Slothrop
Tight but Polite
I kind of want to try to make a line in the sand here.
It feels like a lot of music books that I've read in the last decade or so have followed a pattern of picking a topic, making some broad-brush argument for why it's interesting, and then essentially just picking a bunch of relevant artists and giving a basic career overview of each one, with lots of verbiage on what they recorded and with who and what it sounds like, but not much deep consideration given to how it relates to anything else. My most recent example was Monolithic Undertow by Harry Sword, but I found Psychedelia and Other Colours by Rob Chapman and even Electric Eden kind of fit the same pattern. (Electric Eden was an odd one because it felt like the stuff about earlier folk revivals was all framed around the grand narratives that the people involved were trying to push, but once it got stuck into its main topic of weirdo folk rock it basically gets right back down to being swathes of (beautifully written) detail around individual bands and albums. And it's fine, but after a while it starts to feel like you're just being bombarded with stuff without much to tie it together.
The books that I'd consider personally canonical - Energy Flash, Ocean of Sound, England's Dreaming, Techno Rebels, Ian Carr on Miles Davis etc - don't do this. They tend to have a constant awareness of how any given thing that's being discussed relates to a broader framework, whether that's a grand theory, a social context or the psychology and preoccupations of the people involved.
So yeah, is this a relevant distinction or am I just being thick and missing the writer's point unless they hammer me over the head with it? And is it a new tendency or just something that I'd managed to avoid in older books by cherry picking the right ones? I've realized that I'm now trying to actively screen for this sort of thing when looking at new music books (I got interested in a thing about hauntology that looks like it goes that way), which tends to involve trogging through the Amazon reviews because everything in The Wire, Quietus etc will be written by mates of the author and describe it as "a hallucinatory journey through the fractal landscapes of Bulgarian neo-psychedelia" regardless.
It feels like a lot of music books that I've read in the last decade or so have followed a pattern of picking a topic, making some broad-brush argument for why it's interesting, and then essentially just picking a bunch of relevant artists and giving a basic career overview of each one, with lots of verbiage on what they recorded and with who and what it sounds like, but not much deep consideration given to how it relates to anything else. My most recent example was Monolithic Undertow by Harry Sword, but I found Psychedelia and Other Colours by Rob Chapman and even Electric Eden kind of fit the same pattern. (Electric Eden was an odd one because it felt like the stuff about earlier folk revivals was all framed around the grand narratives that the people involved were trying to push, but once it got stuck into its main topic of weirdo folk rock it basically gets right back down to being swathes of (beautifully written) detail around individual bands and albums. And it's fine, but after a while it starts to feel like you're just being bombarded with stuff without much to tie it together.
The books that I'd consider personally canonical - Energy Flash, Ocean of Sound, England's Dreaming, Techno Rebels, Ian Carr on Miles Davis etc - don't do this. They tend to have a constant awareness of how any given thing that's being discussed relates to a broader framework, whether that's a grand theory, a social context or the psychology and preoccupations of the people involved.
So yeah, is this a relevant distinction or am I just being thick and missing the writer's point unless they hammer me over the head with it? And is it a new tendency or just something that I'd managed to avoid in older books by cherry picking the right ones? I've realized that I'm now trying to actively screen for this sort of thing when looking at new music books (I got interested in a thing about hauntology that looks like it goes that way), which tends to involve trogging through the Amazon reviews because everything in The Wire, Quietus etc will be written by mates of the author and describe it as "a hallucinatory journey through the fractal landscapes of Bulgarian neo-psychedelia" regardless.