James CampionRecensioni

There are fewer than a dozen books out there about a single song, and that's not an accident. It's an impossible task to undertake: is there enough to talk about? don't get too technical! don't read too deeply into things that aren't there! don't bore us!!

Well, Campion does none of these things. This book is an outright success, from the first page to the last. And while the book IS about the song Hey Jude of course, it covers much more than that. His device of using song lyrics simultaneously as chapter names and to frame the chapter's topic (inspiration, family, Beatles history, song structure, social upheaval, etc) is very, very clever, and sets you up for what you will be reading over the following pages.

Campion is a true expert on pop culture and pop music—you only have to read his other books or listen to his and Adam Duritz's Underwater Sunshine Podcast to find that out—but he never comes across as overbearing or lecturing here. Instead, he is more that happy to let the dozens of experts he interviewed for the book tell the story, deftly weaving their thoughts and observations together with his own research.

If you like the song Hey Jude, or any song, or The Beatles, or any other band, or music in general, or the 60s, or your mom, read this book.

In the Beatles canon, there is one composition, one performance that stands up and takes notice of the world. Since 1968, that song has been ‘Hey Jude.’

Author James Campion elongates the timeline from then to now with ‘Take A Sad Song: The Emotional Currency of “Hey Jude”’ (Backbeat Books, 2022). If one questions why this song has come to define how we feel - deeply - about ourselves and globally, each other, he details those passages to great effect and empathy.

Campion brings together several noted musicologists, journalists, and musicians whose love for and knowledge of The Beatles helps to describe the far-flung reasons and reactions that bind ‘Hey Jude’ to our collective DNA and the shared elements of the individual who miraculously brought it all together.

Paul McCartney’s childhood is well documented with the loss of his mother to cancer and the hardships that followed. The ensuing years saw the rise of The Beatles with not only their popularity as a band, but as songwriters, Lennon and McCartney ascended to the top of the charts with their catchy memorable tunes and distinctive sound.

But what really happened went far deeper. While the struggle to maintain a normal life was in fact an everyday occurrence for those involved, McCartney processed his soul into a song. As early-to-mid 1968 has shown, his personal life started to unravel: the trip to Rishikesh proved insightful but fractured his relationship with Lennon, and his longtime girlfriend Jane Asher broke off their engagement. What else could he do but pour all this into an elegy?

Campion’s book is not so much a studious laundry list of how ‘Hey Jude’ came to be and where it went. The uniqueness of the times, as many interviewees noted, demanded to be heard and then have it propelled forward. The mechanics of the composition are unmatchable. McCartney - as has been noted in a previous blog entry - was surrounded and imbibed with music. His mind was constantly spinning, never slowing down in absorbing breath and emotion coming from his environment. Whether he intended to construct what has become an epic, relatable anthem is only up for reflection by McCartney himself.

The frequently told and legendary story surrounding ‘Hey Jude’ is not hard to fathom: as Lennon became involved with Yoko Ono and left behind his wife Cynthia and young son Julian, McCartney traveled out to see them. During the car trip, the germination of the song came to him and while the conversation with Cynthia was lighthearted, he knew immediately the sense of loss and abandonment that was coming soon, especially for a boy whose circumstances mirrored his own.
Instead, the implied autobiographical details infused in ‘Hey Jude’ elicited personal empathy from Lennon. While also losing his mother months after McCartney’s mother's passing, Lennon refused to live with the scenario that she was gone. Hence his blocked emotion at explicitly revealing this in song… until ‘Hey Jude.’ It was his comment to McCartney about leaving in the placeholder sentence ‘the movement you need is on your shoulder’ that gave his junior partner the confidence that this song was relatable to not only him… but anyone.

Two areas that are especially interesting are the recording of the song and the filming of the video. While noting that the band switched over to the then-new Trident Studios (with the intention of using their 8-track recording system), once completed and taken back to EMI Studios, the dissimilar operational logistics and control settings between the two seemed insurmountable. Campion explains those defeating circumstances and the fixes utilized by the team at EMI (including the brief return of engineer Geoff Emerick) to the great relief of everyone who had believed it was a lost cause.

