This was originally one of the delightful 33 1/3 series, with an unusual subject - the 1997 Celine Dion album, Let's Talk About Love, that housed "My Heart Will Go On" and was already a huge smash even before Titanic and utter ubiquity.
Wilson is a music critic with all the predictable biases towards the challenging and experimental, about which he's utterly open at the outset, as he is about his reflexive dislike of Dion (and her music, and the elision between the two is relevant), as it's at the heart of the whole project of the book, which is to use an investigation into Dion and her music - including cultural context and reception, musical antecedents, fanbase, and the qualities of the music itself - as a way into a much broader inquiry into taste, value and identity.
One typically fine - and central - section is his treatment of sentimentality, first re-presenting Kundera's excoriation of sentiment and kitsch in The Unbearable Lightness of Being (a book that I really should re-read) and others in similar vein, then highlighting that the reflexive resistance of sentiment may itself be sentimental:
In the end, it does seem like he's been through a genuine journey and progression through the exercise of thinking about the many layers associated, not so much in his case with what it's like to be a Celine fan, but having confronted himself with "how much is involved in not being a Celine fan". And his conclusion, that we should all consciously try to be aware of not only the ways in which we all have our own tastes, that we shouldn't (even implicitly) think about taste in a way that assumes the ideal is that everyone should have the same 'good' taste if only the conditions were present, that we all have an enormous amount of identity-formation and self-regard at stake through our tastes, and that we should strive to be open to understanding and valuing the tastes of others with a truly democratic spirit, is powerful and convincing and not at all relativistic.
***
Also, this edition includes a whole stack of shorter - and interesting, thoughtful - riffs on the original book and pieces touching on related themes, from such apt contributors as Nick Hornby, Krist Novoselic, Owen Pallett, James Franco and, poignantly and in closing, Wilson's ex-wife and prominent author Sheila Heti (a description of a playlist that ends with "A Case of You" and made me gulp a little).
***
And, only somewhat a propos but quite resonantly, this:
Some brief autobiographical notes:
Wilson is a music critic with all the predictable biases towards the challenging and experimental, about which he's utterly open at the outset, as he is about his reflexive dislike of Dion (and her music, and the elision between the two is relevant), as it's at the heart of the whole project of the book, which is to use an investigation into Dion and her music - including cultural context and reception, musical antecedents, fanbase, and the qualities of the music itself - as a way into a much broader inquiry into taste, value and identity.
[In the course of a history of 'schmaltz' as musical genre:] Celine Dion's music and career are more understandable if she is added to the long line of ethnic "outsiders" who expressed emotions too outsized for most white American performers but in non-African-American codes, letting white audiences loosen up without crossing the "color line".It makes for a very impressive piece, always keeping in mind where Wilson himself is coming from, while effecting a sort of fusion of horizons between that perspective and the frames through which taste and its formation and (class-related) boundary-policing take place, devoting a full chapter ("Let's Talk About Who's Got Bad Taste") to Bourdieu, cultural capital, the way it tends to be defined - of course - by and for those sufficiently privileged to claim and enjoy 'refined' art and experience.
One typically fine - and central - section is his treatment of sentimentality, first re-presenting Kundera's excoriation of sentiment and kitsch in The Unbearable Lightness of Being (a book that I really should re-read) and others in similar vein, then highlighting that the reflexive resistance of sentiment may itself be sentimental:
What self-conscious aesthetes such as Kundera, [Stephin] Merritt and I might be guilty of sentimentalizing is ambiguity, that shibboleth of our postidealistic age. Which can make us dupes of another kind, prone to taking surface complication and opacity for depth, and apt to overlook the complexity that may lie even within the sentimental on more patient, curious inspection.What keeps it credible is his immediate acknowledgement that, of course, sentimental art can be lousy - before repeating the point that it's not sentiment itself, but what is often done with it, that is the problem. That's also the chapter that ends with a quite lovely couple of paragraphs about a music-related moment early in Wilson's relationship with his "future exwife":
That it did not remain enough, that there would be a sadder side to the story, does nothing to mar it, nor to diminish one watt in my memory the soft autumn light that fell across her face as she sang Buddy Holly's words to me.
