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Chunklet Presents the Overrated Book: the Only
Book You’ll Ever Need
By Henry H. Owings
Last Gasp, 2006
Trade paper, 204 pages, $24.95
Powells.com
Late last year I received a very thoughtful gift from
a friend who works at a major publishing house. It was
a book detailing the top 500 rock albums ever produced.
If you’ve listened seriously to pop music for
more than about a decade, the book was as predictable
as the outcome of a Harlem Globetrotter’s match.
The only moment that could be distantly called tense
was guessing whether Sgt. Pepper’s was going to
be the number one album and Pet Sounds number two, or
vice versa. After thumbing through the book, I went
out for a drink with a friend and asked if he could
guess the top 10 albums. He got all but one, missing
Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On”
(number six).
What’s the real point of all-time “best
of” lists, especially if they’re going to
be more or less immutable? Sure, you can swap out Patti
Smith with PJ Harvey or The Ramones with Nirvana to
give it appeal to the next generation, but at the end
of the day, it’s more or less the same list that
came out five, 10, or 20 years ago. Is there a collective
fear among rock writers that viewing Sgt. Pepper’s
as anything less than the best album ever made will
make them look like the one dentist out of five who
doesn’t recommend sugarless gum?
Christopher Hitchens, writing in Letters to a Young
Contrarian (Basic Books, 2001), states, “There
is something idiotic about those who believe that consensus
(to give the hydra-headed beast just one name) is the
highest good.” Taking that philosophy to heart
are the writers and editors of Chunklet magazine. In
Chunklet Presents: The Overrated Book, nothing is sacred
and no prisoners are taken. In their opinion, everything
is overrated, and chances are that if you read this
book, you will find that something very dear to you
will be deflated, defiled, or repudiated. And you won’t
mind one bit.
The Overrated Book is the perfect distillation of
the entertainment value derived from mocking your friends’
favorite anything. While you might actually like what
you’re making fun of, there is no denying the
wonderful, almost perverse glee in being needlessly
contrarian. The Chunklet writers don’t just grind
sacred cows; they atomize them, doing so in mercilessly
piquant prose that is simultaneously spot-on and impossible
to take too seriously.
Like most books of satire, some gags work better than
others. “The 1,000 Unrelated Overrated Things,”
for example, feels like filler, which may actually be
the point, but that doesn’t make reading it worthwhile.
An article on overrated drummers is like shooting fish
in a barrel.
But, when the Chunklet writers hit their targets,
they tear them to shreds. Whether they’re scoffing
at art-house film directors, indie rock culture in all
of its DIY pomposity, or chumps (like me) with enormous
student loans, their caustic wit makes for frequent
episodes of near-asphyxiating laughter. It’s difficult
to summarize a book that is essentially a book of lists
and charts, with a smattering of articles, but highlights
include: “Work That Shaft!: Twenty-Three Time-Worn
Methods to Step Up to the Mike,” “The Seven
Degrees of Winona Ryder,” and “Rocktoids.”
This might be the work of a bunch of poseurs who are
every bit as pathetic as those they mock, but I don’t
care. I don’t need to see how my hamburger comes
from the cow in order to enjoy it, and I can receive
this book on its own, demented terms. If you can laugh
at yourself as well as others, The Overrated Book deserves
a place, if not on your coffee table, then at least
in your bathroom.
Reviews from the website of Powell’s City of
Books are reprinted with the permission of the giant
Portland bookstore. (www.powells.com).
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