With humor, the story behind the filming of the video is decidedly more intriguing. In fact, there are two filmings that Campion covers. The first was the rehearsals of the song at EMI. Filmed by the National Music Council of Great Britain for the documentary ‘Music!,’ this footage is notable for the fact of George Harrison’s presence in the control room with George Martin and Ken Scott. McCartney’s specific demands led to a spat and Harrison exited the studio below. The bassist’s attitude toward perfection was an open secret that would lead to further friction in the coming months.

Another surprising revelation (to this reviewer) was the Michael Lindsay-Hogg-directed version of ‘Hey Jude.’ As presented to the UK public, one surmised it was specifically done for exclusivity for David Frost - hence his introduction. However, Campion unearths the hysterical reasons why Frost shouldn’t have been there and then delves into the unspoken visual nuances of the performance, the band’s interaction with the invited audience, and the “cosmic kinship’ as described by Campion between Lennon and McCartney.

But what really drives this narrative along are the numerous observations from Campion’s interviewees and his own personal examination of the crucial four-plus minute coda. Initially, told that ‘it just wasn’t done,’ what does one think if you’re The Beatles? You go ahead - and do it.

Na… na… na… na na na na will in fact, become more than an ending to a long song. At the time, it is a rule-breaking, non-conformist leader that disrupts the leftover hippy-dippy AM sounds of summer and reaches out in a soul-searching, personal call-to-arms as 1968 explodes in domestic and worldwide chaos. Several scholars note that where McCartney succeeded was reaching back from childhood and leaning on the Christian hymn ‘Te Deum.’ And to add: a fourth-century canticle that he subconsciously meshed with The Drifters’ 1962 soulful ‘Save The Last Dance For Me’ (a Beatle favorite) is not an unreal possibility.

As Campion notes several times (and with the comments and remarks from his respondents), ‘Hey Jude’ is not just about Paul McCartney inheriting a character (one of his songwriting traits) and offering a manufactured tale. This was a Paul McCartney who passionately cared that this creation succeeds on the ‘everyman’ level: from a TV audience in 1968 to the countless world tours to young non-English speaking musicians such as Korean pop band BTS who when asked what their favorite Beatles song was, jumped up and began Na… na… na… na na na na.

The impact of ‘Hey Jude’ from a song to an event is incalculable. By definition or perhaps default, this milestone in music has come to define the personal and professional attainments one feels - whether it be a comforting lyric in a time of mourning or a place that thousands of artists aspire to reach every time they compose. Campion has fashioned a unique testament to the power of one song to countless individuals.

You wanted the Best, You got the Best, The greatest band in the world...KISS

Shout It Out Loud: The Story of Kiss's Destroyer and the Making of an American Icon by James Campion is the history of Kiss up to and including the making of Destroyer. Campion is the Managing Editor of The Reality Check News & Information Desk and the author of Deep Tank Jersey, Fear No Art, Trailing Jesus, and Midnight For Cinderella.

It's hard to believe that Destroyer was released forty years ago. I was introduced to Kiss by a school friend when I was in that musical stage of moving out of AM Gold and into progressive rock. Eventually Kiss and Led Zeppelin posters covered most of the empty wall space in my room, and CREEM magazine replaced MAD as I began to take music seriously. A good part of growing up in the 1970s included quite a bit of KISS. It was hard, loud, and its simple message. Today, however, the music seems tame. The rhymes and lyrics are almost humorous at times:

You were distant, now you're nearer
I can feel your face inside the mirror
The lights are out and I can feel you, baby, with my hand.
~ C'mon and Love Me

Still I manage to listen to KISS with fond memories of youth.

Shout it Out Loud tracks Kiss from its early roots to finally making it big with Destroyer. It's hard to believe that KISS almost didn't make it. Their early albums floundered which is difficult to believe with songs like "Deuce", "Strutter", and even "Rock and Roll All Night". KISS created a frenzy at live shows with pyrotechnics and Gene Simmons spitting fire and "blood." The act, however, did not transfer into studio success. The band was tanking and released "Alive" as an act of desperation in 1975. The impossible happened. The live album sold, and sold, and sold. The same studio songs that fizzled now sold. Kiss was about the act as much as it was about the music. "Alive" captured some of the act and saved the band so that Destroyer could be produced.

The making of Destroyer reveals much about the band and its members. From the drinking and drug use of two members and the unexpected tea toddler to the songs that made it to the album, Campion writing and history will capture any fan's attention. Alice Cooper fans will also enjoy this book as both bands shared producer Bob Ezrin who left his mark on their music. KISS moved from being a raw power band to a more refined rock band under Ezrin drill instructor type leadership.

