Guy Oseary's "On the Record"

It's fairly easy to hate Guy Oseary--this is the wunderkind who found himself head of A&R at Maverick Records at the age of 19, just in time to get on board the Alanis fame train and enable Candlebox to become a one-hit wonder. He's dated Paltrow and Demi Moore, he's a man about town, and he's more or less "graduated" to the movie business.

His new book is grating in this context, for it's hard not to feel some condescension in its premise: he "wanted to write a book" so he came up with the idea of sending the same dozen or so questions in his Rolodex. "Over 150 of the most talented people in music share the secrets of their success," says the book's tagline. And share they do. Oseary has enlisted all his friends to help us be like them!

Too bad much of the book sounds like my father talking. Or your father. Esteemed advice such as "work hard" clogs the book, and by the end it's pretty obvious that there's no secret door to walk through in the music business. Other than the one marked "Don't Step On Your Dick," of course.

Yet in that regard, it's thematically sound. Hard work IS the way to get ahead. The industry wouldn't have such a bad rap if more people did work hard. But the entertainment industry, with its diamond dreams and overbearing beauty quotient, has never been much of a mediocracy.

So while Oseary's done a pretty good job of tracking down some stars--never mind that Oseary's way too young to be lumped with a lot of the execs he interviewed--the book is a shallow read.