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I've remarked in the past that just as there are coffee-table books -- typically large-format, colorful, photo-intensive volumes designed to provide a largely text-free browsing experience -- there are "toilet-tank" books. Their low-rent appellation notwithstanding, the best toilet tank books are first-class time-killers -- books you can open to any page and just start reading, offering lightweight entertainment for sixty seconds, five minutes or half an hour. Unless you are a very pretentious person, you probably have a few of these books in your own bathroom -- their covers well-worn, their pages bloated from years of exposure to humidity and condensation.
Mouthing Off is a shameless toilet tank book. I'm sure John Luerssen would agree with me, too. This is not a philosophical work. It's certainly not a think-piece (which is a good thing. If you ever run into someone who routinely labels his/her own writing as "think-pieces", rest assured that this person also occasionally locks him/herself in the bathroom for a quick "think".). It's 162 pages of the collected wit and wisdom of your favorite rock stars, culled from twenty-odd years of published interviews. In this single, slim volume, you can find out what Billy Corgan thinks of fame (it's fleeting), what Björk thinks about sex (apparently she quite likes it, particularly in airplane bathrooms) and what Rivers Cuomo has to say about Napster (he seems to be in favor of it, so it's a shame it's gone). There are hundreds of quotes here, on dozens of topics. Some are profound, many more are thoroughly fatuous, and a few may inspire spontaneous trips to your local used-CD store to drop off newly-unwanted albums.
Opening the book at random reveals an eclectic mix of artists. For instance, the section titled "My Philosophy" includes quips from Mick Jagger, Rob Zombie, Stephen Malkmus, J. Robbins, Natalie Merchant and Ozzy Osbourne. Ozzy, of course, is a fount of wisdom:
"You gotta be really careful what you bite off. Don't bite off more than you can chew. It's a dangerous world."
Isn't Ozzy funny? What a national treasure.
Thom Yorke admits that he loves getting high, that making rock music is easy, and that he finds sex to be rather distasteful. Bob Pollard and Al Jourgensen cop to being adolescents trapped in middle-aged bodies. Mick Jagger admits he's in it for the money. Michael Stipe addresses the fact that being famous can make you an egotistical dick. Half a dozen guys whose careers were launched by MTV express their heartfelt disdain for the music network. In other words...unless you've been living under a rock, Mouthing Off will offer few true revelations. Did you know that Fred Durst is boorish? Robyn Hitchcock is clever? That guy from Third Eye Blind is a bit of a twat? Yup, it's all true.
While certain names appear again and again, the book's scope is admirable. Where else will you see related quotes from Ian MacKaye, Uncle Kracker, Axl Rose, Peter Buck, Brian Wilson and Hot Water Music's Jason Black in the same two-page spread? A few of the well-named sections are particularly interesting: "On the Couch" corrals dead-on self-assessments and arrogant boasts; "Punker Than Thou" offers an intriguing mix of old and new names, sounding off on the DIY aesthetic and more; "Sexism Meets Feminism" pits Courtney Love, Kathleen Hanna et al against Eminem, Gene Simmons and other swaggering would-be rapists; and "Torch Bearing and File Sharing" presents a handful of slightly-outdated opinions from both sides of the MP3/Napster fence. There's also a rather questionable section on September 11th; Moby, Madonna and Dave Matthews are as entitled to their opinions as anyone else, but they're scarcely authorities, and their comments seem unnecessary.
Of course, you can't expect hardcore philosophy from Mouthing Off; it's essentially a Readers Digest version of a bunch of articles that weren't hard-hitting to begin with. You'll open the book to a random page, laugh a little, sneer once or twice, and perhaps raise an eyebrow...and then you'll finish your business and put the book aside 'til next time. It's a book you can read over and over, perhaps without even realizing you've read it before. It's pure fluffy goodness.
Indeed, it's so fluffy that some readers may be tempted to sneer at Luerssen's efforts; I even saw a few reviews (on a well-known online retailer's site) questioning the need for his author credit. But if you think assembling a book like this is easy, I encourage you to try it. The average band interview may contain one, perhaps two interesting and/or pertinent quotes. Luerssen must have had to read hundreds, if not thousands of interviews in order to assemble the quotes in Mouthing Off, after which he had to group them by subject, and then whittle his collection down to the best, pithiest soundbites. Perhaps it was easier than writing a 175 page book from scratch...but I'd far rather churn out 175 pages than attempt to organize something like this. Yes, it's an idea anyone could've thought of -- anyone with a basement full of old music magazines, anyway -- and as such, it'll probably inspire a lot of sour grapes and a handful of imitators. And if you're one of the people who claim to have had exactly the same idea, perhaps you'll get off your ass next time.
It's a shame, though, that nobody took the time to properly proofread the acknowledgements and back cover quotes, spoiling an otherwise uniformly positive impression.
One final, rather gratuitous point: the sources for Mouthing Off included glossy magazines, newspapers, trade papers and a few zines, but most independent online magazines were conspicuously absent (perhaps Luerssen is saving them for Volume Two). I wasn't surprised by this, but I was a little bummed, as I'd secretly hoped to find a quote from one of my own articles. And then, while reading the book in the smallest room of the house, I stumbled across a quote from KMFDM's Sascha Konietzko, pulled from the first magazine article I ever wrote -- in 1990, for a long-defunct freebie called New Route. It's right smack in the middle of page 135. Meaningless to you, I know -- but it made my day, so I thought I'd toot my horn a bit.
-- George Zahora
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