The Overrated Book

by Henry H. Owings (Editor)

The Overrated book is brought to you by the staff of Chunklet Magazine, a paragon of satire for the holy cows of underground music and culture. Since the early 90s, the magazine has mercilessly lampooned the music industry, and is one of the most loved reads for the hippest bands and music aficionados. In recent issues, the magazine has an official guide of what music not to buy and made extensive charts of a Pay Not To Play system, offering bands large amounts of money to break-up, and Adopt a Gutter Punk program to make the world smell just a tiny bit better. The magazine has a highly graphic-style and combines the work of political cartoonist Ted Rall with many talented, young artists from the Cartoon network. The musings of David Cross (Mr. Show, Arrested Development), Sarah Silverman (Saturday Night Live, School of Rock, Crank Yankers, Jesus Is Magic), Patton Oswalt (King of Queens, Comedians of Comedy), Janeane Garofalo (Saturday Night Live, Air America Radio) Brian Posehn (Mr. Show, Just Shoot Me,), and Zach Galifianakis (Late Night With Zach, Bubble Boy).

Genres: Music

204 pages, Paperback

First published May 15, 2006

About the author

Henry Owings is the editor and publisher of Chunklet, a music magazine.

Reviews

[Burgersub · Rating 3 out of 5]

chunklet is weird because, as elitist as they come off most of the time, a surprising amount of the jokes they make are predictable and/or stupid and could just as well have come out of the mouths of a VH1 talking head or a typical unhip college kid, or any other number of the kinds of people chunklet hates on. a lot of the time though, it IS funny.

[Lou · Rating 3 out of 5]

This looked like it would be really awesome, and has it's awesome moments- Patton Oswalt promising that this book will cure cancer in the intro, a review of Portishead that "trance is the mime of the 90's", but in the end it's just a bunch of stuff crammed into a book. Spent a fair amount of time in my bathroom.

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

from the zine chunklet, a guide to everything overrated. but mainly just music, and by music i mean mainly just dudes with guitars. enjoyable for having next to the shitter, but hardly a book to read cover-to-cover.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you have sacred cows, you might want to skip this one. Otherwise, it's just a lot of thumbing of noses at targets big and small. If you're not offended by anything here, well, you probably have a life and wouldn't recognize 91% of what's in here. But your life probably isn't too funny.

[brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

true, true, and true.