I recently read another book from the great 33 1/3 series - I read the book about Black Sabbath's Master Of Reality a few months back. It's an album I love by one of my favorite bands. For my next 33 1/3 book, though I opted to go with something I don't listen to: Celine Dion's Let's Talk About Love. The book actually has a subtitle: A Journey To The End Of Taste. It was written by Carl Wilson (not the late Beach Boy, but a hipster blogger type) and is really about why so many people hate Celine when so many others love her. She is about a polarizing as an artist can be. I'm not a fan of her music. But she doesn't seem like a bad person. As I always say about people *hating* artists, I always say, "well, they didn't kick my dog!" In other words, most artists - and certainly not ones like Celine Dion - don't make music to annoy you, quite the opposite. I remember when she was up for an Oscar against hipster darling Elliott Smith, the hatred aimed at her was just ugly. The book uses this as the jump-off point. It's a really great book, and looks into why we like what we like. A lot of Celine fans really love her - she really means something to them. What's wrong with that? They aren't people obsessing over music magazines or blogs. But does that make their love less legitimate? If I had more time, I'd make some kind of study of the life cycle of blog favorites - the indie community seem to lose interest in bands really quickly. Celine's fans are fans for life. There are some pretty moving stories about Celine fans in the book. I can't say I'm going to go out and buy her music, but I definitely recommend the book, and I wonder if she knows about it.
No comments:
Post a Comment