Books like The Story Of "Crass"

When I first started reading this book, I was very excited. It begins with thorough details of the individual members of the band and the early art happenings, etc. Unfortunately this level of detail soon fizzled out and the book unraveled into a mess of meanderings and Rolling Stone style rock journalism. The author reads like someone completely new to the band and has trouble describing their music at all, using dismissive generalizations such as "unlistenable" (when talking about a live recording which is actually not at all unlistenable). That shouldn't be good enough for anyone who is seriously interested in reading about any kind of music. The book focuses far too much on sensationalism and highlights controversies without getting into any sort of balanced description of the music beyond brief, irrelevant opinions. It contains the term "singafuckinglong" which should give you a clue as to the depth of the author's abilities. He also seems to fail at any sort of intelligent analysis of the bands' philosophies and just decides everything is "shocking" or "funny" as though that is enough. Maybe he should write about the Sex Pistols instead - he can't seem to stop mentioning them in this book.Then it gets even worse and you start to realize that Berger does not really even like Crass because all he seems to write about is how terrible all their music is and how all their critics were right. He basically admits this in the epilogue, "I always thought the Poison Girls were a far better band than Crass, and it puzzled me that Crass was so much bigger and more influential." Why did this asshole write this book? Was it out of some weird need to take them down a peg or just pure ignorance and inability to write? Given the way Berger forms sentences, I have to assume it was a combination of the two.There are a few good moments in the book which detail things I hadn't read before that are very exciting to read about. But those moments are really sporadic and don't hold this thing together. With all the first-hand accounts and stories, it is a bit depressing that this book turned out the way it did. Did the author manage to quote every single word of "Last Of The Hippies" (which I do recommend reading) over the course of this?I do not recommend this book to anyone. The music of Crass music largely speaks for itself and this book does not help you to appreciate it. If you want to learn about Crass, listen to their incredible albums and read the lyrics and essays and then make up your own mind about it.