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A review by tasharobinson
Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate A Cappella Glory by Mickey Rapkin
3.0
Closer to 2.5 stars. I wish this book — the non-fiction basis for the Pitch Perfect movie series — had stuck with one a cappella group and followed them to finals. Or stuck with one group per section, or had stuck with a linear timeline, or something that passed as an organizing principle. It's just this grab bag of names and anecdotes, of people who don't distinguish themselves at all except when they're misbehaving. I lost track of the players quickly — when you're covering decades of college-group history, and people drop in and out every year, the names start to blur quickly, and when so many of the stories are repetitive (arguing over trivia about musical arrangement or group direction or album production; acting out on gigs by drinking too much and acting unprofessional) the lines blur even more. Only a few of the details really stand out at the end, like the group that showed up to a David Letterman taping fully expecting to just walk in and be allowed to perform on his show — and eventually, after intense mocking, getting their wish.
YouTube wound up being a really useful resource as I read this book. There are SO many detailed descriptions of songs and sounds that are pretty meaningless in prose — including a ridiculous number of cases where the author spells out whatever deedle-dee dah dum dum dees or whakkita-chakkitas the group of the moment is singing in the baseline of a given song. But often it's possible to find the group in question performing the song in question, which clears up what Rapkin is talking about. Still, while it's clear that an immense amount of journalistic effort went into writing this book, it's easy to wish for a lot less meaningless name-date-event-songlist-sound detail, and more of a broad and approachable overview. This book is incredibly weedsy, and the repetition gets pretty grinding.
YouTube wound up being a really useful resource as I read this book. There are SO many detailed descriptions of songs and sounds that are pretty meaningless in prose — including a ridiculous number of cases where the author spells out whatever deedle-dee dah dum dum dees or whakkita-chakkitas the group of the moment is singing in the baseline of a given song. But often it's possible to find the group in question performing the song in question, which clears up what Rapkin is talking about. Still, while it's clear that an immense amount of journalistic effort went into writing this book, it's easy to wish for a lot less meaningless name-date-event-songlist-sound detail, and more of a broad and approachable overview. This book is incredibly weedsy, and the repetition gets pretty grinding.