Absolute shit! Some terrible, terrible song choices - Nelly Furtado!! It's embarrasing! Like hearing your dad telling you he watched the fratellis on Jools Holland and thought they were great! Awful, awful book!

favourite quote: - “the best music connects to the soul, not the brain.”

I really didn't know what to expect from this one, considering looking at the contents, I recognised precisely one of the songs written about in this book. Yet I think Hornby put it best himself when he said (and I'm paraphrasing here) that this book is less about explaining the songs or making people think of them in the same way, and more about making people think about their own favourite songs in a new way. While I couldn't relate to what Hornby was saying about these particular songs, I certainly got where he was coming from when he talked about music in such a way, and it helped me to put words to my own appreciation of the songs and albums that have stuck with me and grown alongside me over years and decades.

I have a lot of opinions about music -- not very polished ones, I'll admit, but I love music and I find it difficult to articulate what experiencing music looks like and feels like to me. It was very exciting, therefore, to see strains of this same feeling within this book. Not exactly the same, of course, because I doubt it's ever the same for two different people, but just the language and the acknowledgment of experiencing music in this way. It's certainly given me a lot to think about, and also enabled me to put some feelings into words that actually make sense.

I won this book in a giveaway and I was excited about reading it. This book was terrible... I don't understand why the author chose to write a book about songs he likes. No story no plot. I was bored from the first chapter.

Este es un libro, para mí, importante. Habla y reflexiona de canciones de rock y música popular. Y lo hace relajado, sin pontificar y nombrando muchos grupos y músicos que no conozco (otros que sí). ¿Qué mejor?

Very nice trip through Nicks music experiences and very nicely, funny and easy to read. If you like music, you like this book.

Curious what he thinks about Eminem nowadays, so if you read this Nick let me know ok?

I won this book in a songwriting contest, which is fitting. It was the hardcover, which has a great look and feel, and comes with a CD. I loved listening to the CD while reading about the individual songs, and following the journey that each song took him on.

fands toll :) das buch ist von 2004 und besteht aus essays zur (damals aktuellen) pop(musik)kultur ( ich war erstmal überrascht, was bei ihm alles in das genre pop fällt haha). Nichts weltbewegendes & einfach zu lesen.
Aber die essays hatten die perfekte mischung aus persönlichen stories zu den vorgestellten songs, reflektierten (und nicht zu ernst genommene) kommentaren und interessanten denkanstößen.

damals wurde musik noch ausschließlich über platten, kassetten und cds konsumiert & ich habe auf jeden fall gespürt, wie viel wert den einzelnen alben noch zugeschrieben wurde. war ein schöner eskapismus aus dem heutigen schnelllebigen digitalen konsum

A esta altura de mi vida, reconozco que no me gusta tanto la música en sí como la idea de la música. O sea que, en general, no disfruto tanto escuchando música como escuchando hablar sobre ella, o leyendo sobre ella. Y aunque me interesa bastante el aspecto digamos formal del tema, del que algo entiendo pero no demasiado, prefiero por sobre ellos otro tipo de análisis, más oblicuos, más filosóficos, más personales, menos verdaderos, como los que intenta Nick Hornby en este libro.

A Hornby lo conocía, por supuesto, por Alta fidelidad, un libro repleto de nombres de canciones, y de músicos, y de ránkings, y repleto de la idea de que los gustos musicales son algo importante y trascendental. Había imaginado que Hornby sería una especie de melómano consumado, y que este libro supondría al menos una dimensión de análisis erudito. Pero nada que ver. Hornby se declara desconocedor de la materia formal, o al menos no está interesado en ella. Ni en ella ni en la importancia histórica o cultural de las piezas que analiza. Su lista es enteramente personal. En cada uno de estos treinta y un ensayos, aborda una canción que le resulta íntimamente relevante, y explica por qué. En el primero de todos, dedicado a “Thunder Road”, de Springsteen, nos dice:

