I paid $2 for a bargain-bin copy of Best Music Writing 2007. The price tag still covers “s” and “i.”
It’s guest edited by Robert Christgau. I’d pay two dollars for anything with contributions by David Byrne, Sasha Frere-Jones, Jonathan Lethem and others because I have high expectations for those writers. That said I have low expectations for music writing. Nowadays it’s too easy to hear a record to care much about someone else’s take. So, for me, writing needs to do more than recount listening.
Christgau knows this, and that’s why his curation is exciting. One of the best pieces removes the author altogether: XXL magazine interviews everyone involved with Jay-Z’s Reasonable Doubt. The album is discussed track-by-track, contributor-by-contributor. The piece goes beyond finding fresh adjective pairings to explain an ancient medium. Instead it shines a searchlight into unseen corners of a modern classic. Reading Memphis Bleek remember what he had for lunch the day he wrote his verse on “Coming Of Age” is the written equivalent of X-ray specs. (Bleek went to Wendy’s.)
Like the XXL roundtable, the work in BMW07 goes beyond familiar levels of fandom and completism. Though Erik Davis’ dissection of Joanna Newsom’s Ys begins with the rambling pagan pedagogy that makes most Newsom writing editorial melatonin, the writer doesn’t stop until he learns what microphones and placement Steve Albini used to capture the harp (“four Crown GLM mics, which are about the size of a kitchen match, along the instrument’s resonating belly”). The success here represents a type of revelatory doubt, the rhetorical exaggeration we connect with art we like so much we can’t believe it even exists, man.
This detail is humanizing for both the author and the musician, but not always required. In Lethem’s massive meditation on James Brown, a man that never needed rapturous critics to claim otherworldliness, the decadence of the hyperbole is essential to the exploration of the artist: “To be in the audience when James Brown commences the James Brown Show is… comparable, I’d imagine, to certain ceremonies known to the Mayan peoples, wherein a human person is radiantly costumed and then beheld in lieu of the appearance of a Sun God upon the Earth.” This reverence frames thousands of words on the outfits, rituals, relationships, behaviors, faults, and wisdom of a legend.
A fourth of the BMW07 selections were “first published online.” The best of these blogpostings fuck with music writing as form, and the best form-fuckery comes as Chris Ryan’s caps-locked emails to a freshly unretired Jay-Z. The writing is unhinged, like Kanye West live-blogging a vision quest (“YO, HOW THE FUCK IS CRAIG BIGGIO HITTING 40 HOMERS WHEN HE LOOKS LIKE LIL MAN FROM WILLOW SHIT”). I like to read selections aloud when entertaining.
BMW07 also nods to David Byrne, offering one of his briefest blogs to date. He goes to see the “minimal metal band” Sunn0))), curious that a “feature in the New York Times” didn’t sell out the show. Byrne hawing about attendance like a Nick Hornby record store clerk is cute, but that’s not what caught Christgau’s eye. Of the performance, Byrne writes: “I thought of global warming (again), the melting icecaps, the earthquake in Java, the Mayan ruins in Yucatan, computer viruses, government surveillance eating itself from the inside out, Donald Rumsfeld’s mind, ant colonies, big science, Jesus’ dick, Mary’s cunt, and the McDonald’s meal a suicide bomber ate, minutes before detonation. This is contemporary theater.” I’d hate to read that blog the morning after Craigslisting my Sunn0))) tickets. Best music writing, indeed.
My favorite piece remains Nick Southall’s “Imperfect Sound Forever.” He maps the history of decibel levels in recorded music, which have become physically and, he argues, artistically unhealthy. That’s a good one, but every contribution deserves its own description, from Nitsuh Abebe following Daniel Johnston to an opening at the Whitney, to Dave Simpson trying to find all 43 former members of The Fall, to Brandon Perkins sitting on a couch with his imaginary therapist, Dr. Lil Wayne.
I could go on, but it’s easier to just reiterate: best two dollars I ever spent.
