Bruce Springsteen’s The Rising has become, as the tenth anniversary of the attacks that inspired it approaches, the closest thing we have to an official soundtrack to 9/11. It is the “soaring musical statement” of that day’s impact on our national psyche, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer’s music critic. New Yorkers selected it in a poll conducted by WNYC as one of the top three records they want to hear on the radio on the anniversary. High school teachers are using it to evoke the visceral pain and confusion of that day for their clueless students. The problem with this is that The Rising is a terrible, bad, no-good record that cheapens us all.

For the Gawker Book Club's second installment, we get literal: our own John Cook and Merge Records co-founders Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance are discussing Our Noise, a history of one of the labels that defined 90s indie rock.