Steven Hyden’s book, Your Favorite Band is Killing Me, gives a deeper meaning to the music rivalries that consume your mind.
I would like to preface this by saying that the review you are about to read does not capture the enjoyment I had reading this book. The writing in Your Favorite Band is Killing Me caught my attention and the author Steven Hyden was genuinely funny. Most of my problems with it likely come from the fact that I am a 19-year-old liberal, mixed-race, college female student, while the author is a 40-year-old white dude with a beard. With different demographics come distinct perspectives. He was also a bit too focused on his personal anecdotes, making his essays meander and the point of the chapters subsequently lost.
Your Favorite Band is Killing Me explore the world of music rivalries, covering everything from the classic Beatles vs. Stones to the country artists Toby Keith vs. the Dixie Chicks to more modern rivalries such as Taylor Swift vs. Kanye West. As someone who takes a lot of pride in the artists that I listen to and would quickly come to their defense, I was particularly interested as to what Hyden had to say about some of the rivalries that I have a clear stance on. The book also claims that it reveals deeper truths about life as well as the reader through whose side they are on. As a sucker for personality quizzes and things that tell me more about myself (does that make me a narcissist?), I picked up this book in search of a reasoning behind my feelings towards certain artists.
Hyden’s writing has clever word choice as well as engaging comments that make the book worth reading. Each chapter has solid introductions and conclusions so that readers can pick up a random place to start. His introductions make me immediately interested in what he is about to write: “Eric Clapton makes me contemplate the inevitable decline of my own life, and this makes me uncomfortable” (114). He uses certain techniques to his advantage as when he cunningly said “Swift… swiftly exited” (82) or when he writes a long-winded sentence and notes that “this run-on sentence made Showalter very excited” (184). He is also clever with his musical references, some of which I likely am not musically inclined enough to even catch. When talking about the Smashing Pumpkins, he describes how he and Showalter “bonded like a couple of Siamese dreamers” (184). He also acts as a skeptic sometimes to his own ideas, which is a challenge that he handles well. He comments that he only classifies himself as more of a Stones fan than a Beatles one because he wants to seem more “cool.” He also only likes Oasis more than Blur because of his inherent self-image issues and aesthetic preferences, rather than the music. He admits these weaknesses in his own music rivalry stances, and insightfully elaborates on them.
I usually would not mind if the author and I came from completely different backgrounds: published authors are not often going to be 19-year olds. However, I could not help but feel that the author’s way of writing and the rivalries in the book seemed outdated at times. Hyden discusses very little rivalries that includes women or people of color compared to white male rivalries. I first took note of the author’s identity as a middle-aged white man when he described an event as “white-washed” (29). I fully understand the true definition of this term, but these days, I would assume most people think of the Urban Dictionary version of “white-washed” when they hear it: the idea that a minority has assimilated into white culture. To me, it seemed like a strange word to pick. The author’s identity kept making appearances throughout the book. Sometimes he uses it as a funny side note such as when he says, “dreaming about Bruce Springsteen is an utterly common occurrence among white men between the ages of thirty-five and fifty-five” (33). Other times, however, his observations seem slightly ignorant. For example, when he spoke of the times that he has “encountered a fellow adult heterosexual male out in the wild,” he says that he always feels like the other male is “trying to push himself into my world” (68). I recognize that this type of exchange can often happen between two heterosexual males, but I could not help but feel slightly put off that a straight white male felt as though another person of his demographic was encroaching on him when women feel this way all the time. The author states that he struggles with “hewing too closely to my demographic stereotype” (115), but when he talks like this, it is hard not to associate him with this attitude.
It is important to note that my view of the author slightly switched in Chapter 8 when he writes about Sinead O’Connor vs. Miley Cyrus. Hyden states that “Miley froze me up. When it came to offering my own hot take, I punted” (141). He describes this fear as one where he did not feel that it was his place to talk about an issue of sex and expression among women musicians. I feel that the following quote is necessary to think about when speaking of any music journalism and to understand the context of Hyden’s writing:
“I feared that whatever I wrote would sound reactionary by virtue of its being written by a straight white male in his late thirties. I didn’t want to be ‘that guy,’ and being ‘that guy’ was unavoidable because I was that guy. My demographic profile would speak louder than anything I could possibly write” (141).
