One of the book's contributors is Leanne Potts, a former Tribune reporter who now writes about pop culture for Albuquerque's morning newspaper.Her target of choice? Lynyrd Skynyrd's debut album "Pronounced Leh-nerd Skin-nerd."
What? How could one of the most memorable rock albums in history, one that includes "Gimme Three Steps," "Simple Man" and "Free Bird" - hello! "Free Bird"! - be on anyone's worst-album ever list?
For Potts, 38, her contempt for the 1973 album is less about its sound - although she writes that Ronnie Van Zant's lyrics "lack the sort of telling details that make a good song great" - and more about the Southern stigma that came with it.
"I didn't like the whole American-by-birth, Southern-by-grace-of-God ethos that had come to be associated with Southern rock bands like Skynyrd," writes Potts, who was born and raised in Alabama.
"I wanted none of Skynyrd's talk of down-home values. It sounded like Moral Majority code speak, and this teenaged member of Greenpeace and fan of musical minimalists such as the Ramones and Devo was having none of this Confederate-flag-waving, axe-wielding mob of rednecks in bell-bottoms."
And just like that, Potts buzz-saws through an institution no critic has had the gall to berate under his or her breath, let alone in a much-anticipated 300-page paperback - a book that received tyrannical criticism on the Internet weeks before its release.
Potts admits she was only 7 when the album came out and didn't start listening to it intently until she was 15 - a ploy to impress her Skynyrd die-hard boyfriend.
But she resents the notion that just because she didn't grow up with the baby boomers, she wouldn't know what Lynyrd Skynyrd or any other music of the time was all about.
"It sticks in my craw that rock is so skewed to the boomers," Potts says. "Like 'You don't know; you weren't there,' in this condescending tone, like we were born too late.
"Skynyrd's album is the one I thought of partly because of the southern connection. Because they were classic rock and because I lived in the South, they were gods. They were always there."
I've been getting my 4-year-old daughter to say "Hay, mayun, play me sum Free Bird!" in the car.
My wife was mortified at first, now she just shakes her head.
Good work! That's more or less how I picked up on the classics myself - riding around in the car while dad had them on the "new" tape deck. We also had an 8 track in a Datsun Z, but that was a little before my time. Two decades later I still got the same stuff playing, only now on the CD changer in the back of my truck. So teach 'em right and it'll stick with them for the rest of their lives.
Why am I *not* surprised?! ;)
A Southern man don't need Potts around anyway. Now..... "Turn it up!"