Music in a New Found Land

"This is a wonderful book, and somewhat forgotten. It’s currently very hard to find, here in America at least. It’s fantastically vivid and passionate writing about music of all kinds. It’s one of the greatest books ever written about American music. Somewhat ironically, as Mellers was English – but as an outsider he was able to look over the entire landscape of American music, before the 20th century and into the 1960s, with a completeness that perhaps an American writer could never have achieved. “It’s one of the greatest books ever written about American music.” What’s amazing about this book, and so rare, is the ease with which it moves from one genre to another. It begins with classical music, moves into jazz, then it goes into the world of the blues. It almost reaches rock ’n roll (it was published in 1964). If he’d written it a few years later, of course, Bob Dylan would have been part of it. He did. It wasn’t as successful. But this one, whatever the genre is, he writes with equal authority, equal seriousness and equal vividness. It’s something that I aspire to in my own writing – to move outside the classical sphere. I haven’t really tried to write about jazz, but I’ve written a few pieces about rock. Actually, all three of my major pieces on popular music are in Listen to This : Bob Dylan, Radiohead and Björk. I’ve mostly given it up at this point, because I find it taxing and a real struggle. There’s a language that comes very easily to me now, writing about classical music , and everything seems to take much longer when I’m writing about pop music. I’m happy with those three pieces, but it felt unnecessarily difficult. With the Bob Dylan piece, actually, I almost had a little nervous breakdown in the middle of writing it, and had to stop for several months because I reached a total impasse and doubted what I was doing. But I wanted to do it nonetheless and I felt it was important to try. I don’t know if that’s so much the case anymore. When I wrote that piece [in 1999] I was feeling more combative in terms of how I was responding to pop and rock critics, and trying to assert a role that I could play as a commentator who got into musical detail in a way that very few Dylanologists had done up to that point. But these days I follow a lot of pop critics, I admire what they do and I don’t think it’s essential that you get into so much musical detail. In certain cases, if there is something notable happening in terms of how an artist or band is manipulating harmonic progressions or something to do with rhythmic structure or textures, it’s important to apply that detail – and it probably doesn’t happen as often as it should. But there’s so much else to talk about in the pop music world. I really admire the critics out there who are keeping up with this insane diversity of what’s happening in the pop music field, keeping track of all the social and the political dimensions of pop music – which critics in that field tend to address much more forthrightly and intelligently than classical critics do. That’s one of the major weaknesses of contemporary classical criticism. There are some pop critics who do delve into musical detail. But my feeling now is that to write a review of a pop show in the same style as a review of a classical concert just wouldn’t make very much sense."