Sunday, July 10, 2005
Trend Alert: Writers other than music journalists write about music.
Editor's Note: Published on page E4 of the July 11, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer
"Lit Riffs"
Edited by Matthew Miele
MTV Books/PocketBooks
2004, 420 pages
FIRST, it was the cassette tape, then the CD and now the iPod, which may change the way we absorb our music, the way we experience lyric and arrangement, even the way we arrange our music. Yet somehow, amid the restless evolving of what we listen to and how, it is possible to find yet another way of going about it.
Good songs always inspire stories, in our heads, in our ears buzzing like something alive. If the song's narrative is straightforward, then the imagining is easier, but if the song's mysterious, then the dreaming is more mysterious with more possibility.
"Lit Riffs" is a concrete product of that process, that crossing over. This is not the first book to combine the purveyors of the written word and songs. Nick Hornby wrote about why he loved the selections included in 2003's "Songbook," his personal mixtape. But "Lit Riffs" is a little different.
by Matthew Miele, "Lit Riffs" is a collection of short stories inspired in turn by specific songs, with the pieces of short fiction as diverse and powerful as the pieces of music that inspired them. Leading of, for example, is "Maggie May," a story by the late, venerable rock writer Lester Bangs based on the Rod Stewart song of the same title, a mournful yet enthralling tale of a woman and her faded affection.
Eclectic, fascinating
The roster of contributors is eclectic and fascinating, mostly novelists, but also poets, journalists and even documentarians. Aside from Bangs, there's Jonathan Lethem, Amanda Davis, JT LeRoy, Tom Perotta, Tanker Dane, Lisa Tucker, Aimee Bender, Anthony DeCurtis, Hannah Tinti, Neal
Pollack, Toure, Victor LaValle, Heidi Julavits, Arthur Bradford, Jennifer Belle, Ernesto Quinonez, Darin Strauss, Judy Budnitz, David Ebershoff, Elissa Shappell, Zev Borow, Nelson George and Julliana Baggott.
And how about the singers and musicians who inspired "Lit Riffs"? It's Stewart, Daniel Johnston via Yo La Tengo, the Cowboy Junkies, the Foo Fighters, Tom Petty, Leonard Cohen chanelled by Jeff Buckley, Pearl Jam, Jane Siberry, the Beatles, Miles Davis, Merle Haggard, Bob Marley, the White Stripes, Velvet Underground through Cat Power, AC/DC, Paul Simon, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, the Black Crowes, Tom Waits, Herman Strauss and Richard Strauss, John Cale, Duran Duran, James Brown and Bruce Springsteen. It's hip and reverent, unusual and standard all at once.
"There are some songwriters who don't like to discuss the meanings of their lyrics or the intention behind them. They don't want to interfere with the interpretations their fans have imposed on the music, they say. When I heard this answer in interviews, I used to think that it was a cop-out. But the beauty of music is that it is, as Marshall McLuhan would say, a hot medium. It occupies hearing, leaving the imagination free to wander (unlike films or the Internet). The closest equivalent is literature, which occupies only the eyes. The intent may belong to the artist but the significance is the property of the beholder," writes Neil Strauss in his introduction. "'Lit Riffs' then
are the synesthetic experience that occurs when the sense cross, when sound becomes text."
From the singsong fable that is Toure's interpretation of Marley's "I Shot The Sherrif" to LaVelle's eerie vision of the White Stripes' "Aluminum," from the street rhythm that is both Tinti's and Davis's evocation of "Milestones," the way Eddie Vedder's growl is echoed in Tucker's "Why Go," this book has something for mostly everybody-as long as you are adventurous as listener and reader. It's jazz and country after all, weird and new all at once, the way a deposed dictator's stroll through a New York street rose from, of all things, Duran Duran's "Rio," and yet it's also the ruminations of an old drug dealer born from James Brown's "King Heroin."
Breathtaking
It's in the breathtaking lushness of the best piece in the collection, novelist Jonathan Lethem's "The National Anthem," based on a Yo La Tengo song: "You wonder whether you can stand never to know the touch of a fresh hand, the trembling flavor of a new kiss, and I'm desperately trying to keep from telling you the little I know: it's sweeter than anything, for a moment. For just a moment, there's nothing else. As to all you're weighing it against, your wife and child, I know less than nothing. The wisdom of your ambivalence, the whimsical, faux-jaded wit you share in your letter, as you contemplate the beauties around you, all that poise will be shattered if you act-I can promise you that much. You're more innocent than you know."
And when you listen to the songs that inspired these stories along as the stories themselves, well, it's just sublime, one mixtape lifting the other to creative nirvana. It's also a most sonic lure, to imagine your own stories behind our favorite songs. What secret life lies behind the
lush exoticism of Seal's "Kiss From The Rose," or what sad, young epiphany is waiting to be found in Coldplay's irresistible "Clocks?" What signals do you pick up from a Wagner crescendo, 50-Cent track, a Karen Carpenter ode, or-to go even further-the Eraserheads' "Wishing Well?" It is the easy and the hard, the quick and the quicker.
Like the songs it holds to its chest, "Lit Riffs" is different things to different people, but it's the chance to experience all this music, this dreaming, this pain and hope this way or that which makes this book special. Press play indeed, and then read, dream and on.
