Crumbler

My new piece for TwentyFourBit looks at what rock critics can’t bring themselves to say about Wilco:

“The fact is that Wilco has now released three consecutive albums about healing, peace, and gratitude, with lyrics that wouldn’t look out of place as cover lines on Oprah’s magazine. (According to Entertainment Weekly, Tweedy wanted to call the new one Get Well Soon, Everybody, which if nothing else encapsulates the record’s themes.) This surging contentment is tricky territory for a rock critic to navigate — you would not begrudge Tweedy his happiness, after all — and so The Whole Love has become that rare rock record to be reviewed as if it were a long instrumental.”

It’s part of something new I’m trying out at TwentyFourBit: a monthly piece that tries to say something interesting about the last month in music. It strikes me that most music content is either curated daily — hourly even, tweet by tweet — or at the end of the year, when everyone discusses the varying degrees to which we all liked the exact same albums. Daily curation, in particular, seems to me to be a losing game for the amateur Tumblogger — nearly all of us are just reblogging Pitchfork and Stereogum, who are in turn reblogging each other, the functional effect of which is that a “stream this album” link posted on Crumbler now produces a marginal value rapidly approaching zero. (I’d note here that TwentyFourBit is one of my favorite music sites precisely because Peter is so determined to go his own way, carving out a range of interests for his site that is willfully different from others in the space.) In any case, I believe there’s value in attempting to curate from a middle distance — after the smoke of the day-to-day has cleared, but before so long passes that one month’s records are overtaken by the next.

For this first installment, I chose to write primarily about Wilco — how the release of The Whole Love in September was reviewed, and about the curious gaps in its critical reception. From there I touch briefly on the break-up of R.E.M., and then include a handful of links to summarize the month: the anniversary of Nevermind, a great Chuck Klosterman piece about Noel Gallagher, and so on. I end with links to some of my favorite albums from the month, which can now all be freely sampled on various music services. If the column is choosy enough in what it highlights, I hope people it will drive people to music and criticism that they might have otherwise skipped over.

If anything, this first edition might have been too choosy. While I would never try to write a comprehensive “month in music” feature — it would contain 400 links, and few would be inspired to click on any of them — I do want to make sure it at least represents an impressionistic summary of the past 30 days. What I don’t know now, and what I’d love to get your advice on, is how to write something that doesn’t just feel like a critical column with some links tacked on to the end. Should we try to draw connections between the month’s big albums, even if they might be tenuous? Should I write shorter blurbs about a larger number of items? In any case, I hope to keep it flexible: no month in music is quite like the one before it. In any case, I look forward to your thoughts.