{"id":15218,"date":"2018-09-24T05:30:38","date_gmt":"2018-09-24T09:30:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=15218"},"modified":"2018-09-24T08:04:41","modified_gmt":"2018-09-24T12:04:41","slug":"book-review-rev-keith-a-gordon-broken-record","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2018\/09\/24\/book-review-rev-keith-a-gordon-broken-record\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: Rev. Keith A. Gordon &#8212; Broken Record"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-15219\" src=\"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/broken_record.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"350\" height=\"568\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/broken_record.jpg 350w, https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/broken_record-185x300.jpg 185w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 350px) 100vw, 350px\" \/>One of my favorite lines of dialogue comes from William Shakespeare\u2019s <em>As You Like It<\/em>: \u201cSell when you can; you are not for all markets.\u201d Though the line is delivered with sarcasm, it\u2019s as apropos today as it was 400-plus years ago. It provides a useful guide to creative types, too: not everything you do will be of interest to everyone.<\/p>\n<p>Take the Rev. Keith A Gordon\u2019s recent <i>Blues Deluxe: The Joe Bonamassa Buying Guide<\/i>. Though in their original forms \u2013 in magazines and zines, on websites and blogs \u2013 Gordon\u2019s reviews of the blues-rock guitarist&#8217;s various releases had undeniable value, as a book-form compendium, I\u2019m not sure whom the intended audience is. If you&#8217;re enough of a fan to read a whole book of reviews on him, you probably own all the music already.<\/p>\n<p>I have no such quibbles with the latest from the astoundingly prolific Reverend (and I thought <i>I<\/i> wrote a lot). <i>Broken Record: The Music Industry at War, 2000-2008<\/i> is, again, a collection of previously-published essays. And while because of the age of some of these pieces \u2013 nearly two decades old now \u2013 some of the Rev\u2019s observations are past their sell-by date, taken as a whole, <i>Broken Record<\/i> provides a deep-dive, incisive look at the turmoil that befell the industry in the wake of Napster and other developments.<\/p>\n<p>Far more often than not, these essays demonstrate that Gordon had a keen sense of <em>what<\/em> was happening, <em>why<\/em> it was happening and \u2013 had anyone bothered to ask him back then \u2013 many suggestions as to <em>how<\/em> the industry could have turned things back in its favor. Occasionally he misses the mark, but most times Gordon is dead-on with his analysis and prescriptions. That fact is borne out when one realizes that the music business eventually (and when faced with dwindling options) put into place some of the very ideas he suggested decades ago.<\/p>\n<p>If you\u2019re someone who looks at the current state of the music business and wonders how it got that way, <i>Broken Record<\/i> offers up a kind of time capsule look at the issues that roiled the industry. Recommended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of my favorite lines of dialogue comes from William Shakespeare\u2019s As You Like It: \u201cSell when you can; you are not for all markets.\u201d Though the line is delivered [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15219,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,65],"tags":[2712],"class_list":["post-15218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book","category-review","tag-rev-keith-a-gordon","cat-10-id","cat-65-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15218"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15218\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15265,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15218\/revisions\/15265"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15219"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}