31 Songs

'but the truly great songs, the ones that age and golden-oldies radio stations cannot wither, are about our romantic feelings. and this is not because songwriters have anything to add to the subject; it's just that romance, with its dips and turns and glooms and highs, its swoops and swoons and blues, is a natural metaphor for music itself.'

I love the obsessive pop fandom done with a British accent.

okay less a review...more a brag...I have a signed copy of this!

When I put this on my wishlist, I thought it was a novel. I just read a couple of Hornby's books and decided I wanted to read them all. I was a little disappointed when I discovered it was just him talking about 31 songs he liked, especially when I looked at the list of songs and either don't know or don't like any of them.

But this isn't really about those particular songs. This is a musical journey that pretty much everyone can relate to. Even though the songs are different, they way he's gone through genres at certain stages of life, echos my own.

I laughed out loud when he mentioned starting to look towards country music, as it tends to be like heavy rock music where it's not that mainstream and you still feel like you have something special to you. I am loving country music at the moment, I must have reached that age!

Everyone who starts to notice they are getting older will relate to not understanding the music of today. My niece was playing some rap song for me yesterday, kept going 'boys, not hot'. And I was judging it for being stupid. This book has made me remember that I love the song 'Barbie Girl' and I will sing along to 'The Cheeky Girls' if it's being played. And I'm guessing my parents didn't understood why I liked those tunes, as their parents no doubt didn't understand what they were listening to.

Still can't get over that all the songs I like are now being played on 'Magic' . A radio station that used to be reserved exclusively for songs my mum liked.

Hornby injects his trademark humor into the writing and although I did try and listen to a few of the tracks on youtube, they are not my thing. But that doesn't matter. Like I said before, this is about the relationship people have with music. Very relatable.

Once again Hornby's affectionate and intelligent criticism reminds me why I bothered with him in the first place.

Hornby has a strange and anxious personality as a music critic. He often seems wounded and defensive when expressing his opinions. He offers qualifiers that don’t so much communicate humility or clarification, but of anxiety. Reading 31 consecutive chapters leaves me with the feeling that they serve to provide him with a protective shield for his opinions more than they serve to communicate any real joy or inspiration that these 31 songs ostensibly bring him. Unfortunately, the result is that it’s kind of a drag reading him.

What, exactly, is he trying to protect? I believe he is trying to establish that it is okay for him to like pop music. And what thesis could be more banal and pointless than that? While Songbook would ostensibly be for a popular audience, I get the undeniable impression that his writing is aimed at an audience that is not popular, but rather fellow critics, writers, intellectuals, literati. Clearly, it must be, because, as a lover of pop music, he has, by definition, most of the world on his side! He doesn’t need to convince the masses to love a song that is already loved by the masses, right? It’s the literati who are apparently against him (although this is only ever implied. He never actually shares any evidence of persecution by his peers [or by the masses, for that matter]). Tellingly, the last sentence in his chapter on Suicide’s Frankie Teardrop (it is the one glaring exception to the other 30 pop songs that he uses as a counterpoint), he writes “don’t try to make me feel morally or intellectually inferior” for not wanting to listen to music like Suicide (64). Who could he be addressing other than his critic peers? Surely no one who shares his love of Rod Stewart, Ben Folds Five, Jackson Browne, Rufus Wainwright, etc. (ie: popular audiences). Of course, there’s an irony here. For all of his allegiance to pop music, his book skips over popular audiences in order to reach and react to his critic peers.

In his attempts to convince his peers of the merits of say, Nelly Furtado, it’s a little comical and a little sad, because he is in a constant state of defending the status quo, the people in charge, the music companies, the radio conglomerates, the logarithms, the victors of history, if you will. And this is where Hornby’s true anxiety lies: he is trying to establish his right to both remain a member of the literati AND enjoy the radio. It’s unfair, it’s true, that his peers won’t let him (if indeed they won’t), but I’m not sure if the reader should give a shit.

The other reason why Hornby is not really writing to a popular audience, but rather his literary peers is that he is not so much defending pop music, but the Idea of Pop Music; of pop music as an institution, if you will. His very brief chapters on songs are riddled with extrapolations about the song as a stand-in for the Institution of Pop. Lauding or defending a song feels like a proxy fight for defending Pop Music itself. Again, this causes for slightly stressful, and certainly not joyous, reading.

Where is the thrill that should accompany a book ostensibly about 31 thrilling songs?

