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Joey Ramone and shout-outs from GodPicking the best music writing of the year
By Todd Leopold
(CNN) -- In an alternate life, Jonathan Lethem says, he would have been a music writer. Lethem doesn't need to change. He's already an established fiction writer, having written novels including the Orwellian mystery "Gun, with Occasional Music" and the bestselling "Motherless Brooklyn." But he's also a longtime pop music fan and voracious reader of the rock critic pantheon, from Greil Marcus to Lester Bangs to Nik Cohn to Lenny Kaye. So it was a no-brainer when he got a call from the folks at Da Capo Press to serve as guest editor of their "Best Music Writing" series. "I revere those guys," he says in a phone interview from his home in -- naturally -- Brooklyn, New York. It's because of respect for them -- and the rock writers of today -- that "I don't dabble in [music writing] more often. I'm in awe of those people." The fruits of Lethem's labors are now in stores with the publication of "Best Music Writing 2002" (Da Capo). The new collection includes old guard writers such as Kaye and Marcus, as well as novelist Steve Erickson, the Chicago Reader's Monica Kendrick, the gang from the Onion, and even a group of e-mailers to Ilovemusic.com. An eclectic setLethem, 38, was among the contributors last year, when guest editor Nick Hornby selected his piece on the Go-Betweens for the 2001 edition. Taking on the editing job himself was no easy task, he says, and he gives credit to series editor Paul Bresnick for smoothing the way. "He does a superb job of distilling a year's worth of music writing into a reasonable pile of about 150 articles," Lethem says.
From that point, Lethem read through submissions, added a few of his own favorites, and then whittled down the selections to the 29 finalists. The process took about four months, after which Lethem "wrote the introduction in a big hurry." It's an eclectic set, like a good miscellaneous tape (if this writer may date himself in an age of burning CDs). The Onion pieces are recognizable to fans of the humor publication, "God Finally Gives Shout-Out Back to All His Niggaz" and "Marilyn Manson Now Going Door-to-Door Trying to Shock People." Kate Sullivan compares her life to Jennifer Lopez's and gets off some cogent points about the self-absorption of celebrities. Mark Jacobson ponders the cult of Bob Dylan and even interviews Dylan garbage analyst A.J. Weberman. Then there are the bookends, two appreciations of the late Joey Ramone. Lethem calls their inclusion a "sentimental act," but says that the death of the influential rocker -- creator of a stripped-down sound that launched a thousand bands -- was a jarring occurrence that symbolized something bigger. "I'm of the generation that was startled into community by the death of Joey Ramone," he says. Good research for his novel
In his introduction, Lethem characterizes "Best Music Writing" as "haunted ... by the ghost of 'Stranded,' " a collection of essays about desert-island discs Marcus gathered in the late '70s. That book opened the teenage Lethem's eyes to just how much he didn't know. It was a primer in Rock's Greatest Records. At the time there were a relative handful of rock writers. Now the number has grown exponentially. "It's paralleled by the explosion of the music industry," Lethem says. "It's not just a simple story of a few great bands. ... There's now a balkanization of tastes, some overlapping, some self-contained." Which may have made putting together a book like "Best Music Writing" more difficult, but Lethem's not complaining. After all, any music fan knows that a good miscellaneous tape takes time: sitting down with piles of records, noting the running times, creating a flow. "I like putting the book together. It's a fun way to play with other people's words and make the book your own," he says. "It's also a vicarious way to play in this community. I heard a lot of music I normally would not have heard. It's a nice reimmersion." And it didn't hurt the writing of his new novel, which he just turned into the publisher. See, the main character's a rock critic. "I want to sort of get inside of a character like that. And think about that alternate world writing career that I might have had, taking my passionate relation to music and marrying it to my writing," he told the Web magazine "The SF Site." Perhaps Jonathan Lethem didn't give up on his alternate life after all.
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