Book Review: Da Capo Best Music Writing 2006

Okay, here's how it works. Every twelve months, give or take, some poor schlub of an editor has to sift through hundreds of articles, essays, interviews and reviews to come up with a few dozen nominees as the "best music writing" of the year. Then said editor -- this year it's music journalist Daphne Carr shouldering this thankless task -- hands off the stack of material to a guest editor; it's novelist Mary Gaitskill this time around, but in the past this post has been manned by folks like the Grateful Dead's Mickey Hart, cartoonist Matt Groening and enigmatic author J.T. Leroy.

Finally, the guest editor chooses two-to-three-dozen of the best pieces as being "better than the rest," the winners are shipped off to the typesetter and hocus pocus, Da Capo Best Music Writing 2006 has been created! This year's edition, the seventh in the series, is larger than 2005's slim volume, but the quality has not suffered from the inflated page count, and there are some real gems among the book's nearly-three-dozen pieces. It seems that the more literary-minded the guest editor -- as opposed to musicians or pop culture icons -- the more they tend to go with the high-falutin' articles, and Gaitskill's high-brow editorial choices for this year's book provide no argument against this theory.

In Gaitskill's defense, some of the loftiest material chosen for Da Capo Best Music Writing 2006 is also some of the best. Alex Ross' excellent "Doctor Atomic Countdown," from The New Yorker, is an entertaining glimpse behind the scenes of the creation of an opera. John Jeremiah Sullivan's "Upon This Rock," taken from GQ Magazine, is an insightful and introspective piece on Christian music and the Creation Festival, a subject that ordinarily would hold no interest for this reader. "Stories Of A Bad Song," by rock criticism's tenured "professor," Greil Marcus, traces the history of Dylan's classic "Masters Of War," dissecting the song's power and putting it in context with today's youth and the War In Iraq.

Much of the rest of Da Capo Best Music Writing 2006 is equally engaging. Bill Friskics-Warren's wonderful piece on Bettye LaVette illustrates the singer's tireless spirit; Robert Wheaton's fascinating look at the short, tumultuous life of British singer M.I.A. provides a contextual frame for the artist's work; and Nick Weidenfeld's "Dying In The Al Gore Suite," about Silver Jews founder David Berman's attempted suicide, is a sometimes-horrifying look into the psyche of a brilliant musician. Robert Christgau, always eminently readable and always a safe choice for any sort of compilation, discusses the magic of Billie Holiday's voice, while Wayne Marshall's look at reggaeton is a fine introduction to a genre of music little-known in the U.S. even while sweeping the rest of the world.

There are a handful of music-related, non-critical pieces in this year's volume that should also grab your attention. Elizabeth Mendez Berry's chilling expose of misogyny and domestic abuse in the hip-hop world shreds the veneer of machismo that fuels rap music while Katy St. Clair's lighthearted piece on the special relationship between Huey Lewis and a coterie of mentally retarded fans sheds a sympathetic light on one of the brighter stars of the long-lost '80s. Ann Powers points out the double-standard of judging mentally unstable male artists like Daniel Johnston or Syd Barrett as misunderstood "geniuses" while female artists with mental problems are typically dismissed and marginalized.

You'll find some hip-hop in this year's book (Peter Relic's "The Return," an interview with the notorious Bushwick Bill, is a scream), some heavy metal (Monica Kendrick's "Bang The Head Slowly," on the band Earth) and some indie rock (J. Edward Keyes' entertaining piece on the band Bloc Party). Mike McGuirk's one-paragraph record reviews, nearly a dozen sprinkled throughout the book, are witty, concise and usually right on target. In this volume, like those in the past, there are some articles that should never have been chosen -- the piece on metal band High On Fire (I won't embarrass the writer by naming them) wouldn't pass muster in a high school newspaper while the piece on avant-garde noisemaker Merzbow leaves one scratching their head at its inclusion; obscurity for obscurity's sake, perhaps?

Overall, Da Capo Best Music Writing 2006 lives up to other entries in the series and provides hours of intelligent reading for the curious music lover. There is no other series that has run as long, or has even remotely archived the wealth and breadth of music writing that Da Capo's annual volume does. There is always something between the covers to entertain the reader and, best of all, each book opens the door to a world of music that even the best-informed of us is unfamiliar with. For these reasons alone, Da Capo Best Music Writing 2006 deserves a place on your bookshelf.