Being the Best: Pop Journalism Comes of Age

Hachette Books, 2022; Hachette Books, 2022.

“How does it feel, to be on your own, a complete unknown, with no direction home . . .” – Bob Dylan

I suppose I’ve always been mystified, in an entertaining way, with our culture’s virtual obsession with the best this and the best that, as if selecting from the taste menu in arts, letters or music actually meant “I’ll have what everyone else is having.”  Maybe it does. Academy Awards, Tony Awards, Nobel Prizes, Grammy Awards, best car, best restaurant, best fashion, best wine, best hotel, and so on forever. Generally, of course, such a designation usually refers to most popular, and nowhere does popularity often equal quality as it does in the rarefied world of pop music. How it could it be otherwise, since the very name says it all? But I’ve never believed that pop meant disposable or frivolous; far from it, since pop, and especially great pop music, is quite often the most accurate gauge of what the French call mentalité, the state of mind of a culture. And pop, at the virtuosic and technically complex level of The Beatles, The Stones, Brian Wilson’s Beach Boys, or The Mamas and the Papas, is obviously an art form demonstrating admirable aesthetics. High-quality pop is invariably a mirror of our reality, regardless of how distorted or clouded by various biases that mirror may be. 

Cultural Recommendations in this COVID Year

Erik Larson's The Splendid and the Vile was published by Crown Publishers in February. (Photo: Nina Subin)

Pandemic or not, culture continues on. Here are some recommended books, CDs, DVDs and magazines you might want to purchase for the holidays, as presents for others or just to treat yourself.

Some Dark Holler: The Oxford American Annual Southern Music Issue, Winter 2017

This year’s 19th annual music issue of The Oxford American features alt-country musician Sturgill Simpson on the cover with a defiant, rebel-like smirk suggesting the music from his home state, Kentucky, is back with an in-your-face attitude. But the cover portrait is nothing but a gentle ruse because this 99th issue is an ambitious collection of essays about finding “the middle ground,” that is, where artists remove themselves from their physical environment to find their voice while acknowledging the pull of home. The Kentucky music scene, like most of the southern United States, is shaped by the rural geography and its urban centers, which is why this particular issue is so passionate about discussing the contrasts between the socioeconomic backgrounds of the musicians who call the state home.

The Poisoned Well: Joe Hagan’s Sticky Fingers

Rolling Stone co-founder and publisher Jann Wenner, 1977. (Photo: Claire Maxwell)

I.

“He’s a dick,” said an old acquaintance, a veteran New York newspaperman, when I mentioned Jann Wenner recently. In three words, he expressed what it takes Joe Hagan, author of Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine (Knopf; 547 pp.), an entire book to say. On the largest scale of generalization, the verdict seems unassailable: one gathers it would be difficult to find a Wenner associate who hasn’t at some point felt betrayed or otherwise outraged by him. Yet this major biography of the co-founder, editor, and publisher of Rolling Stone, though it reports innumerable facts, can’t really be credited with telling the truth. In its single-minded focus on proving that Jann Wenner is a dick, it almost utterly ignores the rest of this complex and influential figure’s metaphorical anatomy.

Out of Vogue: Joan Juliet Buck and The Price of Illusion

Joan Juliet Buck and her father, Jules Buck, in London, 1968. (Photo courtesy of Joan Juliet Buck)

The shiny surfaces in The Price of Illusion reflect a high-gloss world of celebrity and glamour which the author, former Vogue and Vanity Fair editor and writer Joan Juliet Buck, has polished to brittle brilliance. As the title of her recently published memoir suggests, the book is less a hedonistic romp through a high life made fabulous by the ubiquitous presence of Hollywood royalty and designer labels, and more an archly ironic reflection on the pitfalls of vanity and a preoccupation with appearances. Witty and stylishly written, it is an absorbing and entertaining read, a richly sashed window looking onto a whirlwind time. It has just the right amount of A-list love affairs (Donald Sutherland and Brian De Palma figure large) mixed in with insider fashion gossip concerning the likes of Karl Lagerfeld, Yves Saint Laurent, Pierre Bergé and André Leon Tally, to make it juicy, even as the narrative skirts the edges of personal tragedy.

