DONNA GAINES
A MISFIT’S MANIFESTO: THE SPIRITUAL JOURNEY OF A ROCK & ROLL HEART
VILLARD/RANDOM HOUSE
LINKS:

donnagaines.com

randomhouse.com
Donna Gaines has been known to New Yorkers for years as a music journalist for the Village Voice. About 12 or so years ago she became known to the world through her first book, Teenage Wasteland: Suburbia’s Dead End Kids, putting her sociology degree to work by analyzing suburban metalheads and suicide in a small NJ town and thus combining her two loves. Now in 2003 she has come out with A Misfit’s Manifesto: The Spiritual Journey of a Rock & Roll Heart, which combines here two loves of music and sociology, but this time with the addition of the added dimension of autobiography. She turns her doctoral magnifying glass inward, with the result being at times self-deprecating as well as self-indulgent.
. She terms herself a misfit, which, in the anally repressed Jewish enclaves of Rockaway Beach, Queens in the ‘50s, she may have truly been, at least in her own only-child, unsocialized, fat-girl mind. It’s the internal dialogue and landscape of her own perceptions viewed through the adjusting “scientific” empirical processes of academia. At times the read is an entertaining page-turner, but there are large dry segments where the professor in her needs to be reined in. Musically, culturally and ethnically it’s an odyssey of the many varied strata and sub-strata that make up what passes for modern society. But what is annoying is the underlying tone of smug superiority that has been adopted and adapted so well by her baby boomer generation. While her friendship with Joey Ramone may have felt to her like communing with a “god” or “spiritual advisor” as she terms him, and she may very well truly believe that, she sounds no different than a teenager gushing over N’Sync. Do her age and the addition of her doctoral degree give her added insight or just qualify her as the world’s most academic overgrown fan-girl?


----Christine Natanael