Even a self-styled corporate hipster should have more
Source: Toronto Star (Original Article)
Rock On:An Office Power Balladby Dan KennedyAlgonquin Books, 224 pages, $16.95
Dan Kennedy’s Rock On: An Office Power Ballad looked like it had all the right stuff: 30-something hipster works at New York-based corporate record company where 1970s’ super-groups like Led Zeppelin were once on the artist roster.
Alas, Rock On consists of 200-plus pages of banal anecdotes padded with Kennedy’s whirling internal monologues and loser anxieties. This is Kennedy’s shtick. He’s the chronic, pessimistic loser, the low-self-esteem sad sack who meanders on in an apologetic, tentative voice while trying, and failing, to be too hip.
In 2004, Kennedy played the same hapless role in his first memoir, Loser Goes First: My Thirty-Something Years of Dumb Luck and Minor Humiliation, which pretty much sums up Rock On.
This second book recounts Kennedy’s stint as the director of creative development at an irrelevant corporate record company in a New York office tower.
Kennedy worries about what his boss and co-workers think about him and he has a healthy daily fear of losing his job. After 18 months he does get tubed, along with a thousand other employees, when a new owner comes along.
I had hoped to read a memoir about Kennedy the cad sleeping his way through several floors of cute, young personal assistants; or Kennedy the junkie descending into his own private hell while he lives at the Chelsea Hotel and hides his rock ‘n’ roll track marks from his Prada-wearing overlords.
But the former advertising copywriter doesn’t have anything that racy up his sleeve. Kennedy falls into the same ironic, anti-hero ghetto as more talented others such as Dave Eggers and Jonathan Ames, Nick Hornby and Douglas Coupland. These men have no balls. Where are today’s heroic writers like Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer and Phillip Roth?
Kennedy’s biggest hurtle is agonizing over the right muffin at the Starbucks Amex Blue Sky Credit Card on his way to work.
Kennedy …continue reading