Joe Carducci's Rock and the Pop Narcotic

WHEN Rock And The Pop Narcotic was first published in 1990, it incited a fair bit of controversy, startling many by the sheer aggression with which Joe Carducci lambasted America's rock-critical establishment and lashed its sacred cows. The book's vitriolic tone stemmed from the persecution complex the author acquired at the helm of SST, the hard-core record label founded by Black Flag that made bands like the Minutemen, the Meat Puppets, Hüsker Dü, and Sonic Youth underground legends but failed to win them commercial success. Completed well before Seattle grunge took the punk-metal esthetic into the mainstream, Rock and the Pop Narcotic was an attempt to write '80s underground rock into history. Now Carducci has published a revised edition of his magnum (and I mean whopping) opus, and, post-Nirvana, it has a different tone – a tweak toward told-you-so triumphalism. But the book remains vastly contentious.