Critical Sass

The Rock Snob's Dictionary
By David Camp and Steven Daly

Broadway Books, $13

For several years now, the highlight of Vanity Fair’s annual music issue has been David Kamp and Steven Daly’s “Rock Snob’s Dictionary,” a cheeky yet practical nerd-to-English glossary for non-initiates (i.e., people who have lives) to “Drake, Nick,” “vocoder,” “Soft Machine, The” and other terms bandied about by that deranged subspecies of pop geek for whom, as Kamp and Daly put it, “the actual enjoyment of music is but a side dish for the accumulation of arcane knowledge.”

Now expanded to book length, the Dictionary at first glance appears to be a Hipster Handbook–style novelty item, but beneath the jokey definitions—a Marshall stack is a “monstrous amplification system designed to … make up for musicians’ penile shortcomings”—lurks a useful historical crib sheet and witty work of cultural criticism that skewers sacred cows (Lester Bangs, Scott Walker) and other hoary rock-crit pretensions. (Particularly welcome is Kamp and Daly’s ridiculing of music-press clichés such as “rewards repeated listens,” “sun-drenched harmonies” and “coruscating.”)

Indeed, the Dictionary is nothing if not critic-proof; anyone who’d dare complain, for instance, about the omission of cellist/disco demigod Arthur Russell or longbeard avant-jazz composer Moondog would instantly reveal himself as a Rock Snob of the first order. Better just to say: Rewards repeated readings.