The Covert War Against Rock: What You Don't Know About the Deaths of Jim Morrison, Tupac Shakur, Michael Hutchence, etc.

Constantine's paranoid romp through rock history explores Brian Jones' demise at Winnie the Pooh's house, Peter Tosh's death during a home invasion, Bob Marley's fatal cancer, and the terminations of other, somehow subversive rock stars, and vets the conspiracy theories about them. Was Marley given cancer by means of a booby-trapped cowboy boot from the CIA? If so, was that part of the same CIA-Jamaican government campaign that rubbed out Tosh? What of alleged foul play in the death of Tupac Shakur, not by rival gangsta rap crews, but by a "COINTELPRO-type operation" ? According to Constantine, the mainstream media have produced books "libelling the deceased and misleading the reader on the circumstances." The scary suppositions are only slightly undercut by Constantine's occasional fudging of known, if ungermane, facts, as when he says that the Mick Jagger^-Keith Richards bust occurred at a hotel rather than Richards' Redlands estate. Less scurrilous than the Weekly World News, less reliable than Kenneth Anger's Tinseltown expose, Hollywood Babylon, this is still fascinating conspiracy mongering. Mike Tribby
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved