Inspiration from Unexpected Places / Lollapalooza Wrap-Up Part 1

In other places on the web, I’ve mentioned Tom Ewing’s monthly “Poptimist” column as essential reading.  In his most recent article, Ewing discusses the intersection of ones personal musical history with the all-encompassing public history of pop music.

This is the terrible problem of writing a history of pop– we don’t experience music in a grand omniscient sweep, we feel it a track at a time, and we all have scenes or songs without which “pop history” seems incomplete.

Ewing hits the nail on the head – while I always look for (and, like many critics, romanticize) great albums, pop music thrives on single tracks.  I think of it like reading a novel – we’re quick to share authors we love or praise entire novels that we loved reading, but it’s single moments in these books that we fall in love with, whether we know it or not.  For example, I distinctly remember the part in On the Road where Sal Paradise ponders what the Spanish word manana means (it’s moments like these that inspired me to start keeping my own notebook, but that’s for another post).  Similarly, I love Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, but much of that love comes from the individual memories I have with many of the tracks.

Regardless, in my brief history as an amateur critic, I’ve always tended to like writing about songs rather than albums.  This comes as no surprise to anyone who’s received a mix CD with seven to eight pages of “liner notes” accompanying the disc (a practice I’m proud to say I’ve passed on to some of my friends).  This practice led into a few “mix” articles for my old college newspaper as well as the practice of building and then writing about mixes in blog posts.

A few months back, while trying to figure out how to write about music (and, quite frankly, just write more often), I came up with the idea to take my love of writing about individual songs to the logical extreme – pick single songs and write something related.  Whether it was criticism, analysis, or simply telling a vaguely related story, the idea was that I would be writing, drawing inspiration from the songs.

So tonight I started that process again, using Radiohead’s “Fake Plastic Trees” as a jumping-off point to start talking about Lollapalooza 2008.  You can read that post here, at the Make Me Fries site.  I’m planning on writing about individual songs as shorter, more frequent posts there (and perhaps breaking it off into something else if it cramps Mike’s style too much) so be sure to check it out.  In this blog, I’ll write one post about Lollapalooza that focuses on my general reaction and personal highlights (rather than dragging it out like the R.E.M. posts I still haven’t finished).

I’m hoping that the adage of “less is more” will carry over here – by writing shorter things more often, I’ll actually write more.  You can help by nagging me if I haven’t written.  I’ll appreciate it (I think).