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Da Capo Best Music Writing
Da Capo Best Music Writing 2000
Welcome to the first volume in an exciting new annual series that celebrates the year's best American writing about music and its culture, as selected by one of the genre's preeminent practitioners. Covering the gamut of contemporary stylesrock, pop, rap, jazz, blues, countryGuralnick has chosen the kind of pieces that send you right to the record store, by both established writers and bright new talents. With thirty selections drawn from more than a hundred sources, including mainstream magazines like theNew Yorker, music journals like Spin, and tiny 'zines and websites where the scribes of the new century are found, this collection will be indispensable for music lovers and lovers of wonderful writing alike.
288 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 2000
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
December 1, 2018
I was trying to get a handle on all of pop music - pop, that is, in the broad sense that anything that couldn't get played in a fancy concert hall is pop, that anything newer than Gershwin is pop. I spent years on this endeavour, eventually reaching the Scaruffian fringes: everything at least heard of, every landmark clung to by fingertips. I'm not sure why I did it.
Or, I know but it isn't pretty: The people who know most about music are the ones who need it most: need it as a pretext to wear headphones and not talk to people, need it as vicarious catharsis for things felt but never said, need it as a gigantic arena for countercultural status, where if you only put in a thousand hours of skronk and dischord, then you're a thousand hours ahead of someone.
Reading Lester Bangs on the Comedian Harmonists (!), included here, remains one of the most powerful moments in my entire reading life. The unsurpassing joy of discovery, of crossing cultures, of fandom.
Or, I know but it isn't pretty: The people who know most about music are the ones who need it most: need it as a pretext to wear headphones and not talk to people, need it as vicarious catharsis for things felt but never said, need it as a gigantic arena for countercultural status, where if you only put in a thousand hours of skronk and dischord, then you're a thousand hours ahead of someone.
Reading Lester Bangs on the Comedian Harmonists (!), included here, remains one of the most powerful moments in my entire reading life. The unsurpassing joy of discovery, of crossing cultures, of fandom.
September 19, 2018
Uneven collection, but has several timeless gems on artists as diverse as Tom Waits, P Diddy and Ornette Coleman. Rosanne Cash's selection is quite lovely.
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July 23, 2012Kudos to SCENE columnist Bill Friskics-Warren, whose NO DEPRESSION piece on June Carter Cash, “Unbroken Circle,” appears with approximately three dozen other music critics’ work in DA CAPO BEST MUSIC WRITING 2000: THE YEAR'S FINEST WRITING ON ROCK, POP, JAZZ, COUNTRY, AND MORE. Guest-edited by Peter Guralnick, the book launches what will be an annual effort on Da Capo’s part to “identify the year’s best works on music and its place in American culture,” according to publicist Lissa Warren (no relation).
Da Capo’s yearly music volume joins a plethora of "Best Of..." literary anthologies, whose subjects currently range from poetry to sports writing, and it joins as well a backlist of various ROLLING STONE annuals and composite books. If Da Capo faces competition on bookstore shelves, the venture nonetheless seems destined for success. First, the ongoing decentralization of our national arts scene means that readers of serious music commentary must look beyond the usual suspects—SPIN, VIBE, THE NEW YORK TIMES, and SALON, in addition to ROLLING STONE--for the best music criticism in any given year; additionally, those readers need help in finding it. Guides in all media are becoming increasingly crucial, since the staggering number of books, movies, and CDs appearing each year makes it impossible for even the most serious devotee merely to skim the journalism that follows in their wake. It’s no accident that recent months have also produced books like ABOUT THE AUTHOR and THE SALON.COM GUIDE TO CONTEMPORARY FICTION, which differ from the DA CAPO BEST MUSIC WRITING 2000 in intent. But in a broader sense, these three books perform the same kind of literary triage.
For the Da Capo book, Guralnick combed roughly 200 generalists’ and specialists’ reviews of blues, jazz, hip-hop, metal, rock, pop, alternative, world, country, gospel, and Americana music, as he states in his introduction. He begins his foreword to DA CAPO BEST MUSIC WRITING 2000 with characteristic modesty, viewing the anthology “not as a contest at all but as a celebration, an opportunity to create, in written form, the type of mix that you send out to a friend and get back in kind, offering the comforting familiarity of shared interests, the sometimes unsettling evidence of divergent tastes, and, best of all, the challenge of new directions to explore, new avenues to pursue.”
Not all of those avenues are strictly aesthetic. One of the anthology’s most riveting pieces, “Don’t Drink the Brown Water,” by David Moodie and Maureen Callahan, draws an untheatrical but nonetheless scarifying portrait of Woodstock ’99. “A Fragile Mind Bent in a Psychedelic Era,” by Karen Schoemer, offers a factual but tender report of the broken life and career of Moby Grape guitarist Alexander (Skip) Spence. And a genuinely interesting interview with Madonna, conducted by Vince Aletti, shows us, in nearly Wordsworthian fashion, the growth of an artist’s mind and strength.
The Madonna interview, oddly enough, chimes with much of what Steve Earle has to say in Dave Hoekstra’s Journal of COUNTRY MUSIC piece on one of Nashville’s most famous singer/songwriters, particularly in regard to the record industry and how its abuses of power have become exponentially more frightening in this media-driven and consumeristic age. And “Punk Undead,” by the editors of MOTORBOOTY, parallels Sasha-Frere Jones’ piece on Run-DMC, excerpted from THE VIBE HISTORY OF HIP-HOP, in that both essays marvelously delineate the sociopolitical conditions out of which these two musical subgenres arose.
