Rock writers are a grumpy bunch (and often with good reason, but we'll get into that later). They love one-upping each other with obscure preferences and snarling at each other over the most minor differences. And if there's one thing they uniformly hate, it's being perceived as part of the herd, having musical tastes that aren't unique and different and special.

And so we have Kill Your Idols, a collection of iconoclastic essays edited by Chicago rock writer Jim DeRogatis and his wife, Carmel Carrillo. The premise behind Idols is admirable, if a little obvious: DeRogatis recruited thirty-two members of the "new generation of rock writers" to write dissenting opinions about classic rock albums ("classic" in the sense that they're considered "one for the ages," as opposed to "KQRS will make your morning jam out with lots of classic rock," although it turns out that there is significant overlap). DeRogatis opens the show with a salvo aimed at Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band; from there, his crew turns their guns on The Best of the Doors, Tommy, Pet Sounds, Trout Mask Replica, Exile on Main Street, Nevermind, Rumours, OK Computer, and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, among others.

The resulting essays, as one would expect, are mixed. Several are quite good:
DeRogatis is generally an incisive, witty writer, and his Pepper hatchet job is true to form. Jeff Nordstedt's Pet Sounds essay points out an incongruity that I'd somehow always missed: virtually every track on the album joins wrist-slittingly depressing lyrics with exuberant lyrics (although, being duly embarrassed about never picking up on that, my next thought is: so? If humans can be emotionally complex and self-contradictory, why can't our songs?). Minneapolis golden boy Jim Walsh turns in what alleges to be a dissection of Rumours but actually turns into an ode to the pains of music writing, woven inside a plan to assassinate Fleetwood Mac.

Sadly, there are more misses than hits. Chrissie Dickinson builds her case against Gram Parsons around three factors: he had a trust fund, she doesn't like his voice, and he's not Merle Haggard. Allison Augustyn's essay on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot reads like a particularly self-indulgent Pitchfork review by way of Rush Limbaugh, railing against political correctness and an annoying woman she saw at a rock club before deigning to actually discuss the album (and then devoting most of her space to insulting those who like it). And Dickinson's and Augustyn's essays are at least readable; David Sprague's takedown of Born to Run got so bogged down in masturbatory prose that, by the time I quit, all I really came away with is that he thinks he's quite the prose stylist.

I could go on with this, praising and panning individual reviews, but, frankly, would would be the point? There's a whole Internet out there full of exactly this type of review (Amazon alone has a couple of hours' worth), and, within broad parameters, it's all subjective anyway. Do we really need my subjective reviews of a bunch of subjective reviews (and guess what, pal- as you read this, you are almost certainly forming your own subjective opinion of my reviews of reviews)? It just gets further and further away from reality, a sort of metacritical version of the old “turtles all the way down.”

And there, indirectly, is one of the ugly truths of the whole endeavor of rock criticism: it's all subjective. The old "dancing about architecture" cliché may get trotted out a lot, but that's because it expresses a fundamental fact: music writers are engaged in the highly dubious process of using one art form to discuss another, unrelated form. Worse off, written criticism is an extremely analytical form; rock music generally works on more of a gut level that resists, or even falls apart under, serious analysis (with the exception of acts like Captain Beefheart, who, of course, gets taken down in Idols).

This isn't to say that there's no point in thinking about rock music; there's a lot of benefit in devoting some energy to figuring out why you like what you like. But in an emotion-driven form like rock, any aesthetic standards that you come up with are going to apply to you, and you only. I think Nirvana are a bunch of overrated thrashers. But I can't claim that there's any set of objective standards by which Nirvana can be proven to be a bunch of overrated thrashers; it's all taste. The same goes for you if you're going to try to tell me that the Flaming Lips are a bunch of freaky strokers.

Taking this back a step, I'm saying that it can be fine, fun, and maybe even somewhat productive to talk about rock. But given how many levels of uncertainty and subjectivity are involved, it's pointless to take it even remotely seriously. Unless you're in a band talking with your like-minded band members about what you want to do with one of your songs, rock talk is an exercise in mental masturbation— it's a lot of fun, there's nothing wrong with it, and you really need to chill the fuck out if you're taking it all that seriously.

And there's the real problem with Kill Your Idols: the vast majority of the writers take the whole enterprise far too seriously. Criticism without passion is pointless; but, unfortunately, in working up a good head of passion, too many of the writers managed to convince themselves that they were bringing a couple of tablets bearing the Rules of Rock down from Mt. Sinai. And any rocker worthy of the name would kick you in the nuts if he saw you carrying the Rules of Rock.

So here's my solution: next time you feel the need to talk about the greatest albums of all time, and which ones are overrated, do it with humility and constant mindfulness of the fact that you're just one person whose gut reacts to music in a given way.

For best results, just have the discussion with friends. Over beers if at all possible.