Shout It Out Loud is an excellent look at the evolution of one of the most recognizable bands in rock history. It is not an easy ride and there are more challenges than most people can expect. It was not an easy way to the top for KISS and their contemporaries in Australia, AC/DC, may just as well be singing about KISS when they played:

Ridin' down the highway
Goin' to a show
Stop in all the byways
Playin' rock 'n' roll
Gettin' robbed
Gettin' stoned
Gettin' beat up
Broken-boned
Gettin' had
Gettin' took
I tell you, folks
It's harder than it looks

It's a long way to the top if you wanna rock 'n' roll

A wonderful and thought provoking dive down the Zevon rabbit hole, or should I say into the Zevon Corner. Each essay covers both a song/album and either a facet of Zevon's life, a time in his career, or some obstacle he was up against. And he was up against plenty of them, often self-inflicted. Smart, well researched, liberty-taking, and multiple view-offering, it's what you've come to expect from a Campion book.

Never Surrender!

An exhaustive look at the making of KISS's Destroyer, by any measure the band's most important album. This is not a simple rock and roll bio, this is real history-doing. Starting with a thesis in which he proposes that KISS didn't become the iconic band/brand we know today until Destroyer was made, the author crafts an un-put-downable narrative that includes new interviews with everyone from the great producer Bob Ezrin to DMV employees to folks that literally swept up at the Record Plant. Songwriting sessions, microphone placement, 70s drug culture, groupies—it is all in this book. If you are going to write a 300 page book about a rock and roll album and it isn't by the Beatles, you better do it right. James Campion did.

A friend of mine once said, "It's okay to go out an play with the archetypes, just don't rape the archetypes." I feel that JC, or James Campion has done just this in his attempt at creating a post- (post-) modern visionary novel which employs all the campy tricks of the trade: pretentious wit, vapid metaphors, contrived meaningfulness and depth, flat, stereotyped characters, and last but not least, an end of the novel therapy session using the tediously unoriginal "speak-to-the-reader" techniques abused by so many writers and film-makers. I've always disliked books that novelize writing, films about film-makers, songs about musicians (metacognitive art). They strike me as pretentious, conceited and self-congratulatory--something akin to masturbation but with an audience subjected to the author's need for voyeurs and not a chance in hell to find the release of the "happy ending". I also disdain the use of the public as a couch for one's therapy. Writing might be great for personal therapy, but the confessional novel/memoir has been employed too often and for too long for me to find much value in knowing other people's sins. I simply don't care to know that much--TMI--I don't hear you--lalalalala! I want my writers to share IDEAS not baggage--I do not want to be responsible for an author's psychosis, neurosis or crimes, I have enough of my own to deal with, thank you.

The only two redeeming features of this novel for me were found on pages 107 where the entity that is "Y" discusses "the big lie," and on page 308 in a much too short diatribe on "madness." The mention of Syd Barrett (Pink Floyd) raised this novel from a 1-star to a 2-star, which might seem ludicrous to some, but fits with the common theme of the novel: caprice, whimsy and complete absence of logic, or meaning, for that matter. Which apparently is the heart of what Campion considers to be the essence of "Y".

I have no idea what Campion hoped to achieve, but Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance or Siddhartha this book is not.

I don't think I understand anything. Seriously, this story was wildly difficult to figure out what is happening.

I had the same kind of befudlement trying to figure out Infinite Jest. The same feeling, but in a totally different way... if that make sense. You cannot explain this book, you have to experience it for yourself. It's trippy and twisted, and odd... but worth taking the time to muddle though.

When I first started reading James Campion’s novel, I asked myself ‘where are we going? Clearly on a journey!’ As I continued, it became increasingly evident I was taking an acid trip, me the reader being the proverbial fly on the wall watching the craziness unfold. Deeper in, I thought ‘Ah, here’s the meaning. This is a commentary on the extent of the media’s influence over people.’ By the time I finished the trip, however, I realized that this novel is actually about the deepest meaning possible in life, best described I think by the Buddhist concept of duality: that Buddhahood and Fundamental Darkness exist side by side, or back to back as in a coin, within the same being. You know, two but not two, “Y” but not “Y”, James but not James.

