Chemical Ambition

The first chapter of John Niven's KILL YOUR FRIENDS details a painful meeting (more painful because it's so ordinary) in the life of Steven Stelfox, record-company employee. Steven likes porn, looking great and Schadenfreude. Steven does not like his job, his friends, his coworkers or, so it would appear, any kind of music whatsoever. Working in A&R does that to a person, apparently.

If there's anything Steven truly loves, besides himself, it's cocaine, but he comes down from his high long enough to realize he wants the job up for grabs in his department, and his best office politicking alone isn't going to get him there. This isn't the point at which Steven and I parted ways with how we saw the world -- that happened much earlier -- but it is where KILL YOUR FRIENDS goes from exquisitely foul to actually diabolical.

The world described within this book and the man describing it are so completely debauched that a lot of readers may be put off before the plot kicks in, and not just because Steven takes his sense of entitlement to a scary new level: There is literally nothing redeeming about this guy. Yet I still wanted to follow him into the depths of this world because, to reference TRAINSPOTTING (a book this has been compared to, although I've never read it), Steven doesn't choose what he does because he's particularly happy: He chooses his own survival in order to screw other people.

It's the diametric opposite of an A&R memoir I reviewed earlier this year by Dan Kennedy. Kennedy, like Niven, worked in the music business, but his book is shaded by this kind of creepy naivete about what he does, so he can affect horror when one of his artists gets a song placed in a major commercial campaign (I believe it was Jewel he was speaking of), or be forced to cut loose bands he loves and replace them with the next fly-by-night pop sensation. The absence of self-awareness in his account of it made me somehow suspicious. Granted, Niven is working in fiction, which gives him a lot more leeway, but Steven's illusions are much more cynical: He believes he deserves that promotion and finds the discovery that he has to work for it distasteful. He signs on a Spice Girls-type girl group, Songbirds, with whom he abhors working, for the sole reason that he can make lots of money off of them and prove he's a hitmaker.

His opinion of coworkers who believe themselves to be indie tastemakers is similarly low, and since the book takes place in the mid-'90s, an era current music executives undoubtedly reflect on wistfully, he proves himself thoroughly rotted to the core once again. Maybe it's just because I'm a cynic, but I preferred the depravity on offer here, even when it was most offensive, to its shiny alternative.

NB: I got this book for free from the good folks at Harper Perennial. Thanks, guys!