Writers and Music RESPOND FAST!

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Imagine that a major American men's magazine were assembling a feature in which top-list writers describe the first time they heard X, in which X can be a particular artist, or an entire genre, or a specific piece.

What writers would you like to read in such a feature? Answer quickly; this is not as hypothetical as it sounds.

― Nitsuh, Wednesday, 13 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Griel Marcus the first time he heard Sleater-Kinney HA HA HA.

I don't know - I hate top list writers.

― N., Wednesday, 13 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Chances of Hornby appearing = v., v. high, unfortunately.

Thus I posited Zadie Smith: because surely this thing will wind up utterly, magnificently rockist -- a string of white male writers talking about how various canonical 1966-1977 rock bands changed their lives -- but I seem to remember that Smith likes hip-hop and UK garage.

I also fear it'll be just a long list along the McSweeneys / Open City young-writer type axis: Dave Eggers, Jonathan Lethem, Steven Reinhart, Joe Meno, Arthur Bradford, Neal Pollack etc. The hideous danger there is that some of them might even talk about Nirvana.

― Nitsuh, Wednesday, 13 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Robert Crumb! Always good for a meander round some ace 20s swing-pop records.

― Tom, Wednesday, 13 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

david foster wallace yeah OK but ALSO margaret atwood and Haruki Murakami. the latter obv. loves pop music, the former i have no idea but would be intrigued to find out!

― katie, Wednesday, 13 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

You mean the 60s Nirvana? Surely not.

If you're going into the 80s you could ask for Jonathan Coe on the Smiths. Is he at all known in America? Prob. not.

― N., Wednesday, 13 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Knowing our luck Zadie Smith will write about Nirvana.

― Tom, Wednesday, 13 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Will Self on Britpop. Alan Moore on Roxy Music. Pat Nevin on Joy Division.

― Billy Dods, Wednesday, 13 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Poppy Z. Brite will provide the GOFF contingent with entertainment, therefore include. Also, get some straight-up nonfiction writers in there. Sherry Turkle, Naomi Klein, whoever did Fast Food Nation, hell, Michael Moore. Dinesh d'Souza.

― Ned Raggett, Wednesday, 13 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Alan Bloom on Culture Club. Actually, is he dead?

― N., Wednesday, 13 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

mark s on the first time he heard the lollies (if questioned, sneer massively "my de-ah!! you haven't heard of either of them!! but that's just too too!!!")

― mark s, Wednesday, 13 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Yeah, I think Alan's in the great beyond after realizing that there was a point to fun.

― Ned Raggett, Wednesday, 13 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I don't follow. Are you suggesting that death is fun? Goth.

― N., Wednesday, 13 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

JT LeRoy, Doris Lessing, Oliver Sacks, Haruki Murakami (He'd be great for this!), Daniel Clowes, Al Gore, Noam Chomsky, Norman Mailer.

― fritz, Wednesday, 13 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I'd like to hear what Bernardo Atxaga had to say about music, but the Smiths quotation in "The Lone Woman" gives me the fear a little bit.

Harry Mathews?

― Tim, Wednesday, 13 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Nitsuh, check your mailbox. There are suggestions. Shame, not many female writers come to mind for this. Is it a *real* piece of journo?

DOUGLAS BLUDDY COUPLAND.

― suzy, Wednesday, 13 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Michael Jones on Echo and the Bunnymen. He's always top of my list (which is a tad more than I can say for the band themselves).

― the pinefox, Wednesday, 13 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

If only Kathy Acker was still alive. :-( I would love to hear her chitchat about James Chance.

― Nathalie, Wednesday, 13 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I think Atxaga has made a record with some folkies, Tim. Or at least someone put his words to music. What Smiths quote was it?

― PM, Wednesday, 13 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Zadie will only write about Nirvana to impress Eggers.

I think this is a pretty dull idea. Has anyone ever read anything insightful about pop/rock/hip hop/whatever from someone primarily known as a fiction writer outside of their books? Shouldn't most proper novelists be too busy soaking Dickens and Tolstoy through their pores to have anything but predictably rockist Hornsby-esque tastes? (Not that I consider NH a proper novelist, mind you). Sorry Nitsuh, though I get the impression this wasn't originally your suggestion.

― xwerxes, Wednesday, 13 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

And does anyone know what kind of music D. Foster Wallace likes? I imagine him being really into Nine Inch Nails.

― xwerxes, Wednesday, 13 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Also: someone who should never, ever be allowed to listen to music again, let alone write about it: Rushdie.

― xwerxes, Wednesday, 13 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

David Foster Wallace wrote a terrible book about hip hop called "signifying rappers" before he graduated from genius school. It sucks.

