So, having finished Where Dead Voices Gather, I have to say I’m disappointed that my initial reactions held true throughout the book, and my hope for a greater focus on the admittedly fascinating story Tosches is telling never materialized. Ultimately, Tosches seems to care more about letting the reader know that he’s a great authority on the subject, and going off on tangential rants, and being weirdly critical of Elvis, and proving how smart he is, and cramming in every opinion he’s ever had about music prior to 1960, than actually informing them about the subject at hand. Sure, maybe that makes for a shorter book, but I wish an editor had told him to cut to the chase. I always felt like most double albums–The River and The White Album come to mind immediately, but I’m sure there are more examples–would have worked better as one fantastic single album, with higher standards for what makes the cut and what doesn’t.  I feel the same way about Tosches’ book.  I get that he’s trying to do a kind of stream-of-consciousness narrative, but in the end he’s not Bukowski or Joyce or Faulkner, and it just comes off as pretentious to me.  It makes it all the more frustrating a read that I was truly fascinated by the story of Emmett Miller, to the point where I think I’d love a better telling of his life story–I don’t think there are enough known facts for a full-on biography, but this feels like it’s begging to be a movie to me.  For all its obvious and glaring faults, the minstrel show is perhaps the spark from which all of American show business and pop culture sprang, and learning about it was fascinating, if repulsive on a visceral level, as I imagine seeing a minstrel show were I to go back and time and do so would be for me.  However, Tosches, for reasons which I don’t even begin to understand, feels the need to defend the minstrel show rather than present it as an ultimately flawed, backwards, and horribly racist institution–yet one that perhaps did some good, was influential and interesting, and even allowed many black performers to get their start eventually.  He more or less calls us the real racists for rejecting the minstrel show, and basically argues that all pop culture is racist anyway, and besides which some of his favorite musicians are black!  While there may be racist elements in many parts of subsequent pop culture, that doesn’t make it alright that the minstrel show was racist to the core. I find Tosches repulsive and his position indefensible, which makes the vigor and vitriol with which he dies on that hill all the more offensive. I wish someone else could have told this story.