"It is a morality tale," says Buck, 69, during a recent telephone call from her home in the Hudson Valley countryside outside New York. The bucolic setting is deliberate. Buck recently chose it over Manhattan to be as far away from her former life in the fast lane as she could comfortably get. A pop-culture chronicler whose four-and-a-half-decades-long career started at age 23 when she became the London correspondent for Andy Warhol's Interview Magazine and then features editor for British Vogue and a foreign correspondent for Women's Wear Daily the same year, she speaks through drags of an ever-present cigarette, a habit picked up around the time a young Tom Wolfe made her the subject of "The Life and Hard Times of a Teenage London Society Girl," his essay about the 1960s counterculture. Her voice sounds dry, and slightly gravelly. But her intelligent commentary is as sharp as her prose. "I was always looking for the truth,"she exhales. "But growing up I didn't have many guidelines."

Georgia on Its Mind: The Oxford American Annual Southern Music Issue, Winter 2015

In lieu of a top ten list of the best music for 2015, I’d like to pay tribute to one of my favourite magazines, The Oxford American that celebrates the music of the American South every December with a compilation CD and some outstanding music journalism. I’ve been collecting them since a good friend of mine introduced me to the periodical in 2010. This is a magazine worth keeping.

Now in its 17th year, the Oxford American focuses on the history of the southern United States. It is published four times a year but the magazine’s best issue arrives in December. Simply titled the “Southern Music Issue,” the magazine features recordings, past and present, from a particular state or region in the American south. Last year the magazine and accompanying CD featured artists from Texas. This year it’s the music of Georgia, with a 77-minute sampler and some fine storytelling about the State’s musical heritage.

TIME Magazine: Sticking to the Old Ways, Fortunately

TIME magazine’s recent announcement that it has hired film critic Stephanie Zacharek to replace the late Richard Corliss, its longtime reviewer who passed away early this year, is welcome news for those of us who still buy magazines, value their continuity, and don’t want to see film critics thrown overboard in some misguided attempt to keep up with the times. When publications as diverse as Newsweek, Variety and The Village Voice canned their longtime critics, in recent years, including such stalwarts as David Ansen, Todd McCarthy and J. Hoberman , the future of film criticism, wobbly as it was in terms of overall quality, seemed even more dire. With the ascent of newer reviewers who don’t actually want to bring a real critical eye to their work (they don’t really deserve to be called film critics as they don’t/can’t criticize films but only praise them) and so many amateurs blogging their misguided, superficial and uninformed opinions on movies, there did not seem to be a place for the talented likes of Ms. Zacharek, who has toiled for the Boston Phoenix and The Village Voice, among others. Yet, here comes TIME which could have opted for a rotating slate of film critics, or no critics at all, attempting to keep the old ways going, allowing a prickly, original voice to carry the torch previously held aloft by TIME film critics, including Corliss, Richard Schickel (now retired), Jay Cocks and James Agee. Not only that, instead of routinely directing the readers of the print edition to go online to read most of the magazine’s critical reviews, as they used to recently do, they’ve of late opted to put most of those reviews in print instead and ceased tub-thumping for exclusively online content in the print publication, They still have separate online content, of course, but I no longer get the impression that it is paramount nor perceived by TIME’s editors, as more important to them then the weekly sent out to subscribers or sold on the newsstand. TIME’s decision to hire Zacharek comes on the heels of the startling announcement that Playboy magazine plans to phase out its nude pictorials, the ones that gave it cultural cachet when it was launched by Hugh Hefner in 1953. No doubt, those pictorials aren’t seen as nor are they as racy anymore in an age when mainstream pornography is aired regularly on (pay) TV (in Canada, at least), but it’s the exact opposite of what TIME has done, in terms of honouring its traditions. Playboy is turning itself into Esquire or GQ – profile pieces, interviews and lifestyle concepts geared towards an upwardly mobile male readership – while TIME tries to maintain important aspects of what it has traditionally done for decades. I think the latter has more merit and should be commended for not bending to the internet’s seemingly implacable Borg-like will.