With this qualifier, I almost felt bad about labeling him as “that guy” in my own head. However, in this Miley Cyrus chapter, he uses the term “Whore-ah Montana” (137), which could be perceived as funny or insulting depending on the audience. He touches on race and sexism when talking about Taylor Swift vs. Kanye West— the award show incident could be viewed as recurrent prejudice against artists of color or “a man saying ‘fuck you’ to a woman finally getting her due recognition” (83). It seems that these social issues are unfortunately only mentioned briefly when the author felt obliged to talk about them. Otherwise, he skips over them because he has a difficult time connecting such a topic to his own identity.
Swift vs. Kanye is one of those rivalries that I have an unequivocal opinion about. Kanye should not have interrupted Swift at the VMAs or referred to her as “that bitch” after the way that he acted towards her. Hyden takes a different approach though. He claims that the moral of the story here is that award shows do not actually signal merit because both West and Swift are talented in their own ways—West diminished the credibility of the VMAs simply by creating this drama. Although this did not change my viewpoint of who “won” the rivalry and Hyden did not reach a conclusion on details of the actual feud, I appreciated this deeper outlook that celebrity and entertainment news sources would never discuss.
Another overarching issue of the book is that the author loves talking about his own life almost too much. Do not get me wrong—I found his anecdotes relatable on a lot of levels, especially his “this was obviously a dumb decision for which there is no excuse” (127) attitude. It is not easy to be able to connect personal real-life experiences to pop culture, and to make witty comments about it. For the most part, Hyden is able to do this. He connects his own struggles with making deep male friendships to the rivalry between the White Stripes and the Black Keys, and his nerdy high school self to Prince’s former “uncoolness” compared to Michael Jackson who has always been cool. On one hand, I enjoyed reading these snippets, and I know I would have a fun time if I sat down to have a conversation with Hyden. But another part of me had trouble following all of his stories, and felt that the book would be better labeled as (at least) half-memoir. I did not hate the chapters that brought in the NFL, Playboy, Nixon, Chris Christie, or Hyden’s wife because they were humorous, but sometimes I just wanted to tell him, “Focus!” This is, however, more an organizational problem, rather than the quality of the writing.
I go back and forth when thinking about this book because the book was good, but not good enough to mask the issues that I found with it. Of course, I could be overthinking an issue that someone else would describe as a joke, or maybe Hyden simply was not writing for an audience like me. I often questioned who the audience for this book was. Was it supposed to be for middle-aged white males who happen to be music geeks? The wording and topic of the book seem accessible to the general public. There are not too many subtle pop culture references, and there are no complex words that I had to look up. Hyden talked about Justin Bieber as a cultural comparison, which makes the book seem agreeable with my demographic as well. However, he also specifically talks to an audience who was at some point “younger and 100 percent more stoned than you are now” (200). It seems like this is the audience that he was picturing, and maybe that demographic would find his personal anecdotes less distracting from the rivalries. But I personally felt like the author’s therapist, listening to him ramble about his childhood experiences and the ways in which he relates to certain artists.
I also wonder if the conflicts that he presents are truly rivalries. The author himself admits that some of the rivalries were created more so by the public rather than an actual feud between the artists. This goes back again to the lack of representation in his rivalries, but also just the sheer narrowness of the pool of rivalries he chose from. There are plenty of other rivalries that are not created by the public (and that are also more diverse) such as Gwen Stefani vs. Courtney Love, Whitney Houston vs. Mariah Carey, Zayn Malik vs. One Direction, Nicki Minaj vs. Cardi B, etc. The book was also written before Prince’s death and it seemed slightly wrong that the author ends the chapter on the note that “Prince lived” while “MJ just got weirder and weirder until he stopped living” (61). His argument does not make sense anymore now that Prince has also passed. Reading it after his death, I wondered if a deeper meaning still existed for this rivalry.
Did the book accomplish what it said it would on the cover? (“What Pop Music Rivalries Reveal About the Meaning of Life”). For the most part, yes. Each chapter needs to be treated separately, so not all have achieved the same effect as others. Some made me think deeply, while others left me questioning if I had really learned anything new other than the trite drama between the artists. Then there were chapters like the one on Biggie vs. Tupac that just left me with an overwhelming feeling of sadness and mystery— “There’s nothing deep about it. It’s as empty as empty can be” (266) were the last lines of that chapter. Although Hyden could be perceived as old-fashioned at times, the book gave me a deeper understanding of what these rivalries are about. I would encourage people to read the book, but go in with the mindset that they will probably learn more about the author than about themselves in the process. After all, music rivalries are subjective and Hyden’s favorite band may make you think, “Your Favorite Band is Killing Me!”