It's the WORD World Cup (disclaimer: not really a world cup)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

Hullo poptimists! For a project I am working on which I shall reveal soon(ish), I would like your wise suggestions in four categories:

viz
A: music writers all should read (two parts)
B: music writing all should read (two parts)
C: zone of exchange that all should learn from
D: music-related film or documentary all should see

Eventually there will be polls and everything!

The four sections above will entail SIX tranches of nomination. (Tranche is a fancy word for slice: as in "combination boo and hoo, my tranche of cake is smaller than katstevens's -- this crime shall not stand ect ect")

1: First, imagine you were inducting a reasonably intelligent outsider, of natural curiosity and openness, into the world of strong, useful, insightful or inspirational writing about music: which FOUR writers would you point them to? (Note: it can be any kind of music AT ALL...)

To start us off, I am going to name nine writers not to bother naming: they get a bye into the poll. DON'T WORRY OR BRIDLE: If you hate them, this is your chance to vote against them! I just want to get a slightly wider pool of potential entrants, really. The nine not to name are: Richard Meltzer, Robert Christgau, Greil Marcus, Lester Bangs, Jon savage, Paul Morley, Ian Penman, Richard Cook, Simon Reynolds. ALSO: Don't name me. I will be all over any project I am involved with. Known and active Poptimists (apart from me) you can of course name, though you're all kind of a given just by turning up.

2: Now imagine the pool of writers we generally get to see in a "best of music writing". Which FOUR writers would you like to see added to it that currently don't get in? (This can be based on a much smaller body of work I think...) Which writers do you think are overlooked or poorly understood? Which writers have an approach -- perhaps mainly directed at some "non-popular" music, or indeed some NON-music -- which you think would be valuable if others adopted it?

re 1&2: Please append to any writers nominated an exemplary work --book, interview, review, sleevenote, whatever, long or short, typical or atypical.

3: Name SIX books about music that everyone should read. It can be about ANY kind of music. But it can't be by any of the folk you nominated in 1 or 2 (so yes, you may have to do some juggling to get the results you favour...). If six such books do not yet exist, please say so.

4: Now name FOUR pieces that AREN'T books -- can be reviews, blog posts, comments -- that everyone should read (they can be collected in books; they just can't be books). Again: not by any of the folk you named in 1-3.

5: Name THREE zones of debate or discussion that were really hoppin. Thus for example: the Zigzag gossip column 1977-79; the comments threads on the War Against Silence in 2001; the reviews pages of the east Village Eye in 1967... They have to be accessible -- so eg not pub discussions on that amazing night or so-and-so's tutorials when x was in her class; they can be the whole of a magazine across a slice of time; or a website; or whatever you want that fits the bill. This is a question about chemistry of voices, voices that haven't perhaps been so strong or interesting when divorced from their co-squabblees.

6: Name SIX films or documentaries about music that everyone should see: ; non-fiction; fiction; biopic -- whatever. What matters is the question of how they deal with music itself: how they make it the subject, or backdrop, or whatever they do.

Comments

[chuckeddy.livejournal.com]

I think Pop From The Beginning was the title in the U.K., actually. (Which means the U.S. version was probably the retitling, I'm guessing.)

[koganbot]

Just emailed this to Sinker, so ought to paste in here:

In his blurb for AwopbopaloobopAlopbamboom, Pop From The Beginning/Rock From The Beginning, Frith said, "Cohn defined good rock writing: insider knowledge worn easily and cynically, prose paced and loaded to match the music. Every eager boy and girl in the music press since has tried in vain to write like this (Cohn's only real successor was Peter York) and his flip approach lives on in Smash Hits and The Face, but Cohn wasn't just a smart stylist - he had an intelligent point to make (which is what differentiates him from today's neat phrase-makers like Julie Burchill)."

"Insider knowledge worn easily and cynically" is everything I hate about journalistic prose,* by the way, 'cause I'm all about questions and inquiry, not "knowledge" popped in cynically with a knowing tone. Since when is cynicism ever intelligent? Usually the cynicism is ignorance pretending that it's knowledge. But that doesn't mean that people who write in the tone can't actually ask interesting questions. Also, I've read very little Cohn but mostly liked what I read, just a piece or two in the New York Times Arts And Leisure section in the late '60s. He panned the White Album and praised Beggars Banquet, correct in both instances. However, in my high school library I looked in the index of Rock From The Beginning to see what was said about Bob Dylan, checked the text and saw "He destroyed the music I loved," or something of the sort; I didn't like that, so didn't read the book.** But the phrase stuck with me, and in my Why Music Sucks essay in '87 I wrote "WE are doing something to kill music." Since I prefer Dylan '65 to the music Cohn loved, I needed to think harder about this than I'm guessing Cohn ever did. (Note the word "guessing.")

Frith's text continues, "At the very moment when rock was constituting itself as a Serious Art Form, Cohn convincingly explained the superiority of pop. For him Dylan and the Beatles marked the end, not the beginning, of good times, and the Stones, as he suggested, should have indeed been killed off before they reached thirty." I wonder how much of that is Frith not Cohn, or a Cohn that comes later than '69 (I doubt that the Stones comment is from the book). In the Sixties it's hard to differentiate rock from pop, even after '68, and "superiority of pop" is a different argument from "superiority of previous rock 'n' roll to what superseded it in the mid '60s." Wiki lists the book's title as "Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom (US title: Rock from the Beginning)." I don't know if "Pop from the Beginning" was the original subtitle or was added for the Da Capo reissue, but it doesn't make sense. When is the beginning of pop? Unless Cohn is going back to the 19th century, how can the book merit that title? Seems to me that "Tutti Frutti" and ilk were considered something of an alternative to the pop of their day, and their genre was given a different title.

*Well, everything I hate about a certain subset of journalistic prose. There are other things I hate about other types of journalistic prose.

**May not have associated its author with the fellow who gave the White Album the pan it deserved.