Word: musicalization
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Pitchfork has been publishing "best-of" lists for years (their annual singles and album wrap-ups are especially popular) so it seems natural that they'd turn their penchant for classifying and cataloging music into a book. The Pitchfork 500 uses 42 critics to cover 30 years of music, from 1977 punk to 2006 crunk, and all the starry-eyed, acoustic acts in between...
Highlight Reel 1. Journey: "Don't Stop Believing," 1981 "You can tell something about a person's relationship to popular music as a whole by how they feel about this song. Generally, people fall into two camps. If they have at one time considered it a "guilty pleasure," a dim-witted power ballad made by guys with bad haircuts to be enjoyed despite its inherent cheesiness, they probably identify most with indie music of some stripe. If they just plain like it and always have, then they've probably spent their lives enjoying whatever was on the radio...
...Relax" by Frankie Goes to Hollywood "Fellini-esque") and its tributes to popular songs are exquisite. The review of Brian Eno's "1/1," tells how the bedridden singer's inability to reach the volume knob on his stereo led to the creation of an entire genre of "ambient music," and provides eager but inexpert music fans with a greater understanding of pop music's evolution. But the problem with the book - and indeed with many music reviews - is that unless the song is familiar, it fails to inspire. It's one thing to read about Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean...
...this were a music video, it would start in this living room in Havana, with a tight shot of the skinny kid in the white tank top at the keyboard. He counts it off from four, and with a sort of animal ease, his fingers fly, and a montuno rhythm swells through the dented amp, surging until the drummer can't help joining in with the five-beat clave that is the backbone of all music here. And then the camera swings to the timbalero with a pink star dyed into his fade, cracking into the rhythm, and here comes...
Here's where the camera would pan way out, from that house in the Santo Suárez neighborhood, downhill past the official state recording studio, past the House of Music on Neptune Street, catching everyone's hips as it goes, until the whole crumbling metropolis is swaying to this montuno, all the way down to the Malecón on the sea, where the world's most humid block party unfolds on the esplanade, the way it does every evening of the summer, just across the Florida Straits from the big enemigo...