Satire & L'affaire Charlie Hebdo (4 of 4): It’s (Still) Hard Being Loved by Jerks

Charlie Hebdo’s then editor Stéphane "Charb" Charbonnier (1967-2015), in 2012. (Photo by Fred Dufour)

“I prefer to die standing up rather than living on my knees.” – Stéphane Charbonnier (Charb), editor of Charlie Hebdo and one of the victims of the January 2015 terrorist attacks targeting him and his staff.

You cannot look at It’s Hard Being Loved by Jerks (C'est dur d'être aimé par des cons, in French), the fine 2008 documentary that Daniel Leconte made about Charlie Hebdo and the lawsuit launched against it about ten years ago by various French and non-French Muslim groups, in quite the same light as when it first came out. Yet the issues and questions raised by this very perceptive film, revolving around the definition of racism versus legitimate satire, the rights of French citizens to not be offended stacked up against the values of the Republic where free speech, however offensive, is sacrosanct, and the intent behind the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, still apply today. Only now they’re overlaid with the blood of the victims of the shootings in the magazine offices, killed by those who not only opposed their freedom of speech and image but who felt they had the moral right, even a religious obligation, to silence it.

Satire & L'affaire Charlie Hebdo (2 of 4): Revisiting The Interview after Charlie Hebdo

A scene from Death of a President (2006)

In 1971, in a novel that was first published during Richard Nixon’s first term as President and has since been reissued as part of the Library of America series, Philip Roth killed off  “Trick E. Dixon,” described the American people joyously celebrating their President’s untimely demise, and signed off with a chapter in which Tricky, in the afterlife, vigorously campaigns for the leadership of Hell. (“Now, Satan has indicated on several occasions during this campaign that I have been misrepresenting his role in the Job case.”) Six years later, Robert Coover used Nixon, called “Richard Nixon” this time, as a major character in his novel The Public Burning, which was set during the McCarthy era. This time, Nixon made it out alive, but he was subjected to speculation regarding his lusting after Ethel Rosenberg, and in the finale, was sodomized by Uncle Sam. A year or so later, a Saturday Night Live sketch depicted Nixon as a vampire who had to be executed with a stake through his heart to spare the country from being subjected to his self-exculpating memoirs. In the play Secret Honor, which Robert Altman filmed in 1984, a drunken, grotesquely self-pitying Nixon spends an evening recounting the crime against basic decency and human dignity that was his political career, promising to blow his brains out when he gets to the end.

Satire & L'affaire Charlie Hebdo (1 of 4): The Challenge of Endorsing “Je suis Charlie”

“…caricature distorts the original, it can be unfair, and it uses humor to reveal the shortcomings of, and occasionally to humiliate, its subject.”

                                                                 –Victor Navasky, The Art of Controversy

When I heard so many people expressing the slogan, "Je suis Charlie," I wondered what they were actually supporting. If the millions in North America and Europe, that include those who marched in Paris and other French cities (the largest since the 1944 liberation of France from German occupation), were merely expressing their sympathy for the murdered journalists at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, police officers, and Jews at a kosher supermarket by Islamist fanatics, their endorsement of free speech as a basic principle, or their repudiation of censorship-by-terrorism, I fully support these sentiments. During these marches, “republican values,” appeals to “fraternity,” and “solidarity” in the cause of freedom were often heard. A similar sentiment of solidarity could have been expressed for the 132 schoolchildren slaughtered in Pakistan in December and the countless numbers murdered, raped and turned into sex slaves by the savage Boko Haram in northern Nigeria. The inclusion of murdered Muslims in these gestures would have sent a strong message to the Muslim world that their lives count just as much as non-Muslims. Muslims suffer the largest number of victims from Al Qaeda and ISIS terror, yet we expect Muslims to condemn acts of violence against Westerners as they did when a delegation of 20 imams visited the Charlie Hebdo offices the day after the shootings, to brand the gunmen as “criminals, barbarians, satans” and, crucially, “not Muslims,” Writing in The Guardian, Jonathan Freedland argues that the demand of Muslims to condemn acts of terror committed by jihadist cultists as “odious [because] it tacitly assumes that Muslims support such horror unless they explicitly say otherwise. The very demand serves to drive a wedge between Muslims and their fellow citizens.” 

