Best musicians biography books
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The Best Music Biographies
Do you want to start by giving an introduction to how you chose these biographies? I think you have quite strong views about how to approach the history of music as a writer. Maybe you could start by telling us about that.
It’s very difficult to write about music because, as one of my favorite musicologists, Wilfrid Mellers, once said, if you’re not writing technically about music, you’re not writing about music at all. You’re writing about something else. I’ve always taken that to heart and tried to keep it in mind when I write about music.
The problem is that in order to write technically about music, there is all of this jargon, and most readers don’t understand the jargon. So you have to try, somehow, to either explain the jargon along the way or avoid it and try to use everyday terms. The jargon is a time saver for people who understand it. That’s why it’s there, it’s a series of shortcuts. But there’s no point in using it if you’re writing for a general audience, which isn’t going to understand it. And it’s really only general audiences that I’m interested in writing for.
So biography was important to your approach in writing The Shortest History of Music?
I wrote about what I thought were the important ways we have used music as
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The 50 Greatest Rock Memoirs of All Time
So many CBGB-era punk memoirs out there, but Richard Hell’s is unique — poetic yet never pompous, bemused without corny punch lines. As a 17-year-old Kentucky kid, he runs off to NYC to be a poet, but ends up a rock & roller. “‘Sacred monster’ is definitely the job description,” Hell writes. “Being a pop star, a front person, takes indestructible certainty of one’s own irresistibility. That’s the monster part.” He depicts his music comrades — Tom Verlaine, Robert Quine, Patti Smith, Lester Bangs — and all the girls he’s loved before. (Hell was the punk Leonard Cohen in that department.) He quips about his popularity with critics, “because they were predisposed to favor noise, intellect, and failure.” In the final scene, he runs into his old nemesis Verlaine for the first time in years — flipping through the dollar bins outside the Strand Bookstore — and walks away in tears, musing, “We were like two monsters confiding.”
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