Available at Fully Booked. ¶ 7/10/2005 08:41:00 PM
Editor's Note: Published on page E4 of the July 11, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer
"Lit Riffs"
Edited by Matthew Miele
MTV Books/PocketBooks
2004, 420 pages
FIRST, it was the cassette tape, then the CD and now the iPod, which may change the way we absorb our music, the way we experience lyric and arrangement, even the way we arrange our music. Yet somehow, amid the restless evolving of what we listen to and how, it is possible to find yet another way of going about it.
Good songs always inspire stories, in our heads, in our ears buzzing like something alive. If the song's narrative is straightforward, then the imagining is easier, but if the song's mysterious, then the dreaming is more mysterious with more possibility.
"Lit Riffs" is a concrete product of that process, that crossing over. This is not the first book to combine the purveyors of the written word and songs. Nick Hornby wrote about why he loved the selections included in 2003's "Songbook," his personal mixtape. But "Lit Riffs" is a little different.
by Matthew Miele, "Lit Riffs" is a collection of short stories inspired in turn by specific songs, with the pieces of short fiction as diverse and powerful as the pieces of music that inspired them. Leading of, for example, is "Maggie May," a story by the late, venerable rock writer Lester Bangs based on the Rod Stewart song of the same title, a mournful yet enthralling tale of a woman and her faded affection.
Eclectic, fascinating
The roster of contributors is eclectic and fascinating, mostly novelists, but also poets, journalists and even documentarians. Aside from Bangs, there's Jonathan Lethem, Amanda Davis, JT LeRoy, Tom Perotta, Tanker Dane, Lisa Tucker, Aimee Bender, Anthony DeCurtis, Hannah Tinti, Neal
Pollack, Toure, Victor LaValle, Heidi Julavits, Arthur Bradford, Jennifer Belle, Ernesto Quinonez, Darin Strauss, Judy Budnitz, David Ebershoff, Elissa Shappell, Zev Borow, Nelson George and Julliana Baggott.
And how about the singers and musicians who inspired "Lit Riffs"? It's Stewart, Daniel Johnston via Yo La Tengo, the Cowboy Junkies, the Foo Fighters, Tom Petty, Leonard Cohen chanelled by Jeff Buckley, Pearl Jam, Jane Siberry, the Beatles, Miles Davis, Merle Haggard, Bob Marley, the White Stripes, Velvet Underground through Cat Power, AC/DC, Paul Simon, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, the Black Crowes, Tom Waits, Herman Strauss and Richard Strauss, John Cale, Duran Duran, James Brown and Bruce Springsteen. It's hip and reverent, unusual and standard all at once.
"There are some songwriters who don't like to discuss the meanings of their lyrics or the intention behind them. They don't want to interfere with the interpretations their fans have imposed on the music, they say. When I heard this answer in interviews, I used to think that it was a cop-out. But the beauty of music is that it is, as Marshall McLuhan would say, a hot medium. It occupies hearing, leaving the imagination free to wander (unlike films or the Internet). The closest equivalent is literature, which occupies only the eyes. The intent may belong to the artist but the significance is the property of the beholder," writes Neil Strauss in his introduction. "'Lit Riffs' then
are the synesthetic experience that occurs when the sense cross, when sound becomes text."
From the singsong fable that is Toure's interpretation of Marley's "I Shot The Sherrif" to LaVelle's eerie vision of the White Stripes' "Aluminum," from the street rhythm that is both Tinti's and Davis's evocation of "Milestones," the way Eddie Vedder's growl is echoed in Tucker's "Why Go," this book has something for mostly everybody-as long as you are adventurous as listener and reader. It's jazz and country after all, weird and new all at once, the way a deposed dictator's stroll through a New York street rose from, of all things, Duran Duran's "Rio," and yet it's also the ruminations of an old drug dealer born from James Brown's "King Heroin."
Breathtaking
It's in the breathtaking lushness of the best piece in the collection, novelist Jonathan Lethem's "The National Anthem," based on a Yo La Tengo song: "You wonder whether you can stand never to know the touch of a fresh hand, the trembling flavor of a new kiss, and I'm desperately trying to keep from telling you the little I know: it's sweeter than anything, for a moment. For just a moment, there's nothing else. As to all you're weighing it against, your wife and child, I know less than nothing. The wisdom of your ambivalence, the whimsical, faux-jaded wit you share in your letter, as you contemplate the beauties around you, all that poise will be shattered if you act-I can promise you that much. You're more innocent than you know."
And when you listen to the songs that inspired these stories along as the stories themselves, well, it's just sublime, one mixtape lifting the other to creative nirvana. It's also a most sonic lure, to imagine your own stories behind our favorite songs. What secret life lies behind the
lush exoticism of Seal's "Kiss From The Rose," or what sad, young epiphany is waiting to be found in Coldplay's irresistible "Clocks?" What signals do you pick up from a Wagner crescendo, 50-Cent track, a Karen Carpenter ode, or-to go even further-the Eraserheads' "Wishing Well?" It is the easy and the hard, the quick and the quicker.
Like the songs it holds to its chest, "Lit Riffs" is different things to different people, but it's the chance to experience all this music, this dreaming, this pain and hope this way or that which makes this book special. Press play indeed, and then read, dream and on.
Available at Fully Booked. ¶ 7/10/2005 08:41:00 PM
