Real Life Rock Top 10

5/6) Ernest C. Withers, "The Memphis Blues Again: Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs," selected and with text by Daniel Wolff (Viking Studio) & "American Roots Music," edited by Robert Santelli, Holly George-Warren and Jim Brown (Abrams)

While not as rich as Withers' "Pictures Tell the Story", in which music was one element in the great social drama of the Civil Rights movement, there is a reminder of Withers' true vision in a portrait of Aretha Franklin at a Southern Christian Leadership Conference event two months after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., her face swollen -- from tears or a beating you can't tell. Otherwise there's merely fabulousness, everywhere you look: Louis Jordan and his father in matching 10-gallon fedoras, the Moonglows in action, a crowd waiting outside the Club Ebony in the rain, B.B. King accompanied on facing pianos by Jerry Lee Lewis and Charlie Rich, a Hollywood Elvis back in town and posing as if he's already slept with everyone in it. It's history as rumor, as a story you know can never be nailed down, proven, finished, only forgotten, until someday people will find these pictures and disbelieve everything they say.

"American Roots Music" -- the book of the PBS TV series -- is very nearly a miracle: It makes the twisted tale of American music, its strands intertwined like lovers hiding from the light, seem bland. Worse, it makes the tale seem obvious. And, as it is obvious, it has nothing new to say, which means that as a tale it was over before it began.

The Withers book is $14 cheaper, too.

7/8) Britney Spears Live from Las Vegas" (HBO, Nov. 18) & "Jennifer Lopez Live" (NBC, Nov. 20)

Howard Hampton writes: "In case you missed it, I can tell you that I watched Britney Spears' concert and I missed it too. It's as if she's made of flesh-colored Teflon. You can look, but your gaze just slides right off the surface. It's not simply that she lacks imagination, personality, charisma, or stage presence" (hosting "Saturday Night Live" last year, she had it all) "but that this absence is the structuring principle of her act. There's not even the pretense that those different voices are really coming out of her body, to the point where her piped-in vocals were like canned fetish objects, floating over the stage like props. It comes across like a Vegas Club Silencio converted into a vocational junior high school for strippers." Two nights later, Gary Radnich of San Francisco NBC-TV affiliate KRON ended his nightly sports report with detailed comparison footage of the Spears and Jennifer Lopez specials, naming Lopez the clear winner because she had more costume changes -- and because while "When Jennifer Lopez crawled on the floor she acted like she meant business. When Britney Spears crawled on the floor you wanted to say, 'Get up.'"

9) Mick Jagger, "Goddess in the Doorway" (Virgin)

Reviews are saying this isn't really terrible. It's really terrible.

10) Berkeley, Calif., Contra Costa Ave. (Nov. 17)

On our woodsy street, the mail carrier walks with dignity, handling dogs, obstructions of foliage and hanging gardens of huge spider webs with determination, humor and a pith helmet. After watching her negotiate a particularly steep and slippery walkway, a neighbor offered encouragement: "All, this, and then the anthrax terrorists. I'll bet when you went to work for the post office you didn't realize you'd be a, a -- " The neighbor couldn't find the right word. "A warrior!" the mail carrier said.

Thanks to Andrew Hamlin

• View blog reactions