All Music Guide to Rock (Amg All Media Guide) [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

This is dead right (well, except my previous edition was dated 1997 and not 1995 but let's not quibble!). In this new edition the write-ups for each group have been cut right down and are far, far shorter than in the previous edition. Also some of the breathtaking excellent essays have been dropped. For example compare the entries for Nirvana: 20 column inches in 1997 have been reduced to less than three column inches!

Fortunately the All Music website provides access to most of this missing data but I would really like to have it in book form.

Yes, this is still the best rock reference around but sadly it is not as good as it used to be. It is drifting worryingly towards the format of the MusicHound book on Rock (which, if you don't know it, is another rock reference guide).

I guess the best way to fill the hole which is now appearing in the All Music book is to get the Rough Guide to Rock. The Rough Guide was always a bit idiosyncratic as a lot of its entries were written by fans of the groups involved (but they were not always sickeningly sweet in their statements!) but the Rough Guide always gave a far more immediate sense of the passions and emotions of what the band was all about, whereas the All Music guide confined its remarks to the strictly factual and it always seemed to write as if the All Music guide was thinking about the band's lawyers suing it!

Just to complete the comparison of the All Music guide to other similar volumes, there is the Virgin Encyclopedia of Popular Music. Despite its high price the Virgin book really doesn't stand up to any of the guides I have mentioned. It is not worth considering.

So buy this All Music guide. It still is the best. But the best just got worse. Maybe buy the former edition (1997, second edition) instead to make sure you get all the band info. In fact, I could see a case for buying the former edition in preference to this latest edition if your real interest is not on album reviews but on background to bands!

The book cover albums issued before or no later than October 2001, so you will find reviews on albums such as Dylan's "Love & Theft" and Collective Soul's "7even Year Itch", but you won't find, say, Radiohead's "I Might Be Wrong--Live Recordings" or Natalie Merchant's "Motherland". Of course, as the editors note, this book is culled from the vastly more expansive on line version of All Music Guide, which obviously is also updated more frequently. The book has some curious omissions (what, no listing for Creed?) and out-of-proportion reviews (3+ pages on The Fall, about the same as for the Beatles!).

In the end, those are minor quibbles. While the on line version is more complete and up to date, I also want to have something I can physically leaf through (same reason why there are still actual newspapers, I guess). Let's just hope that it won't take another 5 years before the 4th Edition sees the day of light! Meanwhile, we will do with this. BUY IT!

The good news is that there is little overlap between this and the previous volumes. Nearly all of the reviews (maybe 90 percent) have been assigned to new writers and re-written. Besides the new and often fascinating reviews, the advantage this book has over its predecessor is more reviews per artist. And as in the previous edition nearly all of the albums featured receive an in-depth critical appraisal not the one or two tossed off lines you'll find in other music guides. Of course the book is also up to date featuring dozens of albums released since 1995 by both new and veteran artists.

That all being said, the original book was much better. The artists biographies are cut to the bare minimums this time around. And while this new edition contains individual essays on rock's various sub-genres, there are less of them in the new book. Further the first volume contained a number of book and bootleg reviews. In this edition there's none of the former and precious few of the latter. There are also less of the one-hit wonders and obscure bands that were present in the first book.

As usual, the criteria for inclusion is erratic and subjective. Like the first volume the editors draw the line at performers associated with a Country and Western audience excluding even performers with large pop and rock followings like Johnny Cash and Brenda Lee. There are similar oversights with current performers like the hugely popular Sugar Ray. The questionable selection criteria is also present in the albums that are reviewed. For example, the Temptations are represented only by greatest hits collections all essentially featuring the same songs. While a casual fan needs to know which of these to select, they also want to know where to go for more. Finally, though they are few and far between, there are a few factual errors. (The CD reissue of "Ray Charles and Betty Carter" does not contain "But on the Other Hand Baby". That's one example that jumps out at me.)

Still, the majority of these flaws are only noticeable in comparison with the stunning standards set by the previous book. Nowhere else are you going to find this much rock history in one volume. When you're done with this you'll know more about the music as music than you'd ever thought you would know. Just don't throw out the first volume.