Sonic Cool: The Life & Death of Rock ’n’ Roll begs discussion — mostly about the state of music journalism. It is pocked with factual errors and loose writing, and brazen in its embrace of both. At times it has the jaded, ill-informed quality of a photocopied fanzine. Its editors and fact checkers must have been dead asleep as it made its way to press.

But there are flashes of genuine intellect that streak through the layers of negligence and self-indulgence. It takes a long time, some 451 pages, to get to the best of the book: a lengthy chapter titled " Post-Everything " that appraises the collapse of artistic values in ’80s and ’90s rock while finding some of the music’s formative embrace of rebellious self-expression alive in contemporary exploratory jazz and in hip-hop. Music journalist Joe S. Harrington is based in Portland, Maine, and his take on Kurt Cobain, the Seattle scene, and the " grunge " era is cynical, insightful, sympathetic, and compelling — even if he does prefer the simple-minded chordal pop of Green Day to the more creative work of Nirvana, Patti Smith, Talking Heads, and many others who took bigger musical chances and had much more to say.

With regard to Green Day, it’s always been a mystery to me how anybody could praise the punk æsthetic of a band who were driven to gigs by their parents. There’s a difference between merely being bratty and doing genuine cultural muckraking, but that’s another matter — albeit one that brings Harrington’s qualitative judgments into question.

Early chapters on the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the evolution of primal rock and roll from earlier forms of American music seem slapped together and based on casual reading. There’s a danger in this, especially when the errors begin adding up. Harrington repeats the myth about Dylan’s being booed off the Newport Folk Festival stage. He attributes innovations to the wrong musicians; he refers to Jimmie Rodgers as " the yodelin’ cowboy " (he was known as " the singing brakeman " ) and spells his name as " Jimmie " and " Jimmy " on the same page (17). He brands Robert Johnson a disciple of Charley Patton (Johnson came up under Son House) and claims he was " the first of Patton’s descendents to achieve notoriety " when Johnson’s records actually sold less than many of his contemporaries’. It was decades after his death, when Columbia released two volumes of his recordings on LP, that Johnson really came to fame. And so goes the litany of large and small literary sins, from redundancy to misreporting the date of the guitar’s electrical amplification.

Despite that, it’s hard not to be charmed by Harrington’s smirky creative flashes. His description of country legend Hank Williams’s return to the Grand Ole Opry shortly before his death is particularly entertaining. " As the Opry became more famous and Nashville-oriented, " he writes, " it became more generic and less rustic, like a hick version of Lawrence Welk and a grim foreboding of Hee Haw. Hank was drunk off his feet, holding a guitar with horseshit under his fingernails and high on whatever prescriptions he could get his hands on. Hell, he could’ve ended up becoming Neil Young. And don’t think for a moment that Neil Young doesn’t know it. "

When I asked Harrington to account for his book’s factual weaknesses, he replied that " the best history books are all impressionistic " and that he aimed " to create a tempo and narrative flow that sometimes neglects rigid factology for the sake of legend. " The problem with this reasoning is that his uneven weave of facts, impressions, and mistakes could be mistaken as genuine history by readers who are trying to learn about rock’s genesis and evolution because they think it’s important. When mistakes are published by a company as (previously?) respectable as Hal Leonard and marketed to the public, there is a danger that they’ll be taken as historic truths. Sophistry of this type shows no respect for readers or musicians, let alone for the weighty cultural gifts of rock itself.