Other stories that will be of interest to SCENE readers include Roseanne Cash’s brief memoir “Songs My Daddy Sang for Me” and “Unearthing the New Nashville’s Wax Cast-Offs,” by Neil Strauss, who spent part of last year reporting from Nashville for THE NEW YORK TIMES.
(initially published in the NASHVILLE SCENE)
Da Capo’s yearly music volume joins a plethora of "Best Of..." literary anthologies, whose subjects currently range from poetry to sports writing, and it joins as well a backlist of various ROLLING STONE annuals and composite books. If Da Capo faces competition on bookstore shelves, the venture nonetheless seems destined for success. First, the ongoing decentralization of our national arts scene means that readers of serious music commentary must look beyond the usual suspects—SPIN, VIBE, THE NEW YORK TIMES, and SALON, in addition to ROLLING STONE--for the best music criticism in any given year; additionally, those readers need help in finding it. Guides in all media are becoming increasingly crucial, since the staggering number of books, movies, and CDs appearing each year makes it impossible for even the most serious devotee merely to skim the journalism that follows in their wake. It’s no accident that recent months have also produced books like ABOUT THE AUTHOR and THE SALON.COM GUIDE TO CONTEMPORARY FICTION, which differ from the DA CAPO BEST MUSIC WRITING 2000 in intent. But in a broader sense, these three books perform the same kind of literary triage.
For the Da Capo book, Guralnick combed roughly 200 generalists’ and specialists’ reviews of blues, jazz, hip-hop, metal, rock, pop, alternative, world, country, gospel, and Americana music, as he states in his introduction. He begins his foreword to DA CAPO BEST MUSIC WRITING 2000 with characteristic modesty, viewing the anthology “not as a contest at all but as a celebration, an opportunity to create, in written form, the type of mix that you send out to a friend and get back in kind, offering the comforting familiarity of shared interests, the sometimes unsettling evidence of divergent tastes, and, best of all, the challenge of new directions to explore, new avenues to pursue.”
Not all of those avenues are strictly aesthetic. One of the anthology’s most riveting pieces, “Don’t Drink the Brown Water,” by David Moodie and Maureen Callahan, draws an untheatrical but nonetheless scarifying portrait of Woodstock ’99. “A Fragile Mind Bent in a Psychedelic Era,” by Karen Schoemer, offers a factual but tender report of the broken life and career of Moby Grape guitarist Alexander (Skip) Spence. And a genuinely interesting interview with Madonna, conducted by Vince Aletti, shows us, in nearly Wordsworthian fashion, the growth of an artist’s mind and strength.
The Madonna interview, oddly enough, chimes with much of what Steve Earle has to say in Dave Hoekstra’s Journal of COUNTRY MUSIC piece on one of Nashville’s most famous singer/songwriters, particularly in regard to the record industry and how its abuses of power have become exponentially more frightening in this media-driven and consumeristic age. And “Punk Undead,” by the editors of MOTORBOOTY, parallels Sasha-Frere Jones’ piece on Run-DMC, excerpted from THE VIBE HISTORY OF HIP-HOP, in that both essays marvelously delineate the sociopolitical conditions out of which these two musical subgenres arose.
Other stories that will be of interest to SCENE readers include Roseanne Cash’s brief memoir “Songs My Daddy Sang for Me” and “Unearthing the New Nashville’s Wax Cast-Offs,” by Neil Strauss, who spent part of last year reporting from Nashville for THE NEW YORK TIMES.
(initially published in the NASHVILLE SCENE)
December 17, 2011
A collection of great (and maybe not so great) essays on all genres of music, from a day in the life of Puff Daddy to Roseanne Cash remembering the songs her father sang her, to Lester Bangs' criticism, to a superb analysis of Ry Cooder's personality and music.
I liked all the pieces, especially the quietly admiring piece on Cooder, the thorough look at the wild life and music of Nigerian musician Fela, and an erudite explanation of the musical legacy of gospel singer Dorothy Love Coates. It's interesting that the pieces that interested me the most were about musicians I knew the least; the best writing made me want to hear their music and appreciate it as much as these writers did. That really does make for the best of music writing.
I liked all the pieces, especially the quietly admiring piece on Cooder, the thorough look at the wild life and music of Nigerian musician Fela, and an erudite explanation of the musical legacy of gospel singer Dorothy Love Coates. It's interesting that the pieces that interested me the most were about musicians I knew the least; the best writing made me want to hear their music and appreciate it as much as these writers did. That really does make for the best of music writing.
May 15, 2007
A great collection touching on the failure of Woodstock 99, the odd dedication of bar bands, a look back at the history of Run-DMC from a diehard fan and an unearthed ramble from Lester Bangs (among others). Pretty much every story is good.
May 29, 2009
Favorite quote (which I'm remembering 9 years later):
"Country is music about dead babies and dead dogs." --Roseanne Cash
"Country is music about dead babies and dead dogs." --Roseanne Cash
October 4, 2009
Weeeeeeaaaaaaak. Lester Bangs? Greil Marcus? Fucking STILL?
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews