Haven’t made my way through much of it yet, but the Riley Rock Index looks pretty damn cool. Tons of great links to peruse (incl. lots of writers/publications on the sidebar). Courtesy of Tim Riley, who’s  somewhere on my bookshelf — ah, yes, over there, engaged in a cross-continental arm wrestle with Ian MacDonald.

1. Someone else’s bookshelf: “45 Books for the Literate Music Fan” (BullzEye)… Haven’t read this yet, but it looks like fun. Not familiar with the publication or the writers, but the selections are interesting, curious, occasionally reprehensible (Songbook ousting Love is a Mix Tape? I don’t think so…), and possibly revelatory (I had no idea an ultimate guide to power pop even existed). (via MPR)

2. “Catch of the day: John Zorn hates critics” (Guardian)… “composer John Zorn politely but firmly requested that any critics attending his opening performances at St Ann’s Warehouse last weekend agreed not to review it.” What a twit — seriously, this guy’s music is now too precious to even be discussed? (via MPR)

3. I was hoping earlier in the week to mention Maxim-gate, but time prevented me from doing so… Groundwork of the story can be found here; follow-up coverage by the Dean here. (via NAJP)

• Robert Christgau slums it blogs and throws in his three cents about Pazz & Jop vs. Idolator: “I really don’t have a horse in this race. I like Idolator and have no love for the guys who fired me, and of course there would be a certain schadenfreude in seeing PJ fail without me–I resist it, but it’s there.”

• Marshall McLuhan blasts the Ford-Carter debate: “…the most stupid arrangement of any debate in the history of debating”; “the vibrations got through to the amplifier and said, ‘this must not continue’”; etc.

• Frank Kogan revives the rockism-antirockism discussion: “My problem [with the term 'rockism'] is more personal: I can’t tell if I’m a rockist or not, or whether a lot of other rock critics are rockists or not (Dave Marsh, Greil Marcus, Richard Meltzer, Lester Bangs, Robert Christgau, Chuck Eddy), and I think the confusion is in the concept, not in me.” (My quick response is perhaps similar to what Frank himself says in the same piece about the word “authenticity”; “rockist” works okay in describing a tendency, but clearly sucks as a defining label. )

• Hillary Clinton resorts to political rockism: “If your candidacy is going to be about words, then they should be your own words…”

• David Moore (and others) talk about Carl and Celine and taste: “I get no sense of Carl being moved by Celine, before or after his thought experiment. I get no sense of Carl really caring about Celine as an artist who makes music (though he cares about her as an object of study — although artists I have no sense of as even human routinely move me more than most Celine Dion — I think I’d rather write a book on Jojo than a Celine Dion album!”)

• Devin McKinney at hey dullblog nails (pretty much) my problems with Marsh’s recently released Beatles book (though he, unlike me, was at least able to finish the thing). So much in McKinney’s review I agree with, but his last line says it best: “‘In print,’ Marsh writes of the other Dave [Dexter--the villain who takes up a sizable portion of the text], ‘he comes across as a nasty, vindictive son of a bitch.’ I grant Marsh the respect of assuming he sent his book to print fully aware of how easily that might be applied not just to his target, but to himself.” Too bad–the idea of Marsh writing about The Beatles Second Album was intriguing to me on a number of levels (as Marsh himself points out near the start, TBSA is the sort of “great story” record any smart critic would like to tackle). But as McKinney points out far more eloquently than I could (and BTW he’s completely on the money about the bullishness of Marsh’s taken-for-granted stance about ‘Till There Was You”), the rancor in Marsh’s voice just becomes too much after a while.

Just in case anyone missed it this year…

On the eve of Todd Haynes’s Dylan flick, come a couple great new pieces worth highlighting:

• The Ten Most Incomprehensible Bob Dylan Interviews of All Time (New York magazine)… Note: If you press play on all the YouTube clips at the same time, Bob actually starts to make a little more sense (not to mention that it sounds like a lost demo from the White Light White Heat recording sessions).

• Mystic Nights: The Making of Blonde on Blonde in Nashville. By Sean Wilentz in Oxford American.

Blabbin’ the Night Away: The rockcritics.com Music Blogger Symposium

By Scott Woods

The idea to bring a few music critics together–virtually speaking, that is–to answer some questions about blogging was borne less out of unbridled enthusiasm for the medium than it was out of a mild but growing disenchantment. If it seems a bit premature to declare music blogs dead-in-the-water, it has nonetheless felt in the last couple years like the initial flurry of excitement across the you-know-what-o-sphere has diminished somewhat. Not to suggest that interesting arguments and lively discussions don’t still erupt every now and again. Or that the obsessive-esoteric pursuits of certain bloggers aren’t sometimes fascinating in and of themselves. Or that there is a single newsstand music ‘zine today even half as engaging as the most inane online chatter. But something, and I don’t know what exactly, has shifted on the ground–and not, in my opinion, in the best possible direction. Hence this symposium.

Perhaps it was inevitable that music blogs, after the initial buzz and howl phase (look ma, no word count!) would settle into a deeper, less noisy groove, but too often the settling in has felt like a retreat into the corner. (From a guy who’s abandoned more blogs than he has fingers, trust me, this is not an admonishment so much as a lament.) Like I said, good, interesting things still happen in those corners, even if it does kinda resemble a high school dance, with participants in the various corners of the room doing little more than nodding at (if not altogether avoiding) one another. Or as David Moore from Cure for Bedbugs puts it, “For some reason a kind of individualist mindset has really taken hold in music blogs, like we’re just here to watch the madmen and women raving from a polite distance.”

Read the rest of this entry »