Barrelhouse 

181 pgs/$15.00

Bring the Noise is the very first release of the ambitious (and highly promising) Barrelhouse Books, the D.C.-based magazine’s venture into indie publishing. I was drawn to the anthology in the hopes it would explain my unhealthy obsession with Jersey Shore (my working theory centers on the gravitational pull of JWoww’s chest). What I found instead, via the book’s strongest essays, was a sense of camaraderie: for better or worse, pop culture reflects where we are as a society now, and in hating or loving it—in examining what we hate or love about it—we figure out who we really are.

Comprised mostly of essays that previously appeared in Barrelhouse (five of the 18 are previously unpublished), the anthology is a potluck of voices and themes. It stretches the definition of pop culture to mean almost anything that could end up on TV or heard on the radio: from pro-wrestling, The Hills, the Chicago Cubs, and that creepy Wizard of Oz sequel (which I’d blocked from my memory almost entirely until this essay brought it back in vivid, nightmare-friendly detail), to Bob Dylan, payphones, and Pearl Jam. The range of these essays, however, is a reminder that pop culture isn’t always ubiquitous on a national scale, and so the tall order for a pop culture anthology—if it’s going to feel like the book it promises to be rather than, say, an issue of a journal—is that it be as robust and inclusive as possible. Continue reading →