A Complete Explanation Of Everything
Friday, May 23, 2008
Is love a mixtape???
Ok, I don't know who turned it on to me, or rather I can't remember... But I've just finished reading "Love is a Mixtape" by Rob Sheffield. It could almost be a companion book for the irreconcilably lovesick and music-struck, joining on the shelf, "A head full of blue" by Nick Johnstone and the classic, "High Fidelity" by Nick Hornby.
To me, it comes off even more self absorbed than the latter two but that's hardly surprising considering the subject matter and we can all feel the pain that Sheffield is attempting to work through, the book being his eventual catharsis. It's certainly very real and raw in spots but mostly it's an unidentifiable worldview for myself, somewhere the crimes against music that most Rap and certainly Hanson have visited upon the planet are forgiven. In some respects, I can't believe this guy is a music journalist or that we share a common love of: "The Hold Steady" (saw them recently in The Academy in Dublin, they were eccelente).
Listen, I'm normally a fan of fragmented pose, surrealism, existentialism, the whole nine yards baby and the more esoteric the better but this just panders after a short while. He's at his best dealing with his pain, the other visitations that break up the book serve to nauseate and flinch.
"A head full of blue", whilst not directly discussing the same subject, comes across the themes of loss, pain and moving on and perhaps it's clarity is rendered through the prism of a recovering alcoholic and a self harmer.
Maybe I'm being patently unfair but, "Love is a mixtape", is a book that will be left on a bench somewhere for someone else and won't be crowding space on my already overrun shelves and I can usually stand to reread a book, 900 million times.
Is love a mixtape? Love is many things, one of the central themes of Hornby's defining opus (and I mean defining in the sense that if women want to understand someone like me, it's pretty much all in there or was in there), was that music shouldn't be reduced to times and places, it cheapens it. A great song should be a great song in and of itself. And that's generally the way I relate to music.
There is the odd song that gets tied up in a time and a place, Toni Braxton's "You're making me high" for reasons that I'm not going to go into for example.
Love is ceding control of the decks to somebody else for periods of time, it sure ain't a mixtape...
To me, it comes off even more self absorbed than the latter two but that's hardly surprising considering the subject matter and we can all feel the pain that Sheffield is attempting to work through, the book being his eventual catharsis. It's certainly very real and raw in spots but mostly it's an unidentifiable worldview for myself, somewhere the crimes against music that most Rap and certainly Hanson have visited upon the planet are forgiven. In some respects, I can't believe this guy is a music journalist or that we share a common love of: "The Hold Steady" (saw them recently in The Academy in Dublin, they were eccelente).
Listen, I'm normally a fan of fragmented pose, surrealism, existentialism, the whole nine yards baby and the more esoteric the better but this just panders after a short while. He's at his best dealing with his pain, the other visitations that break up the book serve to nauseate and flinch.
"A head full of blue", whilst not directly discussing the same subject, comes across the themes of loss, pain and moving on and perhaps it's clarity is rendered through the prism of a recovering alcoholic and a self harmer.
Maybe I'm being patently unfair but, "Love is a mixtape", is a book that will be left on a bench somewhere for someone else and won't be crowding space on my already overrun shelves and I can usually stand to reread a book, 900 million times.
Is love a mixtape? Love is many things, one of the central themes of Hornby's defining opus (and I mean defining in the sense that if women want to understand someone like me, it's pretty much all in there or was in there), was that music shouldn't be reduced to times and places, it cheapens it. A great song should be a great song in and of itself. And that's generally the way I relate to music.
There is the odd song that gets tied up in a time and a place, Toni Braxton's "You're making me high" for reasons that I'm not going to go into for example.
Love is ceding control of the decks to somebody else for periods of time, it sure ain't a mixtape...
posted by Christophe at 23.5.08
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