I’d never heard of Neil Strauss when I found this funky looking book called The Game. It was all about how to pick up chicks. It was also about self confidence and what it takes to go out into the world and ask for something you have no real reason to expect you will get. It was a fun book.
So when I saw Everyone Loves You When You’re Dead, that sounded like a fun title, too. But not so much.
Neil falls into that trap that everyone who has more material than they need for a story falls into. Hey, the Editor said to cut out all this crap, so now I can turn it into a book!
Neil’s day job, when he isn’t writing tell-alls about pornstars or pickup artists, is working for magazines like Rolling Stone, where he does celerity interviews. Apparently he spent days with these famous folks so that he could scrape together enough material for an article. I was amazed at how quickly I became utterly bored with the mindless drivel Neil has to listen to from the famous and the now all but forgotten.
I couldn’t get through it. Maybe if Neil had just published a collection of his edited, published articles it would have been OK. But Neil seems to think he ranks up there with The Beatles and we all want to hear the rejected cuts as well as the finished pieces.
Or maybe that’s the problem. I’m not all that keen on Snoop Dogg or Christian Aguilera or even Britney Spears or Bruce Springsteen. And the behind the scenes interviews with people I have never heard of really did me in. Though I have to admit that ?, of ? and the Mysterians, confession that he was a Martian was kind of interesting.
The interviews are also sliced and dice to make a kind of narrative out of the random ramblings of the celebrities. We drop off one famous person and pick up the thread of the topic with another. The end result is that feeling that even the rich and famous can be bores you wouldn’t want to be stuck sitting next to on a long bus trip.
Neil got paid to listen to this crap, I’m not sure why anyone else thinks it great stuff.
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