![]() ![]() ![]() Not for Tosches et al the scholarly approach of contemporaries Greil Marcus or the self-appointed “Dean of American Rock Critics” Robert Christgau (“a pompous asshole,” according to a drunken Bangs). ![]() Like the other pioneering rock critics who earned the soubriquet the Noise Boys – Richard Meltzer and Lester Bangs – Tosches was clearly a lavishly gifted writer from the off, but his early work had as much to do with a particularly rabid form of iconoclasm as it did prose. ![]() Indeed, there was a grain of truth in that description. Even when he reprinted his early work as a rock critic in the 2000 collection The Nick Tosches Reader, he was inclined to dismiss it as “making a mess on the page”. He wrote far more about other subjects than he ever did about rock and pop: biographies of sportsmen and mafia-linked Italian bankers, books about drugs, books inspired by modern art, a slew of novels and poetry collections. The late Nick Tosches would doubtless have been furious to be described as a music journalist. ![]()
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