James brilliantly captures this concept in the title alone (the backwards Y). But the story itself is brilliant because it so cleverly reveals that deepest of all principles in life, that each person has the capacity for both Buddhahood (enlightenment) and Fundamental Darkness (delusion). When we understand this, we are Buddhas; when we don’t, we are ordinary people. “If the minds of living beings are impure, their land is also impure, but if their minds are pure, so is their land. There are not two lands, pure or impure in themselves. The difference lies solely in the good or evil of our minds.” (Major Writings of Nichiren Daishonin; “On Attaining Buddhahood in This Lifetime,” Volume 1, page 4)

I’m not giving anything else away because you have to read it for yourself. But near the end, we are told we’ve been had. With all due respect, I beg to differ: “Two Campions.” Fantasy/Reality. Dark/light. Reader/Writer. Confusion/Clarity. James/James. My point exactly!

This story, including the commercial interruptions and the author’s apology at the end, confirms – not that I had any doubt – that the duality inherent in life exists and pervades everything, whether we like it or not. The question is which prevails, the dark or the light? James’ ultimate message is that it’s up to us, the reader/author of our own lives, to decide. “Y” is his skillful vehicle.

Exploring the potential of creating true uniqueness by employing the writing styles of a myriad of other authors, this is a story about a writer struggling with perception of reality and with writing something of quality, while immersed in compelled absurdity. I believe it is semi-autobiographical.

Generally, I enjoy meta-fiction. As an English major in college, classes that included meta-fiction were some of my favorites. However, Y is an inaccessible and un-funny attempt at meta-fiction, I was completely put off by this book, and it took me weeks, rather than hours or days, to read. The only reason I finished it was because I received an Early Reviewer copy and I felt responsible to complete the book before writing my review.

The device of writing in the first person, as the author, didn't work. The attempt at fantasy and the references to both Alice in Wonderland and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory didn't work. Rather, they felt like a poor rehash of classic tales.

I've been working my way through this book since I got it about two months ago. Usually I can get through a book in about two weeks, a month if I have a lot going on with home or work. Other than Thanksgiving, that's not really the case. I've not read further than the thirteenth chapter because this book is just really hard to get into. It just doesn't quite capture my imagination like I thought it would when I requested it with the Early Reviewers.

There are little glimpses of how good this book could have been if it wasn't so overly wordy. I think the main issue is that it tries to be visually imaginative in the world it creates. It tries so hard to have the magical feeling a new unknown world hidden amongst the modern world, like Harry Potter, but fails miserably.

It makes me so sad to see, because of those glimpses of what could be, but it seems like the author gets in his own way. I think, from what I've read up to chapter 13, with how visual the author tries to be that this book would do better as a screenplay and eventually a film. A medium that is much more fitting visually. But who knows how well it would succeed there as well.½

Y is a gonzo fantasy set in New York in the present day. Similar in narrative style to that created by Hunter S. Thompson, Y tells the tale of a spiritually and professionally burned out journalist who gets sucked into the hidden world of a cult-like organization of merry makers, gurus, nuts, dwarves and various other psychopaths and fanatics. It's a cool idea and Campion makes it work in his own way. Where Thompson spared no detail regarding the chemicals he used to induce his twisted visions, Campion does not. This is not an ode to junkie culture, although there is more than a trace of amphetamine psychosis in the paranoid narrator's exposition. Y is a celebration of freakdom and the displays how crucial the role of outsider in a decaying monocultural void really is.

I received a physical copy of this book through LT's Early Reviewer program. Nice touch Gueem books! Mysteriously, I lost the book somewhere between my car and the bus one rainy workday morning. I most likely will pick it up again, probably online as its only $6 for the epub and I would really like to finish it.½

James takes you through a story where the narrative shifts between an increasingly un-heroic underworld in NYC while experiencing exploits that humorously depict small persons in interesting roles.
James depicts an author who represents himself as a victim of a journey through the mind. His journey of self-discovery doesn't offer much to cue you into the “turn”, as the previous reviewer mentions the “rant”
BUT the interesting secondary characters flatter jokes and contribute to a funny spirit of vexing pointlessness.
Loved the descriptive nature that some have indicated was a little over the top. It is a style I enjoy.

