The experienced student of musical history understands that nearly all criticism and exposition on the history of music suffers from a frustrating myopia. You have to consider the source when you read about music. Whether it be Mingus' dramatic flair in Beneath The Underdog or Lester Bangs incisive paranoia, even revelatory writing about music needs careful analysis through the writer's eyes.

The music of the post-punk era has generated a woefully inadequate critical response as of yet. It is fitting that a genre of music with the bogus label of alternative is so far incapable of being understood in any broad sense. Three recent books have made an attempt to explain what has happened to rock music recently. Michael Azerrad's Come As You Are: The Story Of Nirvana chronicles the freak success of Nirvana and the schism between their indie scene origins and their mainstream success. Gina Arnold offers a personalized tour of the indie rock world in Route 666: On The Road To Nirvana. In Manic Pop Thrill , Rachel Felder offers a laughably ridiculous overview of the scene that is so annoying that it is perhaps more illuminating about the integration of the idealistic indie scene into the profit-oriented music business than either Arnold's or Azerrad's books. Perhaps it is unfair to look for a satisfying overview of this music at a time when it is still evolving, but it must be possible to outdo what has been offered thus far.

Any biography of a band with less than five years of recording experience smacks of a rushed, celebrity focused project. To his credit, Michael Azerrad provides a satisfyingly detailed account of the rise to significance of Nirvana in Come As You Are. Even in the guise of a sanctioned project with full band cooperation, Azerrad offers his own interpretations and conclusions. While this book must be viewed as an attempt to counter the negative publicity that Kurt Cobain received in the wake of his heroin addiction, it also serves as primary source material for the band's history and output. In this aspect, the book finds its value, and rewards the Nirvana fan with detail and anecdote.

In focusing on the one band with strong ties to the indie/underground who happened to sell a gazillion CDs, Come As You Are overestimates the impact Nirvana has had on the music business. Perhaps there was more lip service paid to local scenes for a while after 'Nevermind' hit it big, but rather than creating a fundamental change in the business, it just signaled another cycle taking its turn, just as anyone with a skinny tie got signed in the wake of 'My Sharona.' Azerrad, like Arnold and Felder, wants this story to be different, wants Nirvana to mean that indie strategies are accepted unconditionally in the culture as a whole, and this plainly isn't the case.

The odyssey of Gina Arnold's Route 666 begins with punk rock, the Sex Pistols specifically. By witnessing the last Pistols show in San Francisco, Arnold begins a life spent intentionally in the center of the scene. While thie first person style strikes the reader as an honest way of relating information, it means that you really have to have some sort of affinity with the writer in order to connect with the work. You can't dispute that Arnold experienced what she experienced, but you can dispute the significance of her conclusions.

Arnold's personal experience with the music business is as an insider, a well-connected writer with access to bands and shows that the typical music fan will never have. Her proclamations and observations always have the rarified air of the globe-hopping music professional with few of the constraints that the actual audience and performers labor under. Arnold's perceptive observations on a variety of regional scenes serve her purpose well. She's at her best when she's describing bands and scenesters, letting them tell the story in her own words. Her opinionated approach clicks when she analyzes the ways that indie rock has been co-opted by the mainstream. By sizing up Lollapalooza side by side with the International Pop Underground Convention of 1991 in Olympia, Washington, Arnold articulates how underground culture can not be broken down into component parts for quick sale. From her soapbox, Arnold offers an overview of the significant players and sounds of rock today that is as close as anyone could want to comprehensive.

An attempt at the same kind of overview of recent rock is made by Rachel Felder in Manic Pop Thrill. Any beneficial information that may be contained in this book is quickly negated by the wrongheadedness that pervades every chapter. One walks away from this reading experience with a singular rage that someone so clueless could actually be published and regarded as an authority.

Ultimately, this is celebrity journalism by and for art history majors. A particularly annoying tactic of Felder's is to canonize musicians within an extra-musical context. In her attempt to deconstruct Sonic Youth, she draws so many parallels to other artists and media that she fails to locate any meaning in the music itself. Folks like Rambo, Dennis the Menace, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Karen Finley, John Berger, Haim Steinbach, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Julian Schnabel, Jeff Koons, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Jean Michel Basquiat all pop up in Felder's eight pages of Sonic Youth discussion. The Kurt and Courtney relationship reminds Felder of Robert Mappelthorpe photographs. Nirvana's songs strike her as Andy Warhol soup cans. After a few chapters of wretched analogies like this, one reads on, not in hopes of being illuminated in any way, but in search of more evidence that this writer is without any skill.

And more evidence is certainly forthcoming. While Felder gives over a whole chapter to 'grebo' bands (Mega City 4, Ned's Atomic Dustbin, The Wonder Stuff) she dismisses R.E.M. with a paragraph, as not being 'interesting or innovative. ' Felder is entitled to her opinion, but the book begs the reader to dismiss it as worthless. Significant bands such as My Bloody Valentine deserve more thoughtful consideration. A lot of styles of rock co-exist in the world today, and the best that can be said for Felder is that she has an open ear. If only her writing showed any hint of reasoned analysis, this might be a worthwhile book.

The final insult of Manic Pop Thrill occurs in the conclusion. These two paragraphs contain a horrible misquote and feeble analysis. They must be read to be believed. "And like punk and Situationism and Dada and graffiti art, alternative music is an accessible art. It's venues are sweaty clubs and crammed little record shops and low-fi college radio stations. If, as Gil Scott Heron wrote, 'the revolution must be televised,' the alternative music revolution must be broadcast and blared and yelled off stages across the country. And that's exactly what the kids are doing.

"And those kids aren't going anywhere. Alternative magazines like Alternative Press and fashion accessories like flannel shirts and Doctor Marten's boots have grown in popularity just as Nirvana's music has. And so alternative music may wave at the past, but it points at the present and toward the future. As an expression of how a generation feels about the present and future, it's undeniably important."

It's amazing that today's music is so terribly misunderstood and shunted into ill-fitting categories. Yo, Rachel, Gil Scott Heron wrote "the revolution will not be televised." He meant that critics like you would be clueless as to the real significance of the events happening around them. He meant that revolution does not originate in the mainstream, and it will never have any effect in diluted form. Self indulgent writing like Gina Arnold's finds its mark in its sincerity. Celebrity biography like Michael Azerrad's signifies by the illumination it provides on its subject. A book like Manic Pop Thrill illuminates nothing, redeems no one, and serves no purpose.