The Book I Read

(That's the title of a Talking Heads song, by the way. Most of my post titles are quasi-puns like that. I'm not sure why I do it, really. Try and spot them all!).

Seems to have been a generally positive response to my live review, so I think I'll be doing more of those in future. Might even do some reviews of albums not bought from Oxfam (I have a few ideas lined up).

In other news I have been somewhat immersing myself in music books of late. I recently finished Rip It Up And Start Again, Simon Reynolds' superlative history of post-punk from 1978 to 1984. It's a period of music I've been interested in for quite a while and despite the length of the book (500-odd pages), I found it a really compelling read. Reynolds is a very thorough author, and his love for the music of the time is evident. I probably enjoyed the first half, which was dedicated to the more avant-garde "post-punk" bands (Pere Ubu, Devo, The Fall, Joy Division, PiL etc.) than the second half, which deals with the so-called "new pop" of the early '80s (Orange Juice, Echo & The Bunnymen, Art of Noise, goth bands etc.), but that was maybe because I enjoy the music slightly more.

I think Reynolds' greatest strength is how he weaves together the story of the musical with the social and political situation of the time. In doing this he superbly sets the wonderful, fascinating new music being made properly within its historical context: there's none of the lazy teleological thinking that sadly dominates a lot of writing about popular music. He quite nicely explores the philosophical/theoretical foundation behind the music being made in general, and behind certain bands in particular, which is something I find particularly fascinating. Overall, an excellent book and one I heartily recommend to anyone with even the slightest bit of interest in that era.

My current reading is Michael Azerrad's Our Band Could Be Your Life, a history of the American underground scene from 1981 to 1991. Instead of taking a broad, very detailed approach like Reynolds, Azerrad instead focuses on 13 of the most important bands of the scene: Black Flag, Minutemen, Mission of Burma, Minor Threat, and so forth, with each chapter providing a biography of one of these key groups. While this is a slightly more atomised approach to take, it's still a very thorough book, as Azerrad conducted a lot of interviews with the key players in the scene. This really helps give the sense of what it was like to be alive and making music at that time, which is an obvious plus for the book.

His writing style isn't quite as fluid as Reynolds', and he doesn't set out events with quite the same degree of clarity, but I'm enjoying it muchly so far. There was a chapter about the SST records/American underground scene in Rip It Up, incidentally, and it does sound like a tremendously exciting time for music, so I am glad to find out more about it.

Unfortunately these books have had the effect of making me feel a bit sad, as I can't help but compare the ingenuity and general sense of optimism; the belief that new, brilliant music could be made and promoted independently; the tremendous sense of community and of a genuine counterculture movement, and compare it unfavourably with the musical landscape I want to try and make music in nowadays. I really do think I was born 25-odd years too late, sometimes.

But enough of my moping. Up next on my reading list is Words And Music by acclaimed journalist Paul Morley, which seems to be a more general book about music. It looks like it will be an enjoyable, if odd, read. Any other music-based books I should be aware of?