On his book Songbooks: The Literature of American Popular Music
Cover Interview of May 19, 2021
Lastly
The great thing about writing a book that starts with a book
published in 1770 and ends with a book published in 2010 is that you get to
take the long view—time will tell! In the immediate future, I expect to hear
about all the errors I made rushing my way through a 2500 or so book
bibliography, all the inherent problems in one person trying to vet a huge
literature. But if I’m lucky, this book will work in some of the ways that my
first one did, the Spin Alternative Record Guide (1995), which managed
to insinuate itself into the listening lives of many people over time. Often,
what I’m quickly pointing to in these pages are subjects that I still think
have some mystery left to them, a question we don’t so much want to fully answer
as keep answering.
I am a strange human being in that I love music writing as
much as I do music itself, love the quirky, cranky characters it attracts, love
the contradictory nature of the enterprise (serious fun), love seeing how far
writers of so many different identities can take particular subjects of so many
different kinds. It’s more than clear now that popular music has amassed a
literature, in the sense of multiple books on multiple topics. What this book
is more concerned to promote is literature in the sense of a sentence or
paragraph that makes an impression the way a lyric does, because the viewpoint
is so singular, because it imparts a resonance.
All these years after the arrival of vernacular pop, we
might feel more posthuman than we do like rock and rollers flocking to what the
great critical explainer Robert Palmer called “The Church of the Sonic Guitar”.
(See my entry on cyberpunk novels!) I accept that, but now we need to work out
what comes next—and how that changes our views of the still powerful writing
that came before. My hope is that by outlining American popular music’s
literary past, and having the time of my life doing it, I can provide some inspiration
heading forward.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
Lastly
The great thing about writing a book that starts with a book published in 1770 and ends with a book published in 2010 is that you get to take the long view—time will tell! In the immediate future, I expect to hear about all the errors I made rushing my way through a 2500 or so book bibliography, all the inherent problems in one person trying to vet a huge literature. But if I’m lucky, this book will work in some of the ways that my first one did, the Spin Alternative Record Guide (1995), which managed to insinuate itself into the listening lives of many people over time. Often, what I’m quickly pointing to in these pages are subjects that I still think have some mystery left to them, a question we don’t so much want to fully answer as keep answering.
I am a strange human being in that I love music writing as much as I do music itself, love the quirky, cranky characters it attracts, love the contradictory nature of the enterprise (serious fun), love seeing how far writers of so many different identities can take particular subjects of so many different kinds. It’s more than clear now that popular music has amassed a literature, in the sense of multiple books on multiple topics. What this book is more concerned to promote is literature in the sense of a sentence or paragraph that makes an impression the way a lyric does, because the viewpoint is so singular, because it imparts a resonance.
All these years after the arrival of vernacular pop, we might feel more posthuman than we do like rock and rollers flocking to what the great critical explainer Robert Palmer called “The Church of the Sonic Guitar”. (See my entry on cyberpunk novels!) I accept that, but now we need to work out what comes next—and how that changes our views of the still powerful writing that came before. My hope is that by outlining American popular music’s literary past, and having the time of my life doing it, I can provide some inspiration heading forward.