In the end, it does seem like he's been through a genuine journey and progression through the exercise of thinking about the many layers associated, not so much in his case with what it's like to be a Celine fan, but having confronted himself with "how much is involved in not being a Celine fan". And his conclusion, that we should all consciously try to be aware of not only the ways in which we all have our own tastes, that we shouldn't (even implicitly) think about taste in a way that assumes the ideal is that everyone should have the same 'good' taste if only the conditions were present, that we all have an enormous amount of identity-formation and self-regard at stake through our tastes, and that we should strive to be open to understanding and valuing the tastes of others with a truly democratic spirit, is powerful and convincing and not at all relativistic.
***
Also, this edition includes a whole stack of shorter - and interesting, thoughtful - riffs on the original book and pieces touching on related themes, from such apt contributors as Nick Hornby, Krist Novoselic, Owen Pallett, James Franco and, poignantly and in closing, Wilson's ex-wife and prominent author Sheila Heti (a description of a playlist that ends with "A Case of You" and made me gulp a little).
***
And, only somewhat a propos but quite resonantly, this:
It's not that I'm some immovable stoic. If you want to know what makes me cry, more reliably than anything this side of George Jones singing "He Stopped Loving Her Today", it's usually some squishy moment from a TV show about a teenage girl. My So-Called Life, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Veronica Mars, Freaks and Geeks, Joan of Arcadia ... You name them, they've turned my waterworks on.***
I have an idea why. It isn't just the sad pretty girls. Nor is it, as I first thought, just an escapist return to the febrile ordeals of adolescence, the scene of the crime of self-invention (but through female eyes, because the teen male is not exactly renowned for his psychological acumen). No, the truth is that my so-called adult life is mortifyingly similar to that of a teenage girl, or at least the bemused existentialists who stand in for them on TV: It's a comedy-drama, centred more on groups of friends than family or workplace. The loose plotlines are mainly an excuse for endless talk about relationships, books, bands, What It All Means and how far we can bend the grownup rules before landing in trouble. Usually we bend them too far. My work entails spending a lot of time at cultural events and parties, figuring out how to assimilate to new social groups, to which the answer is always: Awkwardly. With a lot of crushes. But my life is also guided by a vocation, a secret mission like Buffy's (vampire slayer) or Veronica's (girl detective) or Joan's (special envoy for God). Mine just involves more typing and less stalking the undead. This is where the grislier side of the identification comes in: the mission tends to distance me from the center ring of adult life, the hurlyburly of business and domesticity, where the normal grownups live. All of which, I fear, has arrested my development.
Some brief autobiographical notes:
- Because my mum was a fan, some of my earliest musical memories are of Celine Dion, often (in retrospect surprisingly) played very loud. I've thought before that my later musical tastes were probably heavily shaped by those early, formative exposures to music from both of my parents that, while in no way cool, were at their heart all about melody - on my dad's side, I mainly remember Elton John, Neil Diamond, Roy Orbison and Engelbert Humpdinck.
- Even at my most self-consciously alternative in musical tastes (late teens and early twenties), ballads were never far from the surface and nor was out and out pop music (that old winamp playlist from uni days...).
- In fact a few months ago I even purchased - via the itunes store - half a dozen or so of Dion's biggest - and most sentimental, power-ballady - hits as part of my ongoing attempt to have every song that I might ever feel the urge to listen to in any kind of mood immediately available. (Maybe it was more than a few months ago but apparently I've listened to "The Power of Love" some 27 times since, admittedly including a few times while writing this now.)
- Of course, while my fondness for straight up ballads is sincere, and feels to me like a response on the same level as I have to any other genre/form of music, it'd be dishonest to claim that I'm not a tiny bit pleased with myself to have such catholic tastes, or that my comfort with saying I like such mainstream stuff (exhibit A more recently: Taylor Swift) is independent of the bulletproofness that I assume I have thanks to also being deep in more conventionally 'credible' tastes, at least by the standards of years gone by, which itself is a form of cultural capital and self-identification, and especially nowadays, things having shifted a fair way from the debate about alternative vs mainstream (and rockism vs poptism etc that was playing out contemporaneously when Wilson's book originally came out in 2007, a point he himself makes in the afterword to this new edition) to a point where omnivorousness is arguably the greater virtue in the eyes of the ruling arbiters of taste, whoever they now are in our dispersed brave new world.
