The Biographical Dictionary of Popular Music: From Adele to Ziggy, the Real A to Z of Rock and Pop

by Dylan Jones

The Biographical Dictionary of Popular Music is an incredible and opinionated collection of celebrated cultural critic Dylan Jones's thoughts on more than 350 of the most important artists around the world―alive and dead, big and small, at length and in brief. This A to Z reference is the true musical heir to David Thomson's seminal The New Biographical Dictionary of Popular Film . Jones writes entertainingly about bands that have inspired, bedeviled, and fascinated him over the years.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction

912 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2012

About the author

Dylan Jones studied at Chelsea School Of Art and then St. Martin’s School of Art. He is the award-winning editor of GQ magazine, a position he has held since 1999, and has won the British Society of Magazine Editors “Editor of the Year” award a record ten times. In 2013 he was also the recipient of the prestigious Mark Boxer Award.
Under his editorship the magazine has won over 50 awards.
A former editor at i-D, The Face, Arena, the Observer and the Sunday Times, he is the author of the New York Times best seller Jim Morrison: Dark Star, the much-translated iPod, Therefore I Am and Mr. Jones’ Rules, as well as the editor of the classic collection of music writing, Meaty Beaty Big & Bouncy. He edited a collection of journalism from Arena - Sex, Power & Travel - and collaborated with David Cameron on Cameron on Cameron: Conversations with Dylan Jones (shortlisted for the Channel 4 Political Book of the Year).
He was the Chairman of the Prince’s Trust’s Fashion Rocks Monaco, is a board member of the Norman Mailer Writers Colony and a Trustee of the Hay Festival. He is also the chairman of London Fashion Week: Men’s, London’s first men’s fashion week, launched in 2012 at the behest of the British Fashion Council.
In 2010 he spent a week in Afghanistan with the Armed Forces, collaborating on a book with the photographer David Bailey: British Heroes in Afghanistan.
In 2012 he had three books published: The Biographical Dictionary of Music; When Ziggy Played Guitar: David Bowie and Four Minutes that Shook the World, and the official book of U2’s 360 Tour, published in October. Since then he has published
The Eighties: One Day One Decade, a book about the 1980s told through the prism of Live Aid, Elvis Has Left The Building: The Day The King Died, Mr. Mojo, London Rules, a polemic about the greatest city in the world, Manxiety and London Sartorial.
In June 2013 he was awarded an OBE for services to publishing and the fashion industry. In 2014 he was made an Honorary Professor of Glasgow Caledonian University.

Reviews

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anyone who is looking for a comprehensive listing of all the greats in popular music over the past 50 years is going to be disappointed with this "dictionary". So will anyone who hopes to find long passages on his or her favorite artists. Dylan Jones is the editor of the U.K. version of GQ, and he has written lots about popular music over the years, and done a lot of interviews with the greats. This is a very idiosyncratic collection of pieces ranging from a couple of lines to ten pages or more about musicians Jones has found important for various reasons. It is U.K.-centric, featuring or mentioning a lot of artists most Americans have never heard of, but it has good U.S. coverage. Clearly Jones relishes driving along California highways with the radio or his own playlists blasting. Crosby, Stills & Nash gets this, in toto: "A varnished log cabin." Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young gets this: "A varnished log cabin with an unvarnished door." Meanwhile, someone named P.J. Proby, an American, no less, who had a couple hits in the U.K. in the mid-60s before he fizzled out, gets 13 pages.
Point is, Jones writes very well, and weaves in his biography as a (clearly upper-class) youth who became musically aware during the punk explosion of the mid-70s and was writing regularly about music by the early 80s. He has a breadth of knowledge to pull off a book like this, and while it's certain that no one will agree with all of his opinions, I found it rewarding to read cover-to-cover, A-Z.

[Colin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Loved the idea of the book, but the execution felt less like a biographical dictionary and more like an omnibus of Jones’s work over the years. A book that’s good enough (and maybe promising enough) to keep reading, but never quite wows the way it might have.

[Thomas · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had high hopes for this one, as it is explicitly modeled after my all-time favorite book of film criticism, David Thomson's The New Biographical Dictionary of Film Sixth Edition, so much so that Thomson even blurbs it. The difference is that Thomson is a critic and writer first whereas Jones is a celebrity journalist/fanboy - several of the long profiles seem like either fan letters or expanded magazine articles (the Keith Richards entry especially). Another difference is that Thomson made an effort to cover everything, but Jones lets his personal obsessions and tastes dictate the entries; he loves bossa nova and light jazz, so there's plenty of entries on those subjects and huge holes where he just doesn't care. (He's English so I don't expect him to go in-depth on country music but one entry (Dolly Parton) doesn't cut it.) There are peculiar choices of subjects too - I have no idea what Shirley MacLaine is doing in a book on "Popular Music" in the first place, much less getting triple the coverage of Elvis Presley or Buddy Holly. Some entries aren't even biographies - t-shirts, lists of punk and reggae singles, rock festivals all get lengthy entries. Sadly, the "Biographical" in the title refers to Dylan Jones, not the artists profiled.

[J.J. Lair · Rating 2 out of 5]

I enjoy reading mini-biography books. This wasn't short. It had all these biographies of artists but the biographies were no more than a few pages each.
I learned about new artists or I got the highlights of someone I’ve never heard of. The Miserabalist Guide to Music was like that. I thought this book would be like that.
It really wasn’t.
I get that this was a bunch of blogs/essays about musicians or music related topics. It was the kind of blog entries that I wanted to write when I started Searching39.livejournal.com. I went off topic and that blog is all different topics. it's still active no Livejournal if you're interested.
Dylan Jones met and interviewed some of the people in the book like Lenny Kravitz and Stevie Wonder. Some essays were purely biographical, like the ones about Dean Martin, Miles Davis or Sammy Davis. Other artists were impressions of that artist, like Elvis Presley, Bruce Springsteen, and Sonic Youth.
I hit itunes to hear some of the artists I didn't know so I will give this book credit for expanding my music knowledge.
All in all, it was a light read. A lot I skimmed over or just ignored and past. I’m not going to recommend it to many people because I don’t know if the average music person wants to read a bunch of essays. It was mostly worth the time, but not great.

[Neil · Rating 1 out of 5]

I had to give up on this one. The author is too clever by far, with lots of little biographical essays of musicians that tell you very little about either the musician's biography or the music. Instead it's more of the variety of "when I first heard Duran Duran I was eating marmalade" or "what if Janis Joplin had lived and started a religion" or "the Beach Boys are like a pterodactyl." OK, I'm making those up, but honestly, they're more to the point and more interesting starts than most of what Jones writes about. It's also a very English take on the pop music scene and he seems to take special pleasure in writing especially long essays about little known figures and conversely, writing a paragraph or less about major artists. Somebody else should take a stab at a book with the same title, or barring that take a stab at Jones's computer so he won't write anymore.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an unexpected read for me. It's a very opinionated and personally curated review of pop music. It's irreverent, and many times I didn't agree (he was way off base on Gil Scott Heron) but it was an enjoyable read. Anyone who's a fan of pop music should enjoy this unique take.