Manafonistas

on life, music etc beyond mainstream

2016 8 Jan

One for my „shelfie“

von: Martina Weber Filed under: Blog | TB | Tags:  | 2 Comments

Mostly it´s great to have a look at our blogroll. You can read Karl Hyde´s photo-diary daily and sometimes the Exsurrealist has posted a new one-picture-story. At 33 1/3 I spotted this book. It arrived yesterday.

 
 
 


 
 
 

After reading it a few minutes I am enthusiastic about it. After an hour even more. In 13 chapters (from 1 to 33 1/3, which follows 12) various music journalists write about topics like the album review, the live review, track-by-track, analysis, the artist-interview, personal essay or blog-piece (!). Between the chapters there are so called „go-betweens“ with offbeat-advices, lists of sources and desert island discs and discussions about whether you need to know how to make music to write about it, how to make contact or where to find inspiration. I find inspiration from many sources, says Joe Bonomo, essays, memoirs, songs, abandoned buildings, movies, road trips. Bryan Charles counters: I´m not a great believer in inspiration. It´s really a matter of getting your ass in the chair every day. What I liked most are the „writing prompt“ chapters with their writing suggestion. Hope to surprise you with the one or another exercise within the next few weeks or months.

You don´t know what a shelfie is? In March 2014 Jazz critic Ted Gioia published a blog post titled „Music Criticism Has Degenerated Into Lifestyle Reporting“ which you can read here. Within the following twitter debate Ted Gioia tweeted a photo of his bookshelf to demonstrate he was well-read. Others followed. The term „shelfie“ was born.

The rewards for writing about music? The only reward you can ask from writing is the chance to keep doing it.

This entry was posted on Freitag, 8. Januar 2016 and is filed under "Blog". You can follow any responses to this entry with RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

2 Comments

  1. Jochen:

    „I couldn’t find any cogent analysis of how these instruments were played (…) I didn’t read a single discussion of song structure, harmony, or arrangement techniques.“ (Ted Gioia)

    This quote is Food for Thought, motivates me to go more into structural details when writing about music. I sometimes wonder how simple harmonics are of songs that sound so complex, deep and mysterious.

  2. Lajla Nizinski:

    Ja, vielleicht sollte man die Kritik von Gioia etwas abmildern.

    Ich verstehe z.B. den Abgang von Sasha Frere-Jones, der 11 Jahre im New Yorker sehr gute Popmusikkritiken verfasste und dann einfach mal was anderes machen wollte.
    Der hervorragende Musikkritiker Alex Ross bleibt dem New Yorker noch erhalten.

    Lustiger als Gioa’s Shelfie finde ich die Idee von Kapielski (Anblasen / Merve Verlag):
    er ließ alle seine Bücher aufblasen und nannte es das Gesamtluftwerk.


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