An early review in Publisher’s Weekly of James Wolcott’s Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York:

Wolcott… arrived as a college dropout in 1972 and scored a writing gig at the Village Voice — a snake-pit of feuds and nude editing — that inducted him into the city’s hippest scenes. Chief among these was the punk-rock incubator at the bar CBGB, which affords him vibrant portraits of Patti Smith, the Talking Heads, and other punk luminaries against a backdrop of Hells Angels… Wolcott’s hip, closeup yet detached narrative falters during worshipful scenes of his mentor Pauline Kael, the New Yorker movie reviewer who elevated criticism to ‘a higher power’; his reminiscences of dishing and cackling with Kael at screenings and soirées feel claustrophobic and dull.

Okay, not really, but here’s what one commenter at the A.V. Club (ostensibly commenting on a review of Reynolds’s Retromania) has to say:

I finally got a chance to read Carducci’s Rock and the Pop Narcotic and despised it. It was slightly interesting at times (it’s also outdated), but so meaninglessly politically reactionary it read like a Red State tract. It’s impossible to measure the bitterness that is contained within the pages: it’s not just ‘winding up the hippies’, it’s as pathetically phallocentric as a Norman Mailer journal entry. I understand why Reynolds would’ve found it intriguing, as it was definitely a uniquely individualistic look at rock music, but I also think he liked it because everything Carducci wrote was almost entirely the exact opposite of everything that Reynolds has ever written in his life… Reynolds is probably fifty times the writer that clowns like Joe Carducci are, more thoughtful and more intelligent. Maybe I’m biased because I remember fondly reading him, and a handful of other terrific writers, in the last heyday of the Melody Maker, but to even put him in the same hemisphere as some middle-aged crank who thought that fucking Saccharine Trust was the second coming is an insult to just about anybody who has ever uttered a word.

Inquiring minds want to know.

Next year Duke Uni­ver­sity Press will pub­lish Fly­boy 2:The Greg Tate Reader. He recently com­pleted The 100 Best Hiphop Lyrics for Pen­guin and is now work­ing on a book about the God­fa­ther of Soul, James Brown, for River­head Press.