Fun for the Holidays: Select Offerings in Music, Collections, Books, DVDs and Magazines

Real World 25, from Peter Gabriel's Real World label is one of many great gift possibilities this holiday season.

It’s the holidays, the stressful time of year when you scurry about trying to match the right gift with the right person. There’s so much to choose from out there, in music, books, collections and DVDs... so where do you begin? Here are some selections I think you’ll like, something for every kind of taste.

Cultural Musings: On Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide, TV Guide magazine, The Maze Runner and the Longevity of Nick Cave

Film critic Leonard Maltin, promoting the now-final edition of his long-published Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide

The rise of the Internet and, in its wake, social media, has meant, I think, that no one bit of entertainment – be it a movie, TV show, record album or book – lasts for very long in the public consciousness. One month Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine will be the film du jour, then Richard Linklater’s Boyhood and then a different movie, which soon makes way for yet another and so on. The same with all other art forms, the result being that very little of anything makes a permanent or lasting impact anymore. Yet, at the same time, one gets used to certain artists, books or publications popping up on an annual basis. So it came as something of a shock when picking up Leonard Maltin’s 2015 Movie Guide to read in his introduction that this is to be the last one of these annual guides.

The Boston Phoenix Remembered

The Boston Phoenix folded four and a half months ago, not quite half a century after it began as two separate publications, The Phoenix and Boston After Dark. (They merged in 1972.) It was one of the few remnants of the age into which it had been born, when arts criticism was completely separate from celebrity journalism – when most critics would have been insulted by the comparison – and young reviewers, working for meager paychecks, were struggling to find ways to talk about the exciting new developments in the arts, especially movies and the newest kid on the block, rock ‘n’ roll. Significantly, the Phoenix went into publication around the same time as Rolling Stone, and many of the early writers published simultaneously in both venues.

A Defiantly Good Read: The Oxford American

A few years back, while browsing at my local record shop, Soundscapes, I came across an interesting magazine I had never heard of before, called The Oxford American. The magazine, chronicling Southern music, was reasonably priced ($10.95 Canadian, it’s now $11.95 here in Canada and $10.95 U.S) and most intriguingly also contained a double CD celebrating the magazine’s 10th Annual Southern Music issue, which I've since learned always comes out at year’s end. (The magazine, founded in Oxford, Mississippi in 1992, is currently a quarterly published out of The University of Central Arkansas.) The CD contained 56 tracks, including a cool intro by Mississippi native, actor Morgan Freeman, and the music on it spanned the 1920s to the present with well known Southern artists (Lucinda Williams, Eartha Kitt, Isaac Hayes, Jerry Lee Lewis, R.E.M.) appearing alongside more obscure ones (The Insect Trust, Hampton Grease Band, Elton and Betty White). It was a terrific primer to the richness that is Southern music, with wonderfully evocative liner notes in the magazine as well as poems, fiction and some feature pieces on the great and unique variety of Southern life.

Since then I’ve regularly purchased that Southern Music Issue, and sought out back copies at the magazine's website (http://www.oxfordamerican.org/). The Southern Music issue is now in its 14th installment and began, starting with disc 11, a state by state compilation as opposed to an overall Southern musical gumbo. This 12-year project designed to represent all sixteen Southern states has so far resulted in discs specifically devoted to the music of Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama and in 2012, Louisiana.  (The Arkansas CD, the inaugural one in the series was actually a double CD, with one disc comprised of general Southern music but the subsequent editions have been single state specific discs.) Together, this detailed and complex musical offering and the accompanying stories and features on what is commonly called the New South go a long way to dispelling the widely held stereotypes of a backwards, inbred region of the U.S. (I confess that I sometimes share that myopic view when I see how overwhelmingly Republican the South is – despite liberal pockets in places like Austin, Texas, Atlanta, Georgia and  Durham / Raleigh, North Carolina – and how gun ownership is highest in the Southern U.S. (and Alaska!))  Yes, I know the likes of crass Southern-set ‘reality TV’ shows like Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and others also don’t help educate people on the matter, but it only makes The Oxford American, even though the literary magazine only reaches a fraction of the TV show’s audience, more important and significant than ever.

