By JON GARELICK  |  November 8, 2012

In the modern world of Wiki and the Interweb, if you’re going to produce an actual print-edition dictionary of pop music, you’d better frontload it with attitude. After all, all those “facts” are available elsewhere. Dylan Jones knows this, and his Biographical Dictionary of Popular Music: From Adele to Ziggy, the Real A to Z of Rock and Pop is proudly idiosyncratic, wise-ass, random, and even downright uninformative. Jones — currently editor of British GQ, with a long history of music books and journalism behind him — offers respect for the standard music encyclopedia, but he also finds them “obsessively objective and pathologically comprehensive.”