dimanche 22 février 2004

Music jottings (ii) - the vanishing generation gap The Kid has done me a very good turn. The latest issue of 'Trax' (via Info-Presse (Fr.; no site of its own) disturbingly points out that the only too venerable 'Rolling Stone' got buried under a thick carpet of moss with its list of the '500 Greatest Albums Ever Made' (Rhino Records). There's not one record in the US magazine's top 20 which won't be at least 13 years old in 2004! Reading on, I see that much of the rest of the list is no better. So what happened? Did good music suddenly stop? Or did the "array of musicians, critics, and influential industry figures" polled by Rolling Stone simply exclude anybody under the age of, say, 25? I'm surprised to find that of all 500 albums listed, I still own precisely three, with five near-misses by the same artists and about a dozen others long since sold or given away. Yet I've bought hundreds of "non-classical" records in my time. It's nice to learn how marginal you are! The Kid, along with friend François, a few other amateur or pro musicians (and magazines like 'Trax', 'musiques WORLD destinations...' and 'les Inrocks') have been unwittingly filling in much of a decade-long gap in my musical "culture", an ongoing process often pursued online on the strength of leads they've given me. So I've discovered that much more of what the Kid listens to is very good music, by my own eclectic standards, than I reckoned a few months' back when my inconsiderate ears were filtering it all down to a diet of tediously repetitive heavy metal without really listening. Mea culpa. With luck, this is a favour I'll be able to return, opening the Kid's ears to a few of the things that are going down today outside her orbit. She claims, for instance, that she doesn't like contemporary jazz or a lot of world music, only to say that she really likes some of the stuff I'm listening to ... so long as I don't warn her what it "is" by sticking a genre label up front. It's precisely such labels, trends, and above all the pseudo-cultured "sacredness" of the classical concert hall that Christopher Small opposed so strongly, along with a Marxist-influenced critique of three or four centuries of "Western classical music", comparing it with Oriental and African music-making, when I interviewed him about 'Music, Society, Education' in 1977. The people at Amazon UK dug out a copy to replace the one I long ago had (though it took them a month longer than the "1 to 2 weeks" mentioned on their site). Since it's not on my immediate list for re-reading, I've lent it to a musician friend, who reassures me that Small's then seminal ideas haven't dated a jot. I've already said (on December 16) that I have hopes of meeting the man again and finding out what he's thinking today. It's one of many good reasons to go to Barcelona. Maybe he rejoices to hear the proliferation of easily available musics since he wrote that book and the way modern technology, computer programmes and the total overhaul under way in the record industry are making creativity that much easier. This is not to say that I like everything going on nowadays. Far from it. In the past couple of weeks, I've been using the iPod to sample dozens of tracks that have made various people's "best of" lists in the past year. Then I trashed what I found unoriginal and boring, to make space for more, and am down to a shortlist of around 30. But don't be surprised in weeks and months to come to find a greying old wolf like me cheerfully writing about music probably more familiar to the ears of our offspring than most of us in our 40s and upwards. Any notion that the music we liked in our youth was so much better than today's has long since been banished from my brain. A baker's half-dozen from that (growing) shortlist might include: The Kills - Keep on Your Mean Side Telefon Tel Aviv - Map of What is Effortless Plastikman - Closer Stupeflip - Stupeflip The Rapture - Echoes Amp Fiddler - Waltz of a Ghetto Fly Mellow - Perfect Colors. 10:05:34 PM  link   your views? [] 'Zodiac' and other biochemical adventures It's impossible, much as I'd like to oblige. Since summer I've tried to make time for long reviews of each book and film that's seized my imagination (and one or two which didn't, though much praised elsewhere), but doing this any more will become a full-time job. So I'll return to much briefer write-ups on occasion. If reviewing becomes a chore for me, it'll certainly be a bore for you! The first "casualty" is 'Zodiac' (Arrow paperback, 2001) -- since I've been reading Neal Stephenson's work backwards. The alarming tale of Sangamon Taylor, an environmental warrior who takes on an industrial giant polluting Boston harbour, is again too broad in its scope simply to be labelled SF. With his customary verve, fast-paced action and considerable wit -- very few books make me laugh out loud as this could -- Stephenson works lessons in biology, chemistry and the art of navigating a high-powered Zodiac in pitch darkness, storms and the blinding glare of floodlights into a first-rate ecological thriller. The cast includes some dangerous nutters and likeable eccentrics as well as the FBI, one or two friends Taylor is pretty lucky to have, and plenty of people out to silence him permanently, including young Satanist angel-dust heads. This was the first Stephenson novel I've read where he managed to write a perfectly satisfactory end as well as a beginning and a middle. He finishes his opening acknowledgements with thanks to a woman who "read the manuscript and told me that the main character was an asshole -- confirming that I was on the right track." If Stephenson's anywhere close to the mark with his speculative look at what nasty industrialists could do to the seas with the things they dump in them -- and I'm sure he is -- then the world direly needs clever assholes like Sangamon Taylor. Reading 'Zodiac' coincided, usefully, with my completion on my online Safari bookshelf of all I wanted from 'Nanotechnology: a Gentle Introduction to the Next Big Idea' (Prentice Hall PTR, 2002) by Mark and Daniel Ratner. This book kept the promise of its title perfectly, notably providing a highly readable and clear non-scientist's guide to the science underlying nano before getting down to a grand tour of the technology in action and potential, in domains ranging from medicine to electronics. I didn't read it all -- that's partly the point of the Safari bookshelf, plus the ability to download particularly interesting chapters as .pdf files to keep for future reference -- but would strongly recommend it. At Amazon, this book alone would cost me the equivalent of my monthly subscription to the bookshelf, where I can have up to 10 titles on the go under the option I've selected. Studying on-screen can be tough on the eyes, but I'm learning to pace myself. The O'Reilly way of doing it is astonishing value for money. 8:16:46 PM  link   your views? []

nick b. 2007 do share, don't steal, please credit under artistic licence terms; contributing friends (pix, other work) retain their rights.