I REALLY wanted to like Joshua Clover’s new book, 1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This to Sing About (UC Press; $21.95). I hoped it would take an in-depth look at the musical climate of 1989 by assessing a range of pop singles and underground movements and how they refracted world events. I hoped it would, in the words of the inside flap, “boldly reimagine how we understand both pop music and its social context in a vibrant exploration of a year famously described as ‘the end of history.'”
Instead, 1989 can be summed up in a few sentences. “Right Here, Right Now” is a Jesus Jones song that’s about some stuff. N.W.A were cruder and more popular than Public Enemy. Rave was cool, but Nirvana was cooler. The Berlin Wall and Tiananmen Square sometimes but not very often influenced pop music. The end. Never mind that “Right Here, Right Now”—acting as a philosophical talisman of Clover’s book, reappearing incessantly time and again in his musings—wasn’t actually released in 1989. Many of the book’s subjects—U2’s Achtung Baby, pop singles like “Nothing Compares 2 U,” “Groove Is in the Heart” and “Freedom ’90″—are from a year or two afterward; even the cover photo of Kurt Cobain is from 1990.
“The current of the mainstream is slower to divert than Alpheus and Peneus,” Clover explains, and in referencing the Labors of Hercules, along with James Joyce, Francis Fukuyama, Guy Debord and Fredric Jameson, we are made to recognize that Clover is well read in literature and deep thinkers. I wish he wasn’t, and I wish he would write smooth sentences about music and politics instead of “this congealing of historical process into a pseudo-concrete thing in turn allows antagonism as an entirety then to be subjected to ‘the absolute deconstruction.'”
When Clover is making sense, his music acumen remains sound, particularly with a passage on Roxette’s “Listen to Your Heart,” which happened to be the No. 1 song in America when the Berlin Wall came down. Casting the power ballad as an exaggerated reflection of pop music itself, Clover finally ruminates on the very nature of pop music in 1989, with the song and era as “pop’s attempt to know itself as excess, as a superfluity which exceeds every container, which is liberation and infinitude.”
At no point in 1989 are any interviews conducted, and all quotes come from pre-existing sources. Reading it has the distinct feel of a guy looking up stuff on the Internet and commenting on it at great, monotonous length. This betrayal of a potentially wonderful project derailed by gobbledygook exacerbates the book’s tiny motes into giant beams. In contrast to the world-shifting music events it purports to document, it simply is, pinned motionless under the stupefying weight of its intellectualism.
Such problems don’t plague The Jazz Ear (Times Books; $15), a refreshingly readable book by New York Times jazz critic and Coltrane biographer Ben Ratliff. In 15 interviews with both giants and lesser-knowns, Ratliff engages in the great tradition of sitting down with musicians in their own homes, throwing on other people’s music and chatting about it. Kindly, he allows the subjects of his book to do the philosophizing.
Ratliff’s open-ended request of each musician is to pick five or so pieces of music that inspire, be they jazz, classical, world music or pop, and the ensuing discussion is never less than gripping. Thus, we get Sonny Rollins in his apartment listening to and effusing about the nuances of Coleman Hawkins’ “The Man I Love.” We get Joshua Redman, continuing the lineage, sitting in front of the stereo and dissecting Rollins’ famous solo from “St. Thomas.”
Deep thoughts abound. “Do you think ‘the brain’ is a good title for the brain?” asks Ornette Coleman, seemingly out of the blue but perhaps linked in some way to the music playing at the time. Wayne Shorter ruminates on life itself as Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Symphony no. 6 plays: “It’s no great mystery about why things are the way they are,” he says. “Doubt, denial, fear, trepidation reinforce the artificial barriers to the real, the barriers that keep us from going into the real adventure of eternity.”
Ratliff throughout provides illuminating background for each musician, so that even those who haven’t heard of Maria Schneider will have a run-down of her noteworthy accomplishments to date. But the author encourages much more from these people in his listening sessions, capitalizing on the power of music to open people up to thought, emotion and memory. By the end of Schneider’s chapter, after listening to the Fifth Dimension’s “Up, Up and Away,” she tells a story about a night watchman who teaches a group of injured crows to say “Go to hell.”
Bebo Valdes talking about crying to Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto no. 2. Roy Haynes’ onomatopoetic enthusiasm over Sarah Vaughan’s “Lover Man.” Branford Marsalis, living in a kind of self-imposed exile in North Carolina, listening to Louis Armstrong sing “Up a Lazy River” and remarking on Americans’ inability to truly hear music. Such gems are scattered all throughout The Jazz Ear. Here’s to a second volume, soon I hope.
