Real Life Rock Top 10 (08/26/15)

Lydon’s first autobiography—the 1994 Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs, with full cover credit as “with Keith and Kent Zimmerman”—had its moments, but it was constantly interrupted and padded with other people’s words, and it wasn’t a real book. This, despite an inside note of “with Andrew Perry,” is a real book—full of blather, guff, and repetition, at least a hundred pages longer than it might have been, but singing, pounding, shouting, even whispering with such a fierce intelligence you can be brought up short on any page. Lydon apologizes for nothing, praises himself for everything, claims infinite meaning for the Sex Pistols…

(RLR Top 10, August 2015, at Barnes & Noble)