Episode 237
Yesterday I found a document on my cluttered desktop entitled “Bono doesn’t like U2”. That sounded interesting enough. I opened the file, but unfortunately it contained nothing more than this sparkling sentence. Disappointment set in for a moment, then I remembered: I had read a while ago that Bono didn’t like the band name U2, and I wrote down this sentence as a reminder for a pop diary entry. There are all sorts of documents with such dazzling titles slumbering on my desktop. Sometimes it’s about song ideas, sometimes possible column titles, in some cases it’s also text ruins that collapsed ages ago but were never deleted.
Another file that has been sitting there for months is called “Barbra Streisand had her dog cloned”. Pop may have become bland and predictable, but it still produces very good pop diary titles with tabloid banginess.
But that’s all. Both reports don’t give much in terms of content: Of course Bono doesn’t like U2, it’s not a nice name either, who would want to be called that? Basically, you can only accept the name, like in the old days when someone’s last name was Dödel in the fifth grade. And of course Barbra Streisand had her dog cloned. I know quite a few other people who have had their dogs cloned; after all, eccentric behavior is no longer the privilege of wealthy singing divas. Much of my neighborhood behaves more absurdly than most active musicians. The latter don’t get anywhere anymore because of making music; times haven’t gotten any easier. Besides, even if Barbra Streisand thought the U2 name was stupid and it was Bono who had someone cloned, I wouldn’t have wanted to write about it (unless the cloned was the U2 guitarist).
Do you just leave the Beatles out completely?
Let’s focus on the music instead: Like many others, I submitted my list of the 50 best albums of all time to ROLL LING STONE these days. Terrible weeks had preceded this:
You don’t just knock together a personal canon like that overnight. One has to deal with horrific thoughts and planning entanglements, driven by strategic evasions and the urge to historicize: You simply smash the ten best records of the 1960s, the primordial soup of pop, so to speak, into the top ten, and then it goes all over the place continue? Do you make yourself interesting with inaudible obscure works? Do you just leave the Beatles out completely? what about jazz Do best-of records count? Are soundtracks also albums? Why does God allow live albums to exist? Should I first rank all my Gilbert Bécaud Greatest Hits records? Why weren’t grunge and britpop prevented? Can a lot of what was released after 1992 still be called music? What about U2 and Barbra Streisand? Can hornets cry?
And what about the albums that didn’t make it into the list? What to do with the favorite records of Rockpile, NRBQ, Marianne Faithfull, EPMD, Manfred Maurenbrecher, Guided By Voices, Love, Bongwater, Gene Clark, The Dream Syndicate, Lee Hazlewood and Franz Josef Degenhardt that had to remain unlisted?
Of course, the question of all questions has to be: What is a good album anyway? My brief answer: A composition of any number of pieces, none of which is missing or should move to another place. I don’t know much about U2 albums. But Barbra Streisand did produce a work in 1973 that might qualify as a candidate for the list according to the above definition. It’s called Barbra Streisand… And Other Musical Instruments. Ms. Streisand sings classics from all over the world, while all sorts of funny instruments are worked on, including various household appliances. Music to clone your dog by.