Knobby's Reviews > Boys Keep Swinging: A Memoir

I'm not a stranger to celebrity memoirs, especially musician's memoirs. (For some reason, I find musicians more interesting than actors, and have read a fair number of memoirs by artists I know peripherally: Jewel, Keith Richards, Posh Spice.) So when the opportunity came up for me to read Jake Shears of Scissor Sisters' memoir, courtesy of Netgalley, I took it, thinking that maybe I'd learn something new. I own their albums and even saw their show once when they toured, so I considered myself a fan (a fairly casual one), but even my familiarity with the group didn't make me love this book.

The book is split into three parts: 25% about his childhood in Arizona and Seattle, 25% struggling in New York, and 50% after the formation of the Scissor Sisters group, from early club-performing days with just Jason Sellards (Jake Shears) and Scott Hoffman (Babydaddy) to the first album's meteoric rise, and brief mention of the second album.

The first half of the book was an interesting slice-of-life experience, describing Jason's upbringing in what was an uncertain time for gay people: the outbreak of AIDS, the social stigma of your sexual orientation being "abnormal." The time he spent in NYC in the late 1990s-early 2000s, when the city was rapidly gentrifying, was a cool look at the culture at the time as well. The settings were great background characters, with their own quirks and tics. I really liked all of Jason's descriptions of his weird apartments and the roommates that inhabited them. Despite all this, the middle of the book really drooped for me and I considered not reading any more, because it felt fruitless.

The second half, when Scissor Sisters were born, Ana Matronic was added to the group, (then a few others,) was more interesting just because I was on more familiar footing at this point. Before, Jason was meandering, describing all of the different jobs he took, places he danced at, men he slept with, drugs he tried, and it felt like a non-linear mess where names dropped with no real purpose. After the formation of the band, he still did all of those things but with the foundation of "and it was while we were doing x or y with the group" — milestones that made sense on their climb to the top, like promo in London, Top of the Pops, chart rankings, etc.

Knowing next to nothing about the group in detail before this — knowing their songs, but not knowing the names of band members — I read trying to glean an idea of who Jason/Jake is. And my conclusion is that I still don't really know, even after reading about his parents' wariness to his coming out, his friendship with an obese woman he met in a chat room to whom the ballad "Mary" is dedicated, and his friendship/relationships with big names like Anderson Cooper and Dan Savage.

Jason/Jake's voice is chattery. He has a habit of describing some problem but then throws the conclusion out later as an aside (from coming out to his parents, to dealing with bad roommates, etc.) He name-drops for no good reason except to show how well-connected he is (and perhaps it's his connectedness that helped the group grow in name recognition; dude hustled). I find it interesting there was a tiny mention of how the NY Times panned the group when Scissor Sisters released their debut album in America, but there was no followup about the controversy it caused. Wal-Mart refused to stock it because of a single with the word "tits" in it, and the group refused to make a clean edit version, which hurt its sales in the US. I had to read about it in the band's Wiki page, but Jake talks about how big they were in the UK and ignores the US for the most part, even though he's an American and the record was cut in NYC.

Should it have been longer, to flesh out these things? I don't think so. Could it have been shorter, to cut out unnecessary jumps to celebrities, one-night-stands, and parties? I don't know, maybe. All I know is, I wish I hadn't been so bored while reading parts of this memoir. And I wish that I could say that I know about Jake a little better.