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  • Published: 1 September 2010
  • ISBN: 9781407013374
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 240
Categories:

Rock On

How I Tried to Stop Caring about Music and Learn to Love Corporate Rock



A memoir of comic genius about working for one of the great music labels: Spinal Tap meets The Office.

How would you like a six-figure marketing job at the hallowed record label that signed everyone who counts in the last fifty years of pop music? Before you answer, we'll throw in a plush office, a hip assistant and a bottomless expense account?

Dan Kennedy thinks all of his dreams have come true at once. In reality, he's just walked into a nightmarish episode of The Office. From his first assigment - creating a campaign celebrating 25 years of Phil Collins' love songs - he knows he's in way over his head, and from the looks of others around the boardroom, he's not alone.

With cameos by ageing rock stars, dinosaur music-biz kingpins, hip-hop thugs and Iggy Pop, Rock On is an achingly funny tale of rock and roll, office life, and what happens when the suits take control.

  • Published: 1 September 2010
  • ISBN: 9781407013374
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 240
Categories:

About the author

Dan Kennedy

Dan Kennedy is a regular contributor to McSweeney's and his work has appeared in The Best of McSweeney's Humor Category, Mountain Man Dance Moves: The McSweeney's Book of Lists, GQ magazine and other publications. He lives in New York.

Also by Dan Kennedy

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Praise for Rock On

...pitch-perfect... a brilliant, hysterical and insightful look at what happens when truly creative people try to blend into a Banana Republicized mediocracy. The author makes it clear, in laugh-out-loud fashion, that the lid was shut on the coffin of music business dreams some time ago, we've just delayed the burial

New York Post

'[A] droll, downbeat account of life in the belly of the corporate rockbeast... His narrative is a fractured mix of cameo scenes from the day job, the surreal daydreams that sprout from it, and satirical doodles... [a] high-spirited obituary for the record business

Sunday Times

Imagine a love child born of The Office and High Fidelity. With Knocked Up as the slacker godfather. That captures Dan Kennedy's memoir Rock On: An Office Power Ballad, his amazingly funny yet perceptive look at rock music and big corporations in crisis

USA Today

Rock On is a succession of gently mordant vignettes, with hilariously spot-on asides about media image-making, music-biz hierarchies and sensitive singer-songwriters. Neither Kennedy nor the music business will ever be the same

New York Times

A droll antidote to the standard music-biz memoir

Robert Sandall, Sunday Times

Blessed with an eye for detail and a shrewd sense of comic timing, Kennedy plays with his internal narrative against the grain of his subject matter with consistently entertaiing results. You trust for his own well-being that he doesn't bump into some of the ex-colleagues he describes in such hilariously unflattering detail too soon

Guardian

If he weren't so self-deprecating, Kennedy might come off as a jerk. But he's just as hard on himself and, besides, he's funny. Super funny

Los Angeles Times