Photo by "Bistro" from the band Ememvoodoopoka 2006
Da Capo Best Music Writing 2006
Editors Mary Gaitskill and Daphne Carr cut to the bone and look beyond the pretty of music criticism
By Sheba White
Published: November 14th, 2006 | 12:21pm
In the past two editions, the once-heralded Da Capo Best Music Writing series has gotten a pretty bad rap. Incepted in 2000, Da Capo is the culmination of a year’s insights into the cross-genre and cross-medium fields of music writing. The selection purportedly includes established critics as well as relatively unknown critics. But in the past two years, with celebrity guest editors like Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart (2004) and controversial author J.T. Leroy (2005), this hasn’t always been the case, as prominent music writers like Robert Christgau and Nick Tosches consistently make the Da Capo cut, while less popular realms of music criticism, both in genre and in experimental aesthetic risks, haven’t. The 2006 edition breaks this pattern with a change in the series’ editor from literary agent Paul Bresnick to noted freelance music journalist Daphne Carr, and the addition of National Book Award–winning author Mary Gaitskill as guest editor.
It’s not the first time that a fiction writer has been chosen to edit the Da Capo. Nick Hornby took a spin at it in 2001 and Jonathan Lethem in 2002. That’s why it’s surprising to see another fiction novelist guest editor amid cries of Da Capo’s predilection for favoritism. “It’s hard enough for me to maintain impartiality and objectivity,” Daphne Carr opined via phone from the CMJ Music Conference in early November 2006. “It’s nice to have somebody completely out of that world judging the work based on its style and its way of dealing with the subject. There are so many great fiction writers right now incorporating aspects of popular music writing into their own work. There’s no shortage of people in that world who are considered great writers and who are also sensitive and intuitive enough about what we’re doing to be able to pick up the pieces.”
Where there is a variance from Da Capo’s traditional approach is in their choice to hire two women as editors. The effect is that the 2006 edition is noticeably more provocative and much less slanted toward a certain aesthetic that Lester Bangs coined as the “industry of cool.” This was a primary complaint of previous editions, whose prolific odes to past musical icons such as the Clash and Buddy Holly by established music critics gave the general impression that music writing hadn’t traveled far from Bangs’ blustery era. “People love to talk about music as this divine inspiration and this really wonderful thing,” Carr said. “But there’s so much more going on, and some of it’s not all pretty and rainbows. To really stare into that and to realize what a dark place music can take you to sometimes is a hard thing to do because you’re ultimately selling a story to a magazine that’s selling perfume or whatever. So, it’s amazing when you can find writers who can portray that earthy, fleshy, corporeal, often fearful side of music.”
The 2006 edition includes moments of old-school idolatry, most notably in Kevin Whitehead’s “Chops: Upstairs, Downstairs with Art Tatum” and in the aforementioned Christgau’s Billie Holiday piece, “The First Lady of Song.” But it also places these stalwarts next to Miss Amp’s take on the confrontational gender-poetics of techno savant Kevin Blechdom and Anne Powers’ juicy essay, “Crazy Is as Crazy Does,” which is a sharp look into rock’s fetishization of mental illness along gender lines. In fact, in most of the essays chosen there’s a decidedly feminist take on the material.
“For me, it wasn’t just about [choosing] women as the byline,” Carr said. “It’s about questioning the idea of what “best” means and what it has meant historically and how that has been shaped by gender dynamics of what is aesthetically ‘good’ and what is relevant to discuss. There are pieces in the book that I think wouldn’t have been there if I weren’t sensitive to what a feminist perspective of music is. I think that perspective is valid and often goes unheard in music writing, and I’m excited to have the opportunity to explore other ways of talking about music.”
Carr and Gaitskill made the decision to include other pieces that weren’t traditionally in Da Capo, most notably reviews focusing on classical and reggaeton. They also included blog music criticism (complete with readers’ responses) and shorter reviews that are gradually becoming more the norm in music criticism but are often ignored when it comes to anthologies. Overall, Da Capo’s Best Music Writing 2006’s essays create a confrontational, challenging, and varied portrait of music criticism that highlights a visceral reaction to music over academic posturing and builds a collection of writing on what Gaitskill refers to in her forward as the “psychic violence” of music.
Carr, however, likened the best pieces in Da Capo to the most basic emotion there is. “When you fall in love with someone, there’s always something about them that is peculiar and that always sticks with you; that is so specific and so personal, it just grabs you. I don’t want to sound like some horrible Hallmark card, but there’s just something about their personality and behavior that’s so them, you love it more than anything. The best of any kind of music writing — of any kind of writing period — is that which gives you an image that’s so poignant or so strange that it sticks with you years after you read it. You’ll turn a corner and you’ll see something and you’ll say, ‘That’s that thing from that piece that I read five years ago.’ The best writers connect all those moments.”
Photo by "Bistro" from the band Ememvoodoopoka 2006
Sheba White is a Minneapolis writer living and working in Chicago. Her work has appeared in Venus Zine, New City, and Reservoir.
Issue #34
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