A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

ALL RIGHT NOW (AND I DON'T MEAN THAT IN A PAUL RODGERS KIND OF WAY): A good review of a creative work, it seems to me, has to do at least one of three things. The most basic form of review -- the little paragraph synopses in the now-playing section of the New Yorker, for example -- suggests whether you will like something. A slightly more ambitious review will contain an argument, in a tone ranging from subtle to Pitchfork, about why you should or shouldn't like something. This may sound hectoring, but it doesn't have to be. A a reviewer has tastes, and either can't or shouldn't be utterly objective. The third basic element of reviews is, perhaps, the most helpful. It attempts to explain a work -- to show what materials or influences or life experiences or processes were blended into the final product. There are innumerable other things a review can do (tell personal histories; belittle the work's target audience), but I think those three are the irreducible minima. If a reviewer can't do one of those three things, then it shouldn't be called a review.

I didn't learn about Continuum Books' 33 1/3 series until recently, but it is a great idea. Each novella-sized book in the currently seventy-volume series focuses on one widely-appreciated album (the selections are all from the popular canon, but otherwise are quite diverse, ranging from James Brown to Joni Mitchell to Captain Beefheart to the dearly lamented Neutral Milk Hotel). Most or all, I am given to understand, hit all three of my elements of a good review, but they're not all straightforward reviews. Many spend quite a bit of time examining the social context of an album or the actual recording sessions (Buffalo Tom's Bill Janovitz unravels some mysteries about the recording of Exile on Main Street, for example, although the participants in those sessions are famously unreliable). There is a preaching-to-the-converted twist to this series, since the authors, many of whom are themselves musicians influenced by the works, obviously picked works they loved, and few readers are likely to pay $10 for a book about an album that means nothing to them.

The reason for this post, though, is that I wanted to laud John Darnielle's entry on Black Sabbath's Master of Reality for hitting all three of my elements of good reviews, and then surging past them to make something special. Darnielle's book is a work of fiction, a bifurcated series of letters from a 15-year-old kid shipped to a private mental institution after attempting suicide, then stashed away for a few more years in a state institution. In the first, truncated set of letters, the kid tries to explain to his therapist why it would help his mental state if he were allowed to listen to his Master of Reality tape, and exactly what he hears when he listens to the songs; ten years later, he writes to finish the job.

This is more than a way to flesh out an essay on an album that resists critical introspection and lacks an interesting historical context. It is a haunting story, simply and well told in two voices, the urgent one of a messed-up but ultimately optimistic kid trying to avoid being filed away in a state institution, and the broken one of the adult who didn't succeed. It works perfectly, right down to the sarcastic second meaning the album title takes as the title of the book. The genius of this trick is that it predisposes the reader to hear the album again as it was meant to be heard -- through the ears of an adolescent in 1985, not those of a 40-year-old in 2010. In away, it becomes a sympathetic review of the audience itself. It's far more than I expected from a review. (It also has one of the great opening lines from an adolescent narrator that you'll ever read.)

Maybe I'm overrating the book because I'm comically close to its first-half narrator (I was a long-haired 15-year-old in a Black Sabbath t-shirt in 1985), but I don't think so. It probably won't work for you if you didn't like Black Sabbath back in the day, but for the half-dozen of you who did (or do), there's plenty of humor (especially the part where the author tries to figure out what happened to the songs that are included on the track list but aren't on the album) and heartbreak in this one.