James Campion defines everything good about writers. Despite a manic approach to the story, subjectivity, and some other issues with the flow of a true fictional journey, there's power in his words.
If you have read James other works he has always touched on a style of Journalism that pushes the reader to focus and imagine. Journalism should be two things, entertaining and informative. James has encapsulated this approach and us on a fun ride of fiction…. Or so I thought.

James takes the reader though their paces with a as the previous writher indicated, a "rabbit hole" while setting the stage for an interesting culmination of craziness and stupefaction….. You find yourself wondering is he really the kind of guy who'd take us on that rant and drive his character into a wall with the force of a rocket.
The rant reminds one of David Foster Wallace who also suffered from the occasional introspection inspired delusion.

Seriously laughed out loud in parts…

This is what I term an "urban down the rabbit hole" book. Usually I have to be in the mood for such a book but there are those authors who have taken me for the ride without me being in the mood. Jonathon Carrol's "Land of Laughs" was such a book, Warren Ellis' "Crooked Little Vein" hit me while I was in the mood and took me for the ride. Unfortunately James Campion's "Y" didn't hook me.

Other reviewers have mentioned the verbiage and the twist of phrases as an issue while some of it was distracting, I think a bigger flaw was the plot. When I've read Carrol, he grounds his story in reality and then slowly pulls you down the rabbit hole. The farther along you get the faster things spin out of control. Campion dumps you in the rabbit hole without really establishing the main character. You are thrust down the rabbit hole without knowing what the territory around the hole is. The main character tells us that things are weird but I prefer as a reader to discover that through other means than just the character's exposition. As the weirdness happens, there is no one but the main character reacting to the weirdness. So the was no anchor to make me connect to the character nor the story.

I gave up. I didn't care about the main character nothing was established about him beyond he is a lackluster journalist. There are snippets that caught my attention but they weren't enough. So if you are in the mood for such a story, you might want to struggle through but otherwise it just didn't hold my attention.

Long. Winded. Oh my god. Let me give you an example. Here's one sentence from the book that I had to read 4 times before I stopped drifting off: "From the political arena to the fog of celebrity, it is this perverse ritual of egoist pantomime that keeps several rapacious hordes working, not the least of which is a special breed of vigorous freelance journalists willing to spend an afternoon sucking up to the most childish of activities with the meager hope of spinning it into news for modest pay."

Don't feel bad; I stopped paying attention, too.

You've heard of people who love the sound of their own voices? Well this author loves the sound of his own meandering, overwritten, nonsensical prose. It was so flowery and overwritten that I had trouble following the plot. I found myself losing interest every other long-winded, ponderously-worded sentence.½

What an odd little book.

My opinion of Y changed as the book went on, but I don't think it ever emerged into "enjoyable" territory. The plot, such as it is, concerns the author-as-character attempting to investigate a secret society, known as Y, which is responsible for flash mobs in New York City. (They are never called flash mobs, but that's really all it was.) The protagonist finds himself drawn deeper and deeper into the organization, which both fascinates and repels him.

The book suffers from several major faults along the way. First is the prose style, which especially in the early chapters is engorged with extraneous adjectives and ponderous sentence structure. The essence of "nonsense" is communicating the nonsensical clearly, making the irrational seem rational. Early on in the book, the author fails at this utterly.

Secondly, the characterization is erratic. The protagonist shifts in motivation from chapter to chapter, and I never really bought the transitions. In an odd case of contradiction, Campion is actually quite adept at creating characters. There are several quite memorable individuals, from Gangle Bill to the Sherpa Man, and the set pieces in which they are introduced are some of the best written and most memorable passages. Indeed, it is not the people the protagonist meets but rather the protagonist himself who feels flat, one-dimensional, and a servant to the needs of the story rather than the genesis of it.

The latter half of the book leaves behind the purple prose and instead presents a series of Platonic dialogues, in which the characters become a mouthpiece for a debate on the nature of reality. Although this kind of fiction is not generally to my taste, it is nevertheless the strongest part of the book. In those sections, the nonsense becomes a setting, and an appropriate one, to illustrate the philosophical points in question.

The ending will be a sticking point for many readers, so I should also address it. If I had actually been invested in any of the characters, then the lack of a real ending might have disappointed me. In fact, the ending of the novel actually addressed my disappointment with it directly, which I found quite engaging. To the extent that the characters in a novel are real to us, to the extent that we have conspired with the author against ourselves to believe (in a limited way) the lie that they are real, we want to know what happens to them. We want closure, and if not a happy ending at least a satisfying one that justifies our interest and attention. At no point had I ever accepted the lie that the James Campion of the novel was real in any sense, and therefore the fourth-wall breaking finale served only to justify my lack of investment.

