Critical Mass, the blog of the National Book Critics Circle, has asked various writers for their book recommendations. Here's my contribution: "Carl Wilson's Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste is part of a paperback book series called 33 1/3, in which writers talk
in depth about a pop album they admire. Wilson, a music critic for the
Toronto Globe and Mail, boldly elects to write about an artist he
thinks he can’t stand: Céline Dion. (Yes, the subtitle performs the
brilliant feat of conflating two Célines into one.) It’s as much an
essay in aesthetics as a description of music; indeed, relatively few
of Wilson’s 161 pages are devoted to accounting for the contents of
Dion’s 1997 album Let’s Talk About Love, the one with the Titanic song.
Instead, Wilson wants to know why he, as a pop listener of intellectual
bent, seems almost to have no choice but to detest Dion; why millions
of listeners in a hundred or more countries around the world
passionately embrace her; why Québécois tend to hear her rather
differently than do Americans and Anglophone Canadians; why Pierre
Bourdieu was only half right about the economics of cultural taste; why 'schmaltz … is never purely escapist'; why it’s sometimes unaccountably
overpowering. At the end of his investigations, Wilson hasn’t exactly
turned into a Céline Dion fan, but his views of the pop diva have grown
considerably more complex. I finished the book with the delicious feeling that
the mystery of music had deepened just a little more." Carl blogs at Zoilus.
