The book is not so much a biography of Kennedy’s life as a whole, but a snapshot into the 18 months of his life as a creative video marketer for Atlantic Records circa 2002. Having never worked in the industry before, Kennedy’s perspective as an outsider depicts an industry of excess, complacency, and hilarity. In fact, many of his initial encounters mirrored my own initial impressions when I started working in music. The internal monologue of “Oh shit I am standing next to (insert big name music star here)! Pleaseletmesaysomethingnaturalbecoolbecool” that he writes is spot on with how I reacted when I was a wide-eyed initiate in the music industry. A lot of the humor comes from Kennedy’s written “thoughts” and they had me lol’ing in my chair quite a few times.
There’s not much of a coherent plot, but that’s fine. Rock On is basically a collection of anecdotes from Kennedy’s tenure at Atlantic. If you’ve never worked in the business before, it’s an eye opening tale about just how ridiculous the inner workings of the industry are. You have executives in corner offices who don’t even show up to work because the whole reason they have their jobs is because they signed a big artist 25 years ago and have been riding the coattails ever since. $50,000 office desks, fat expense accounts, cluelessness, artist hypocrisy, two and a half hour lunches, corporate sycophants, high employment turnover are all things you’ll read about. All that glamor, glitz, coolness that you’ve attributed to the music industry in your mind is brought crashing down to earth in what amounts to an episode of The Office.
The funny thing is, everything Kennedy writes about working at a major label seemed natural to me at the time. In fact, I probably had less of a jaw-dropping reaction to a lot of the anecdotes than most people will when reading the book. If you’ve worked in music before, you’ll know what I mean. Nevertheless, Rock On was a very entertaining book that I read in two sittings one day. Recommended if you like music and/or office humor.
*statistics are from googling “the average american reads how many books a year” and checking out what the first page gave me