Raising the Mercury on Summer Reading: The Walrus July/August 2012

Maybe we can blame the summer reading frenzy on John Keats when he said “give me books, fruit, French wine and fine weather and a little music out of doors.” Never mind that for most people it’s now magazines, junk food, beer, scorching humidity and Top 40 radio on the beach; the sentiment remains. Summer is a time to relax with your literature and libation of choice. What defines ‘summer reading’ or ‘beach reads’ – is it content, style, or context? We could ask the same question of Canadian Literature (CanLit). For most definitions of both summer reading and CanLit, The Walrus July/August 2012 issue, the ‘summer reading’ edition, lives up to expectations.

Although summer reading is notoriously light and easy, The Atlantic and The Huffington Post have recently put out articles disputing this assumption. And they’re right. Why should our brains shut down just because it’s hot out? But it’s also true that although we still want to be challenged, it’s not fun reading doom and gloom with the sand between your toes. Filled with short stories by talented Canadian writers, The Walrus summer reading issue is always the perfect balance, and this year is no exception. Heather O’Neill, Joseph Boyden and Margaret Atwood all treat us to an inside glimpse into well-remembered characters from their novels. That’s not to say if you haven’t read the novels you won’t understand the stories. I’ve not read Boyden’s Three Day Road, but I was still able to appreciate the true Canadian-north setting and pitting of characters against the elements. In fact, both these things were a refreshing antidote to lying docile in a pool of sweat on the beach.

So Much Richer: The Diversity and Variety of Modern Music

It arrived later than the other music magazines but the French cultural/political magazine Les inrockuptibles’s Best of the Year music issue is an illuminating read and listen, both because it’s so different than the Anglo-American annual music lists but also because it provides incontrovertible proof that when it comes to music, unlike other art forms, the critics are on so many different pages.

Charmingly titled Best of Musique 2011 (an apt mix of English and French) and accompanied by a CD of 16 of the mag’s favourite tracks, entitled La bande-son 2011 (Soundtrack of 2011), Les inrockuptibles’ top 100 discs, 50 reissues and 100 tracks certainly offers a cornucopia of sonic richness. But I was especially intrigued by its deviations from Uncut and Mojo’s top of the year lists. Generally of the top 50 albums cited by those British music mags, about half or so of the CDs chosen differ from each other. They shared a common preference for such albums as Gillian Welch's The Harrow and the Harvest, Wilco's The Whole Love, Fleet Foxes' Helplessness Blues, Tinariwen's Tassili and Radiohead's The King of Limbs but Mojo also picked Glen Campbell's Ghost on the Canvas and Nick Lowe's That Old Magic as among their best discs of the year while Uncut went for the likes of Ry Cooder's Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down and Gil Scott-Heron and Jamie XX's We're New Here. But Les inrockuptibles went even further in charting its own path with some surprising choices on tap. I would expect them to choose some home-grown discs, from French artists François & the Atlas Mountains and Daniel Darc – the Brits tend to ignore most non-English music outside of Africa – but how did they come to focus on an Oklahoma group called Other Lives, which I don’t recall being mentioned by either Uncut or Mojo (who supposedly keep a close eye on the musical output of their Anglo cousins). Other Lives was not the only American band whose album (Tamer Animals) was mentioned by Les inrockuptibles as among the year’s best; other choices included both predictable ones from Bon Iver, Tom Waits and Fleet Foxes as well as left field choices, not picked by the Brits, like M83, Hanni El Khatib and Salem, American artists whom I’ve never heard of. Surprisingly, Paul Simon’s So Beautiful Or So What, though featured on both Mojo and Uncut's best lists, was absent from Les inrockuptibles's chart They also focused on Canadian artists like Drake and Timber Timbre who were shut out of the British magazine lists. (Feist's Metals made both the French mag and Uncut's top list but was overlooked by Mojo.) And of course being neighbours and all, lots of British choices, including the releases from Arctic Monkeys, PJ Harvey, Gruff Rhys, The Horrors, James Blake and Cat’s Eyes, not all of whom placed high in their local lists. Interestingly, Harvey's (overrated to my mind) Let England Shake was Les inrockuptibles's eighth best disc but placed number one with both Mojo and Uncut.

