yourfriendtorie's review against another edition
4.0
I am only halfway through this book, but at this point I feel inclined to comment that whoever is copyediting over at the New Press needs to step it up a bit. This one and Heather Rogers' Gone Tomorrow are surprisingly full of spelling and grammatical errors. What, do they just use spell check now? Maybe it's just the librarian speaking, but it seems like these kinds of errors are more common and more commonly overlooked lately. It's not a crime against humanity or anything, but damn, it's annoying!
daynpitseleh's review against another edition
2.0
As a business marketing student and a supporter of 'indie' arts and culture, I felt torn by this book. While some of the cases and facts presented in the book made me feel bitter towards the ad world, I don't think the entirety of the advertising world is purposefully trying to erode the integrity of the underground.
foozmeat's review
3.0
The author gave me a few new things to think about but for the most part I think you'll gain more academically from reading the books she cites ([book: Conquest of Cool] for example). What I found the most compelling were her personal accounts of interactions with corporate money/power as an activist and as an artist. These above anything else show how complicated our culture has become in both production and consumption.
stgts's review
3.0
I'm giving this book three stars largely because I think the wealth of information, research and experience contained in it is extraordinary, and largely eye-opening for me. I recommended it several times while reading it largely for this reason, but always with caveats. In fact, as much as I feel like there's a lot to gain from this book, I don't feel I can put a recommendation of it out into the world without heavy caveats that it is, essentially, one-sided. In an environment like this, I can understand it; Moore has a lot of love for her community and a great deal of complicated disgust for the invasion of it by marketers and big companies. But I found her love blinded her, to a glaring degree, to the faults of DIY/punk/underground communities, and it was hard to overlook for me. The people I know who are most closely tied to the kind of society and mindset Moore holds are up trans women, the disabled and the chronically ill, but they seemed strangely absent from her book; she goes as far as to say that riot grrl as a movement eventually made space for "less traditionally gendered fans" without a hint of irony. Part of this could be the way seven years has dated the book - a reference to Jonah Peretti as an "individual activist" in particular - but I find it hard to stomach her passing accusations that famous black people are "safe" from structural racism, and so a black comedian criticizing the racial biases of the police is somehow being edgy in a way that is without risk or significance. Like I said, I think there is a lot of good raw information in the book, and I appreciate the ways in which it challenged me, but I wish Moore had been willing to challenge her surroundings beyond the politics of 'selling out.' The pure, unmarketed underground isn't a utopia for everyone.
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