Rock On, English edition: How I Tried to Stop Caring about Music and Learn to Love Corporate Rock

Kurzbeschreibung 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. When Dan Kennedy is hired by a major label he thinks he has been handed a pass to the secret kingdom of rock and roll. In reality, he has walked into an episode of The Office. Whether directing a gangsta rapper's video or battling his better judgement to create a campaign celebrating twenty-five years of Phil Collins' love songs, he's in way over his head. And from the looks of those around the boardroom, he's not alone. Cameos by aging pop stars, dinosaur music-biz kingpins, hip-hop thugs, Iggy Pop and others make up the cast of this brilliant power ballad to rock and roll, office life and all the wage slaves who've done their damndest to hide from Human Resources when the axe falls. If you have ever bought a record, worked in an office, tried to get into a creative industry or suspected that some things are not all they're cracked up to be, Rock On will make you laugh more than you thought possible. Pressestimmen "Dan Kennedy is a very funny human being and a very funny writer and this is a very funny book. It's also quite subtly wise about the absurdity of life and the dreams we cook up" ( Jonathan Ames) "A delightful and delirious evocation of the love/hate relationship virtually my whole generation has had with the music industry. The rest of us may have dreamed it, but Dan Kennedy actually lived it out in the trenches. The results aren't pretty, but luckily for him, and us, they are hilarious" ( Todd Hanson, editor of The Onion) "Seeing the world through Kennedy is like smoking some magical drug that makes everything hilarious in ways that cannot be explained ... The death of rock and roll should be heartbreaking. But when living it through Kenndy's eyes, it becomes the funniest thing that's ever happened" ( Scot Armstrong) " 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) "...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." ( The New York Post) Über den Autor und weitere Mitwirkende 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.