The Rise and Fall of the Rock Stars

I just read “Uncommon People: The Rise and Fall of the Rock Stars,” a book from 2017 by music journalist David Hepworth. It was excellent. Over the years I’ve read quite a few of these year-by-year episodic histories of pop music—the appeal is some mix of the familiar and the unfamiliar, new stories and new takes on old stories. This one was better than most, in part because it had a consistent theme. Here are the very first words of the book:

The age of the rock star, like the age of the cowboy, has passed. The idea of the rock star, like the idea of the cowboy, lives on. There are still people who dress like rock stars and do their best to act as they think rock starts would have acted in an earlier time, much as there are people who strap on replica holsters and reenact the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. It’s increasingly difficult to act like one or the other and keep a straight face.

The true rock stars rose and fell with the fortunes of the postwar record industry. . . .

Beyond its theme, content, and stories, I also enjoyed the book’s crisp style, which reminded me of something . . . it took me awhile to identify . . . it was the style of the historian A. J. P. Taylor, author of The Origins of the Second World War, an absolutely wonderful book which I was disappointed to learn is actually wrong—at least that’s what international relations expert Robert Jervis told me. It’s hard to describe the style that I’m talking about, it’s some mixture of abruptness and generalization. Hepworth, like Taylor, has a way of making a flat statement followed by a stunning juxtaposition. At this point I should really supply some examples. But it’s hard to flip through and find anything. In any case, I highly recommend both books.