I'm currently reading Nick Hornby's Songbook, which I received for Father's Day (thanks Madeline!). I'm enjoying it immensely -- he brings out certain essential truths in pop music appreciation that I had never really thought about, and he validates my love for Bruce Springsteen's "Thunder Road" -- but I can't help but feel a little disappointed. For starters, it's a little intellectually dishonest: rather than walking the reader through what he likes about each song, Hornby uses the song as an opportunity to pontificate about the disposability of pop, or how certain bands "are of no use to him anymore," or emotion in music vs. what he would probably characterize as "intellectualism."
Read the Dylan-as-poet essay for an example: after telling the reader that he owns over twenty Dylan CDs, and knows perhaps too much about Dylan's biography, he writes:
I'm not responsible for my intimacy with the Life of Bob...That's the fault of all sorts of other people: friends, music writers, university professors... He's hard to avoid -- mostly because his status as a major poet allows one to like him without inducing the feelings of intellectual insecurity that usually accompany devotion to a pop star.Hornby's voice is always engaging, and always reads as if he's speaking directly to you, but there's a real looseness to this book, as if (like me) he simply sat down and started writing blog entries. (I loved High Fidelity, but in About a Boy everyone speaks in the same voice; in the latter case the movie was actually an improvement, if only for the presence of Rachel Weisz.)I suppose I resent that. In my book, either you're in or you're out, and if you're in, then get in properly, and find as big a place in your heart for the stupid stuff... as for the stuff that you can pass off as poetry. Obviously I wouldn't ask you to find as big a place in your head for "Mmmm Bop," [sic, Nick: I believe it's "Mmm Bop," with three "M's"] but then, that's partly the trouble: the best music connects to the soul, not the brain, and I worry that all this Dylan-devotion is somehow anti-music -- that it tells us the heart doesn't count, and only the head matters.
There's a whiff of the suspicious about it, primarily because the book is really about what each song means to him personally. There's certainly nothing wrong with this -- his little personal takes are great -- though in the end there is little one comes away with once one finds out that he was going through an X phase when he was listening to Y band, and so on. (There's a somewhat similar valorization of emotion in Edward Hirsch's How to Read a Poem, a post on which I've been meaning to write, but just can't get to. But Hirsch does, after all, prefer the lyric poets.) As music criticism it falls flat, but that's not Hornby's point.
In his essay on Suicide and Teenage Fanclub, Hornby makes some salient points about not needing to be terrified by art anymore -- as a 40-year old parent living in these times, for starters, he doesn't need to experience terror vicariously through music.
It is important that we are occasionally... depressed by books, challenged by films, shocked by paintings, maybe even disturbed by music. But do they have to do all these things all the time? Can't we let them console, uplift, inspire, move, cheer? Please? Just every now and then, when we've had a really shitty day?I see his point, as the father of a 22-month old daughter, but it's no reason -- not the only reason -- to prefer Teenage Fanclub over Suicide. I guess what I'm looking for is a deeper intellectual engagement of some sort, and not just because the Teenage Fanclub song is "more likeable. It's got a tune and everything, and on the whole I prefer songs with tunes." (I can sing along to "Ghost Rider" and "The Concept," thank you very much.)
It is indeed true that my enjoyment of the musicians on the right -- Hermann Nitsch and Merzbow, stuck in my CD player at home -- is rather different from my enjoyment of Missy Elliott's "Work It." But is it really? Am I not moved in the same way? Am I not equally transported by Eddie Van Halen's solo on "Dreams" as I am with Emil Gilels playing the first movement of Beethoven's "Emperor" Concerto or Yoko Ono screaming her head off on "Why?"
Well, maybe not. Maybe Hornby's right after all. As much as I love Fushitsusha, Keiji Haino is completely unlistenable as I'm driving in my car; it becomes undifferentiated guitar glop, which is different from, say, howling maelstroms of noise, controlled by a writhing Japanese shaman, plunging into bottomless chasms. (I thought you Forced Exposure types might like that last description.) And the Swans are great, but hearing the thud and clang and all that screaming in your car doesn't do anything for me. Give me early ska any day and I'd bet you the drive would be fantastic.