About Rock Geek Chic

William and Cristy have just gotten a show: Rock Geek Chic Radio. Saturday mornings from 8-9 Central Time (GMT-6). Streaming online at weft.org. Or listen with static at 90.1 FM for those lucky enough to be in the radius.

Rock Geek Chic is rock scholarship by William Gillespie and Cristy Scoggins of Urbana, Illinois. This website is the draft of our book. Send us your CD or concert tickets; we will do our best to provide a positive review. And we are right about everything. Yes, it’s as simple and shameless as that.

Rock Geek Chic
co/ Spineless Books
PO Box 17191
Urbana IL 61803

We’d like to know what we’ve done. You may email us feedback; we will post it here if it is well-written. We also welcome additions to our various lists and topics. To encourage discourse, we have set up a blog at rockgeekchic.blogspot.com

cristy at rock geek chic dot com
william at rock geek chic dot com

FAQ

Q: You like bands? I have a band. I'm going to put you on our email list. Okay?

A: No. We review music, not email. If you send us email about your band, it is likely that, if we ever even get to hear their music, we will already be weary of them.

Q: Oh. Well, I'll mail you a CD?

A: Nice. Incidentally, we won't waste anybody's time by writing a bad review of a small or up-and-coming act. We save our ammo to take down the big guys.

Q: Posted by: you are dumb. Friday, April 11, 2008 1:51 PM.

I will no longer read your posts and consider your opinions worth reading after going to your website and seeing that you not only hate Bob Dylan, The Pixies, and Radiohead (and other influential bands) but discredit their work and insult them.

Stop writing about music.

Now.

A: Dear adoring fan,

Before you get all mad and throw your Betsey Johnson trucker cap at us, please remember: your mom bought you that. And besides, a lot of people are upset with us for revealing the Truth: that maybe one or two of the two of us doesn't like Bob Dylan as much as she or they thinks they should. Before we destroyed Bob Dylan's career with this pronouncement (made simultaneously available to everybody on the World Wide Web) Bob Dylan was able to eek out a comfortable living on the state fair and Victoria's Secret commercial circuit. Now he would have a hard time landing a job as a roadie in a Daniel Johnson cover band. Look at it our way: it's not easy being right about everything, especially all the time, and also to have so many readers that detractors like yourself try to wound us by publically boycotting reading our free website. Well, shucks, even though you aren't a careful reader, we will sure miss you, and you will miss out on knowing. To paraphrase Allen Ginsberg: "Are you going to let your emotional life be run by Rolling Stone magazine?" Because it's significant that you told us we ought not to dislike the Pixies because they are "influential," but that you did not make the more risky claim that their songs are good. What you are saying is that rock and roll is not art but a corporate power structure, and if we don't defer to the idiotic wisdom of middle management, we risk being fired. So be it. It's yes men like you that help keep America strong, with an illiterate president and a national debt equivalent to $30,000 per American. But as for us, we calls em like we sees em. Bob Dylan is good, sure, almost as good as Phil Ochs or Woody Guthrie or the other artists he built a career on imitating--indeed almost as good as the Byrds or Mannfred Mann or Jimi Hendrix or Robyn Hitchcock or the artists who made many of Bob Dylan's songs listenable. But our scholarship is more usefully applied elsewhere.

We tried to help you, but we understand that it is frightening for people not to do as they are told. We are disobedient, it is true, and are not living up to our responsibility to support the media conglomerates who rule the world by sucking up to their most heavily promoted musical acts. Bob Dylan, we are sorry that now that we have destroyed your credibility by withdrawing our unconditional endorsement Columbia records wouldn't touch you with a ten foot pole, or even a thin white rope, but we have freed you to make political folk music for the first time in your career, now that it is more desperately needed than ever.

Love You To,
William and Cristy

P.S. We may have flaws, known only to the inner circle of our closest co-conspirators, but being dumb is not among them.

NOW PLAYING ON OUR STEREO:

"She Was a Hotel Detective," by They Might Be Giants
(sophisticated disco version from the Back to Skull EP)

Widow City by the Fiery Furnaces

"Sandy" by Caribou

Vertebrats