Would I recommend this book? Honestly, no. If someone is in the mood for nonsense I would direct them to other, less self-congratulatory examples. I understand that Campion wrote this book as a break between other projects, and I hope it gave him pleasure in the writing. But in its current form, it does not achieve his stated goals or provide much entertainment along the way.

The journey was fun, but the ending was disappointing.

The story itself is enjoyable - nonsensical while still being understandable and even vaguely realistic, an engaging plot, and a nice amount of weirdness. However, the book would have been better if it just ended at the end of Chapter 46. The attempted ending was a dud; the author was trying to do something, and it did not work at all.½

James Campion wrote himself a story wherein he is the protagonist, antagonist, and theme. There was feeling that he was on the brink of one of those books that end with an epic revelation or major twist (which is why I can see the comparisons to Palahniuk) or on the brink of a magical hyper reality where for a while you think everything is just on the crazy side of normal but somewhere along the way it evolves into actual magic, but it never actually goes there on either account. For me it was never magical or anarchic enough to stand along Lewis and it wasn't witty or insightful enough to stand along Palahniuk. The events of the story drag on and while they do make you slightly curious what the overall game is, Campion (the main character, who as I said, is the author) drones on and whines through even the action sequences in such a dry and uninspired way that though some crazy stuff does happen it didn't feel very exciting. Plus the ending, while it served to elucidate the rest of the tedious journey, was just awful in my opinion. And no amount of apologizing about how awful it was by the author could engender my sympathies otherwise. I think he felt like this ending was going to be startling or innovative and it was trite and irritating and could not even be said to be a dud ending to an otherwise fabulously creative piece of work, it was all kind of lame and derivative.

I'm not sure if the reviewer DarthDeverell was sincere that their copy of the book was upside down and backward (given the theme of this book, it would make sense as a joke related to the book or as a way in which they printed it) but my review copy was printed the usual left to right and upside up way.

I couldn't get past the navel gazing and too cute wordsmithery in this book. I'm an avid reader of Vonnegut, Hunter S. Thompson, and have read four of Chuck Palahniuk's novels (he ended up just creeping me out too much in the end) and "Y" appears to be striving to be something akin to those authors' works. Just didn't work for me. Maybe I'm just too dumb to appreciate the brilliant writing. If you think you might be too dumb for brilliant writing I recommend applying the Nancy Pearl rule to this book: read 100 minus {your age} pages to give it a chance. And if you're a hundred years old you are allowed to judge this book by its cover.

In Y, James Campion crafts a disjointed narrative evocative of Hunter S. Thompson or Chuck Palahniuk while using the nonsense style of Lewis Carroll and the wordsmith skills of F. Scott Fitzgerald. I’m not certain if it is a result of my copy being an early reviewer copy or a deliberate decision on the part of Campion to embody the concept of opposite, but I had to turn my book upside down and read the pages from right to left. It wasn’t hard to acclimate to this, but a little bizarre at first. The story itself follows the author as he finds himself working for a new artistic collective, trying to uncover its meaning and purpose even as the group eschews such definition. Though the narrative is odd at times, Campion’s writing evokes the linguistic skills of an earlier generation of writers so that his word choice is just as enjoyable as the story itself. The book ends on a particularly odd note, entreating the reader to analyze what it means to read a book and what it means for a writer to create a novel. In many ways, this ending is similar to John David California’s unauthorized Catcher in the Rye sequel and, while it may not entice casual readers, is enjoyable for those who like to engage what they read on an intellectual level. Overall, this first novel from Campion is exceedingly well written with an interesting concept that is splendidly executed.

Equal parts absurdism, pop culture, magical realism, Alice in Wonderland, Wizard of Oz, and lunacy, "Y" is the rare book that wholly transports you to another place...if it is in fact another place. Campion's slanted and often cynical view of the world, along with an odd and sometimes bizarre cast of characters, makes this send-up of media and the madness of crowds as entertaining as it gets.

Well, it's great. Of course, I'm in it, so even if it sucked, it would be great! :)

But it doesn't. Suck.