Renewal: The Fall Fashion Magazines

For most, the idea of beginning a new year involves waiting for the dropping of the ball in Times Square, flowing champagne, and finally a round of "Auld Lang Syne". Mine, however, arrives when that familiar fall coolness bookends the still warm days after a long hot summer. September, particularly the wrapping up of the Labour Day weekend, is my time to reflect on the past, hope for the future, and become overwhelmed with excitement about my fresh start.

Perhaps this all comes from attending school for too long, but this is my new year. Refreshed from summer with a new game plan, I am ready to reveal my reinvented self to the world. Among the other more introspective emotions and activities, this is usually accompanied with a fall wardrobe to match. Our style, our presentation of ourselves, is a great form of self expression. The right ensemble – carried with our natural confidence – can capture attention, demand respect, and leave lasting impressions. It has the potential to be that finishing touch that sells us.

The Downbeat Goes On

Despite the changes in the music business, particularly from a technological point of view, criticism is still relevant. This particular website is dedicated to reviewing the arts by distinguishing itself as an honest broker of artistic endeavors around the world. Downbeat magazine, which has been the best and longest lasting periodical of jazz, has just issued its 59th annual Critics Poll (August 2011).  As a monthly journal that has adapted well to change, its Critic's Poll and Reader's Poll is an important barometer of what's being heard and reviewed in music.

The August 2011 edition of Downbeat features the critic’s picks for the best in jazz of the past 12 months and as a critic who did not participate in the poll, I was happy to see certain musicians getting recognition, namely, American pianist and composer, Jason Moran. His album Ten (Blue Note, 2010) was voted the best of the year. Moran himself was voted as Artist of the Year and he led the poll in the Piano category by getting more points than Keith Jarrett and last year's poll-winner Brad Mehldau. This is fine company, to say the least, and while I'm generally fickle about "best of" lists, I was very happy to see Moran grace the cover of the magazine and win three categories. Ten made my own list of the top records in 2010, and I have to admit that I'm feeling vindicated for trusting my ears and choosing new releases off the beaten path and rarely with a high profile. Nevertheless, with all the great music and musicians vying for our attention, which is bloody difficult in the 21st Century, it’s nice to see the so-called purists at Downbeat support up-and-coming musicians. In fact, that’s been an important part of their mandate since the beginning.

General Interest/Generally Interesting: June 2011 issue of The Walrus magazine

If necessity is the mother of invention, then satisfaction is at least the love child of expectation. We feel the constant need to calibrate our expectations, evident in the popularity of e-commerce consumer reviews, ‘best-of’ polls and blogs such as the one you’re now reading. We want to know what we’re getting before we get it. It’s tricky to manage expectations with a magazine: does the publication in general align with our ideology? Does the issue itself interest us? Purpose also plays a role in expectation. The link between authorial intention and reader results is often murky, but can be elucidated if readers try to understand intention.

If I had to write the mandate of The Walrus magazine, it would be: to make readers question assumptions, reconsider prejudices and stretch perspectives. The magazine’s actual mandate is much more straightforward: “to be a national general interest magazine about Canada and its place in the world.” Here’s where I quibble over semantics. General interest seems to imply that any Canadian adult could pick up the magazine, read it and find it interesting. While the subject matter would interest a wide cross section of Canadians, it’s clearly written for an educated and engaged audience. Since most local newspapers are written at a junior-high reading level, The Walrus would likely not appeal to these same readers.

There’s no doubt that there are people who find The Walrus intensely readable. And unlike other periodicals of biblical proportions, one can easily read the entire magazine in one sitting. Without an Audi or DKNY ad on every second page, it’s a size you can actually put in your satchel and tote around. The articles are not current in the time-sensitive meaning of the word, but they’re definitely relevant. For a magazine presumably on the left of political centre, the contributors provide an objective, non-pejorative and eye-opening commentary.