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Reviews Best Music Writing 2007 Tuesday, January 22, 2008 Here's an annual health-check on the state of music journalism. By Rhythms Music Book Reviewer Des Cowley
Best Music Writing 2007
Edited by Robert Christgau PB$29.00
This long running series from Da Capo publishers is a boon to those who love good music writing; regardless of whether it’s blues, rock, jazz, R&B, or hip hop. Each year, a guest editor selects what he or she considers to be the very best music journalism of the previous year.
This year’s editor, Robert Christgau, will be familiar to many readers. Aside from being a contributing editor to Rolling Stone, he’s appeared in previous Best Music Writing volumes on a number of occasions. His approach varies from editor Mary Gaitskill’s in the 2006 edition. Whereas she was aiming to come up with a ‘mix tape’, a set of pieces that worked together, Christgau makes it clear that, for the 2007 edition, he “wanted the best writing. THE BEST WRITING”. His aim is nothing short of demonstrating that “the music I imperialistically call rock and roll continues to inspire more acute, original, engaging, funny, and idiosyncratic writing than can be stuffed into a 300-page book”. So, what’s he come up with?
Christgau has selected with 32 pieces culled from a variety of magazines and online sites, some familiar (New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Village Voice), others less so (Flaunt Magazine, XXL).
The brilliant US novelist Jonathan Lethem contributes a nearly-40 page piece on the late-great James Brown; David Kastin writes about ‘Nica’, the jazz baroness who supported many jazz musicians, including Charlie Parker and Thelonius Monk (Parker died in her New York hotel suite in 1955); Erik David provides a beautiful extended piece on Joanna Newsome; John Swenson writes about New Orleans post-Katrina; our very own Robert Forster provides a moving eulogy for fellow Go-Between Grant McLennan, who died of a heart attack in May 2006 at age 48.
Other subjects include: Pere Ubu, the Supremes, Neil Diamond, Beyonce Knowles, Jewish rapper Matisyahu, Jay-Z, the Fall, Barbara Streisand. You get the drift.
As with previous books in the series, the Best Music Writing 2007 is best approached as a smorgasbord – there’ll be bits you’ll want to devour, along with other bits you’ll turn your nose up at. But, to my mind, Best Music Writing remains a vital and important series, an annual health-check on the state of music journalism today.
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