reviewed by Dan Kennedy's ROCK ON in last weekend's New York Times Book Review. Here's a sample of the rave review

The music industry’s decline has been swift, merciless and bloody; perhaps it’s best to broach such a dire story by laughing. A memoir of Dan Kennedy’s 18-month stint in the music business, “Rock On” is a succession of gently mordant vignettes, with hilariously spot-on asides about media image-making, music-biz hierarchies and sensitive singer-songwriters. It’s also a coming-of-age story.

Kennedy, a contributor to McSweeney’s....attends a meeting about Jewel’s song “Intuition,” which she has licensed to a line of women’s razors, also called Intuition. “Anyone in the room who knows the irony of a song about not selling out being used to sell razors,” Kennedy writes, “displays a perfect professional poker face. I, on the other hand, am most likely doing the thing where I stifle disbelief and then start getting paranoid that I totally don’t understand what’s going on and that it’s showing on my face, and then I get paranoid that you can get cancer this way.”

Kennedy doesn’t expound on the music industry’s decline; instead, he simply lays out reams of damning evidence. The time frame is circa 2003, when illegal file sharing was starting to dent the bottom line; fatally, the industry played down the Internet. As he notes, “anyone above middle management has to yell to their assistants for help with something as technical as, say, an e-mail attachment.”

Or maybe the industry has lost touch with its product. Rock ’n’ roll is “sadly missing in this newly merged, trimmed, refinanced, restructured, freshly scrubbed, wide-eyed, suited and tied record company.” In a bravura passage, Kennedy finds real rock at a concert featuring Iggy Pop, who climbs a wall and harasses the flabby grandees in the V.I.P. section. By contrast, in one of the many McSweeney’s-esque lists that punctuate the book, “Rock On” offers choreography advice to singers in aspiring bands: “Moves should be odd combination of sexual advances and a temper tantrum, punctuated with moments of apparent hypoglycemia.”

Eventually, investors buy Atlantic’s parent company, the Warner Music Group, and lay off hundreds of employees, including Kennedy. About a year later, he spots his childhood hero, the once flamboyant Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, in conservative suit and tie, leaving the New York Stock Exchange after attending Warner Music’s public sell-off. Neither Kennedy nor the music business will ever be the same.

Buy ROCK ON here........