Hornby defends pop not in its own right, but in opposition to other genres, including jazz, classical, and most rap. For example, being a jazz fan is automatically a stand-in for being a snob or an inauthentic posturer. But remarkably, Hornby is not even defending ALL pop music, but only pop music of a narrow scope. After all, he has to write off SOME pop music to justify his status as a critic and not just any ordinary music listener. So even within the institution of pop, not all pop is allowed: he distances himself from anything that rocks “too hard,” and while acknowledging the greatness of critics’ choice canonical pop works (Pet Sounds), he claims that no one really listens to those anymore (Really? It’s okay to like pop, but not the Beach Boys?!). It’s not that there’s anything wrong with liking adult-oriented pop and soft rock (to use a broad stroke to characterize the 31 songs contained within his list). It’s that his trustworthiness as a music guide become questionable when that is virtually the only sound that he finds worth writing about. Frankly, what use is a critic if their ears only capable of listening to a fraction of the popular music spectrum?

The most telling (and wickedly amusing) part of the book is how Hornby resolves the dilemma of finding himself loving a Patti Smith live set, consisting of poetry with musical accompaniment (dangerously non-pop) by assuring us that a poet walked out of the performance, as if to tell us, “Don’t worry—it wasn’t that artsy—a poet walked out!” And he literally ends the last sentence of the chapter, and of the main section of the book, by trying to reassure himself, that it’s okay, that Patti Smith’s “Pissing in a River,” is actually just a pop song:

“I’m a little ambivalent about it [ending the book with recounting Patti Smith’s live performance of the song]: maybe it’s a little too High Culture, what with Woolf and Blacke and Ackroyd [who Smith references in her performance] and the chapel and all. Maybe I should close with “Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow” or “Surfin’ Bird” or “I Hate You So Much Right Now.” On the other hand, the song was called “Pissing in a River,” and it was played on guitars, and it lasted four or five minutes, and its emotional effects depended entirely on its chords and its chorus and its attitude. It’s a pop song, in other words, and like a lot of other pop songs, it’s capable of just about anything” (153).

In this passage it is remarkable how concerned he is about being a critic that likes a pop song that others would readily identify as being a bit “edgy.” After erecting walls around himself to distance himself from those other, snobbier critics, what is he to do when he can’t help but fall in love with pop of an artsy variety? What’s remarkable here is not Hornby’s claim that the song is pop—it seems pretty straightforward that it is—but rather that Hornby is so concerned about liking something that fits within the boundaries of pop music.

Hornby’s inherent critique of fellow critics (“metacriticism?”) is that they don’t give pop a fair shake. This book feels like a reactionary over-correction by his almost masochistic denial of pleasure for himself if it is drawn from music that strays to far off the middle of the road.

Hornby loves pop, and he's fascinated by how it transcends its own status to become 'pop culture'. Songbook is, in many ways, a testament to how he sees music and the function it should serve in his life. The song choices matter less than the way he writes about them. Throughout we get some wonderfully written and heartfelt stories that illustrate the power of music on the mundane. Towards the end, we also get some Hornby music criticism, which is just delightful and, as always, extremely well-observed. A breezy, good-natured book.

Tal como su título ya da a entender, '31 canciones' se trata de una disección de 31 canciones que por diversos motivos han impactado y llegado al autor. No importa que la lista que ha escogido Hornby no tenga ningún parecido con la que hubiéramos escogido nosotros, ni que ni siquiera hayamos oído las canciones de las que habla, porque consigue transmitir perfectamente el amor que siente por estas canciones en concreto, y por la música en general, con un estilo que mezcla crítica musical, ensayo y autobiografía. Hay momentos verdaderamente memorables: como cuando defiende la "música pop" ante los que la consideran superficial y simplona; cuando relata el efecto que tiene la música en su hijo autista; cuando explica lo que es adorar un grupo que nadie conoce o descubrir una canción nueva que logra emocionarnos; cuando nos cuenta cómo en su juventud sólo adoraba (y se decidía a escuchar sólo) música "ruidosa", pero que con el pasar de los años ha ido perdiendo todos sus prejuicios musicales.

Sin embargo, mi momento preferido es cuando nos cuenta cómo podemos llegar a odiar una canción que habíamos descubierto por casualidad, simplemente porque la empiezan a poner a todas partes y a todas horas. Es algo que inevitablemente nos habrá pasado a muchos y algo que yo nunca hasta ahora me había parado a analizar. Hornby argumenta que es porque es imposible "amar o conectar con una música que está tan omnipresente como el monóxido de carbono", porque la música es algo que nos habla directamente a nosotros, sobre nuestra intimidad. Y a partir de aquí también he descubierto porque siempre es tan especial encontrar en la radio esa canción que para ti es en algun modo especial, simplemente porque es la oportunidad de compartir por una vez algo que tienes muy dentro, algo que te define como persona. Y por todo esto creo que es un libro imprescindible para todos los que aman la música.