Book tour finale (On dabbling in pop)

The book tour for Listen to This is winding down. I'd have posted more zany pictures and anecdotes along the way, but a persistent head cold laid me low for a while. As it happens, several remaining events will place me in conjunction with colleagues in le Monde de Pop. On Monday, Nov. 15, I will appear alongside Sasha Frere-Jones, the New Yorker's pop critic, at Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn. On Nov. 20, at the Miami Book Fair, I'll share a stage with the iconic rock critic Greil Marcus, who has a new collection of writings on Bob Dylan. And on Nov. 22, at Housing Works Café in NYC, I'll join a reading for Best Music Writing 2010, of which I'm honored to be a part. Also present will be such rock/pop eminences as Ann Powers (editor of the volume), Robert Christgau, Jody Rosen, Greg Tate, and Sasha again. I thought I'd take the opportunity to muse about my extra-classical adventures.

As I relate in the opening chapter of Listen to This, I grew up listening exclusively to classical music and had no time or patience for anything else. In college I delved into free jazz and underground rock, which resembled in certain ways the avant-garde composition I'd lately discovered. When I became a critic, I periodically tried to write on rock as well, with variable results. At the New York Times, I persuaded Jon Pareles to let me do occasional reviews of bands and groups such as AMM, Caroliner, and Thinking Fellers Union Local 282. I'm glad I got them into the paper of record, but I didn't really know what I was doing. I covered some of the same territory in occasional reviews for Spin, where Craig Marks and Eric Weisbard were indulgent of my peculiarly limited enthusiasms. In 1994 the New Yorker asked me to write an obituary for Kurt Cobain; I included this piece in Listen to This, since it holds up a little better than some of my other early efforts.

One problem was that I lacked a critical language. I'd been reading classical commentators from an early age, but I doubt I'd ever looked more than once or twice at pop writing, with the exception of Maximumrocknroll and other punk tracts. Producing the pieces was a tortuous process, and I was seldom thrilled with the outcome. (I have a bad memory of inserting the word "damn" into one of my Spin reviews in the hope that it would make me sound like less of a geek.) Nonetheless, once I became a full-time New Yorker writer, in 1996, I kept on trying. I liked the idea of transcending genres and addressing music as a continuous whole, as Wilfrid Mellers did so magnificently in Music in a New Found Land. Also, the magazine then lacked a pop critic, and certain assignments fell by default to me. Between 1996 and 1998 I produced three critical columns on pop: only the last of these, on Sonic Youth and Cecil Taylor, appears in Listen to This. It became clear to me that I couldn't hack it as a working pop critic. In time, the magazine did hire a writer who knew enough — more than enough — to accomplish the task. That's Sasha, and I learn from him constantly.

I'm happier with the three long-form pieces that I've included (with some revisions) in Listen to This: my essay on Bob Dylan and my profiles of Björk and Radiohead. In the first instance, I was speaking more as an obsessed fan than as a critic. In the others, I was chronicling the artistic process in a journalistic mode. By the time I wrote about Björk, I felt that I'd finally overcome my hangups on the issue of style — my fear of sounding square, my puzzlement over the simple question of what words to use. I decided simply to approach Björk as if she were another gifted younger composer, which indeed she is. Inded, of all the profiles I've done, this is the one that makes me cringe the least. I don't anticipate attempting another long piece on pop — might as well finish on a relatively high note.