Doomboy by Tony Sandoval
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
The art is great, the primary story arc is okay, but the whole thing feels like an outline rather than a complete story.
There’s also this thing that happens in books that talk about music or food or something that we, as readers, can’t really experience through the media of text and pictures. It’s why it’s so hard to review music. How do you write sound? And how do you write sound such that I HEAR what’s going on?
I wonder what the utility of a rock critic is anymore. Like in Rolling Stone. I mean, it’s easier for me to jump on YouTube and hear a song than it is for me to read someone’s opinion on it, and that listening experience is probably going to be a lot better than reading about the listening experience. I still sort of get it with movies. A movie review takes 2 minutes to read and could save me two hours. But a review of a song, it’s not saving me a lot of time, and it just seems like a weak way to get across the info I need, which is what something sounds like.
Part of me wonders if this is why we’re so obsessed with the personal life of musicians and the like. What else are rock critics going to write about? They know damn well we don’t need their words about the songs themselves, so it helps a lot more to write about who is dating who, what happened with what. How is it that I know Kanye West’s baby names and who he’s married to and I have no idea what his last…I don’t even know how many singles, sound like?
My personal theory, it’s something people can write about. Critique.
In 1990, it made all the sense in the world for a rock critic to review a new Weezer album. Is this a bunch of bullshit? Why is this only 43 minutes long? Is the sound like Pinkerton? Blue album?
These were things I wouldn’t know without going to the record store and hoping they had the record in one of their listening stations, which was also a risk because you had to don headphones worn by the other fellow scumbags who didn’t want to just buy an album.
In 1990, we were talking $20, and when you bought a new album, you may have heard 2 of the songs on the radio, if you were lucky. Someone had to at least try to help us.
But in 2016, it takes less time to look up a couple songs online and then make a purchase informed by the ultimate decider, personal taste.
Anyway, Doomboy. A book that hinges quite a bit on the sound of doom metal, and a book that has a lot to do with being awesome on the guitar, but I just can’t “hear” it. And in a book where the sonic qualities are so important to the arc, the reading experience is a little flat.