― fritz, Wednesday, 13 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Harold Bloom on the Band. I think he once said in the Paris Review that he was the last rock band he paid attention to. Robert Hughes on Michael Jackson. He’s mumbled some irritatingly rockist things in the past, nothing major, about the decay of pop music into something synthetic and squeaky clean. Germaine Greer and Madonna. We’ve heard quite on this subject from Camille Paglia, thank you, next please. Steve Erickson and just about anything. William Bennett and Janis Joplin! They dated, you know. At least once. Stewart Brand and Brian Eno. (Richard Rorty and Brian Eno!) David Halberstam and Elvis Presley. And somebody should sit Don DeLillo DOWN and get some kinda ‘Invisible Jukebox’-stylee thing goin’ on.

I think the only writers on my list *I'd* like to hear answers from would be Rorty and DeLillo.

― Michael Daddino, Wednesday, 13 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

That is the worst title of any book ever, aside from the vapors of smug condescension wafting off of it. Why does DFW get to decide if rappers signify or not?

― xwerxes, Wednesday, 13 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Oh, I don't think it's meant like that - it's a reference to the African American vernacular tradition of "signifying", old traditional rhyming stories and toasts that were a precursor to rap.

― fritz, Wednesday, 13 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Good popmusic author = Steve Erikson. Ask him about The Doors.

― Sterling Clover, Wednesday, 13 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

That does nothing to convince me.

― xwerxes, Wednesday, 13 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Stephen Troussé on Gilbert O'Sullivan's "I Don't Trust Men With Earrings In Their Ears".

― the pinefox, Wednesday, 13 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I mean about Steve Erickson. The DFW now makes sense, though it still sounds terrible.

― xwerxes, Wednesday, 13 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Martin Amis on the Sex Pistols just to see the amount of shit he'd come out with.

― RickyT, Wednesday, 13 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Ack! No! Anything but Turkle! She was a professor where I went to school. God, I can't stand her, especially since the annoying and terrible article she wrote for the New York Times last week concerning gender, Lord of the Rings, and computer culture. So horribly uninformed for an academic who has supposedly been studying "cyberculture" all these years. I'll bet she has annoying taste in music, too.

― geeta, Wednesday, 13 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

hillary clinton on when she first heard tammy winette; hunter s thompson on when he first heard john coltrane; michael stipe on when he first heard jimmy webb

― Queen G, Wednesday, 13 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I admit it was a rather goofball article Turkle wrote there, true. There's plenty of points to be made about gender and homosocial environments in Tolkien, I just don't think that was a particularly perceptive effort.

― Ned Raggett, Wednesday, 13 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Alan Bloom on Culture Club. Actually, is he dead?

He's way dead. Funny you should pick that foxy gay-identified band. A friendamine whose dad taught at the University of Chicago informed me -- long before that Saul Bellow book -- that Bloom was a rather notorious lover of young men.

― Michael Daddino, Wednesday, 13 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Anthony Bourdain on the punk rock he loves. James Lileks on his least favorite bands of the 1970s. Jonathan Franzen on the first time he heard Oprah's favorite bands!

(Agreed, Ned--Turkle's article "not particularly perceptive" indeed!)

― geeta, Thursday, 14 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Jim CArroll on NY Punk, Imiri Barraka(sp) on Ike Turner, Douglas Coupland on Rush, Wayne Kaustenbaum(sp) on Nico,James Ellroy on LA Jazz,Gary Indiana on Peggy Lee

― anthony, Thursday, 14 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Hmm, Mim Udovitch on the rebirth of house culture. Dominic Dunne on the current jazz scene.

Hell, Elie Wiesel on bubblegum pop. (Yeah, I know he's ancient. Call me perverse;>)

Anne Rice on whatever inspires her to write those epic novels.

― Nichole Graham, Thursday, 14 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

i am reading Anthony Bourdain's book at the moment, and it's hilarious how he thinks he's a lot more punk than he actually is.

― katie, Thursday, 14 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I'd like to read Meltzer on the Minutemen or Meltzer on Albert Ayler. Please see what you can do.

― dan, Thursday, 14 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I'm really enjoying these; some of them are hilarious. I wonder how many of them are meant to be taken seriously.

― xwerxes, Thursday, 14 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

margaret atwood! i wonder what she would talk about though. her book on writing is so good, well at least the first chapter is.

dan rhodes on the sugababes !

alex shakar and/or tom frank on commercial jingles or the first time they noticed the repurposing of songs they loved for similar purposes?

amy fusselman on ac/dc.

lorrie moore, zsuzsi gardner, francesca lia block (on x!—her stuff is so informed by la and i bet she'd have a lot to say about x especially), aimee bender.

― maura, Friday, 15 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Christina Aguilera on Radiohead.

― nathalie, Friday, 15 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Mecha-Skank is a writer now?

― Nitsuh, Friday, 15 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Fredric Jameson on the Beach Boys.

― the pinefox, Friday, 15 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Derek Jameson on the Beach Boys.

― N., Friday, 15 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Oh, just a note: the bidding is basically closed here. I've passed many of your suggestions on to the individual in question.

Feel free, however, to keep discussing.

― Nitsuh, Friday, 15 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Lewis Shiner and Dave Hickey.

― dan, Friday, 15 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Adorno on Alizee

― Wyndham Earl, Monday, 18 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

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