Idolator

I admit it: I have a bias against literary novelists who write about music. It has to do with my appetite for immediacy. That’s what I like about pop, and pop writing, and it’s not a tendency always shared by literary fiction writers. So I see detailed explanations of milieu that I take for granted and I grow impatient. Obviously, this is my fault, but sometimes it’s the writers’ too. Once I showed a friend a piece a long music essay, by a well-known author, that seemed to spend its first page clearing its own throat. My friend summed up my response with hers: “Trying. Too. Hard.”

So it’s nice to have this bias knocked over, as happened with Hang the DJ: An Alternative Book of Music Lists (Faber & Faber), edited by Angus Cargill. I hadn’t known about the book before Simon Reynolds, who contributed two lists (“Deserving But Denied: Thirty-three No. 2s That Should Have Been No.1” and “The Dirty Dozen: Twelve Great Artists Who Are Terrible Influences”), mentioned the book’s blog on his own. I hadn’t looked beyond a couple of names before my copy arrived; I wanted to be surprised.

More »

I have no real sense of Rick Moody the novelist. I haven't read any of his books or short stories; I haven't even seen the filmed version of The Ice Storm. Most of what I know about him is that Dale Peck made his career by calling him "the worst writer of his generation," and that he contributes regularly to the pop-leaning lit mags I read, Black Clock and The Believer. In both magazines a few years ago Moody wrote about a listening club he's part of; once a month he and a dozen friends pick two songs based on a theme and then sit around and play them together, with dinner. It inspired me to start something similar, and that's been going on for a few years now, so I thank him for that. More »