Best Music Writing 2009 by Greil Marcus
September 12th, 2009Title: Best Music Writing 2009
Editor: Greil Marcus
Publisher: Da Capo Press (2009)
I love music (like most people) and I am a musician of sorts (in that I know how to play a few instruments). I also love writing. Naturally, one would think that I would love a book about the best music writing of 2009. Well…at least in this case…one would be wrong.
Best Music Writing 2009 edited by Greil Marcus is theoretically a good idea. A lot of different genres of non-fiction have “Best Of…” series’ to recap that year. I’ve read sports writing and food writing collections and they were fine. This, on the other hand, was tremendously bad. Now…I don’t know that it is the fault of the editor or Da Capo Press. I think it has far more to do with the current state of music writing.
Music, like other forms of art, lends itself to a lot of pretension. I think music writers are mostly elitist who only like “indie” style music and crush on anything remotely popular. If you write about some great band no one has ever heard of it is acceptable. It is also OK to write about old cool jazz/blues musicians or Johnny Cash of course.
Anyway…most of this book bored me and I skipped through the sections. However there were a few well written, non maddening essays included in here. So there was some redeeming value at least. I realize that my frustration with all things pretentious likely clouded my vision on this one. I just have a really hard time reading what other people write about art. (What about you though? Right now you are reading something someone else wrote — about something somebody else wrote — about something somebody else did!)
Anyway — if you really like music writing — you should be all over this. Otherwise, you probably won’t want to read this.
Rating: 1.5 out of 5
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