SOURCE: “White Men Behaving Badly,” in Times Literary Supplement, December 6, 1996, p. 28.

In the following excerpt, Bowen offers an unfavorable assessment of The Faber Book of Pop.

The culture of rock music is a notoriously excessive affair. Anthologies are one way of capturing some of its monstrosity, and in these two fat collections, culled from a half-century or so of writing about rock and pop, we encounter, among other things, Elvis’s 19,000 drug prescriptions in two and a half years, Ike Turner’s thirteen wives (and innumerable affairs and one-night stands), and countless trashed hotel rooms and wrecked lives, to say nothing of such curiosities as Lou Reed’s interview with President Havel and the peculiar charms of Dahlia the Dog Act. Dylan Jones’s Meaty, Beaty, Big and Bouncy, orthodox to a fault, starts with Elvis and ends with Blur and Oasis; the more ambitious and eclectic Faber...