“Una de las cosas fantásticas de la canción tal como aparece en Born to Run es que los primeros compases, con una armónica jadeante y un precioso piano dolorido, suenan en realidad como refiriéndose a algo acontecido antes de empezar la grabación, algo trascendental y triste pero que no destruye toda esperanza”

¿Qué querrá decir todo esto? Ciertamente, nada que sea verificable en la canción; no es un análisis musical, ni siquiera lírico. Es apenas la impresión de Hornby al escucharla, un enunciado que no tiene propiamente un valor de verdad. No significa nada, excepto que casualmente venga a completar la impresión que uno mismo tenía de la canción antes de escucharla. Lo que la música puede llegar a evocar pertenece al terreno de lo inefable, pero quizás se le pueden poner palabras que de alguna manera se aproximan a la experiencia.

No es, para usar los términos saussureanos, una relación entre significante y significado, uno a uno, sino algo más cercano a la imagen poética y a la mística. La canción produce algo en quien la oye, algo que podríamos caracterizar como una especie de “imagen”; las palabras de Hornby, sin un referente concreto, quizás evoquen una imagen que se aproxime a la anterior. O quizás no lo logren, en tu caso, y no te digan nada.

Por mi parte, de cualquier manera, no es tampoco esto lo que más me interesa del libro. De las treinta y una canciones que lista Hornby, apenas sí conocía y había escuchado seis. El resto las oí en simultáneo con el ensayo, o después de leerlo; en general, ninguna me pareció la gran cosa. Terminé por darme cuenta de que estos ensayos bien podrían prescindir de las canciones; lo mismo hubiera sido para mí si se referían a canciones inexistentes, a canciones imaginarias, como los libros que de tanto en tanto pretendía reseñar Borges.

Cuando digo que este es el tipo de análisis que me gusta, no estoy queriendo decir que la música, o el arte en general, solo puedan comprenderse desde un punto de vista individual y subjetivo, sin atender a las virtudes de la composición. No creo en eso, para nada. Lo que digo es que el ejercicio de la crítica, en el rubro que sea, debe ser considerado como otra rama de la literatura, capaz de los mismos logros artísticos, y que no debe juzgarse en relación con sus referentes.

¿Importa, digamos, si el Julio César de Shakespeare se parece al Julio César histórico? ¿Importa si lo que un crítico escribe sobre la obra de Shakespeare se parece a la obra de Shakespeare? En uno y otro caso, me parece, lo que les pido es que las representaciones estén bien escritas y que sean inteligentes, no que se me asemejen a otro objeto. En este espíritu, leí el libro de Hornby no porque me interese la música, sino porque me interesa la literatura.

It is not really this book’s fault that I hated it because it really is not my thing. However, I like to give every book that comes my way a chance so I gave it a go.

This is a book about Nick Hornby’s favourite songs. My problems were that I don’t know who Nick Hornby is, I don’t care what he thinks about certain songs, and we clearly have different tastes in music.

I tried to read it carefully but after the first few songs, I just skimmed through it.

Not for me at all.

Haciendo bandera del abandono de aquellos libros que no tenemos ganas de leer, pienso que en la adolescencia me hubiese enganchado con el juego de escuchar y conocer cada una de las canciones elegidas por Hornby, que me cae muy simpático por haber visto adaptaciones como High fidelity o About a boy, para luego sumergirme en la lectura de estos artículos.
En esos años de leer con avidez suplementos jóvenes y revistas como Los inrockuptibles o la Rolling Stone, este libro hubiese encajado a la perfección.
Hoy en día, simplemente prefiero estar leyendo otras cosas.

The other day I read a rather unfair review of Somerset Maugham's "The Razor's Edge" on The Atlantic, about how he was among the best of second-rate writers, or something like that. In explaining her position, the writer refered to a moment in the book where a character's library is used as a way of describing him, which is apparently lazy. This observation was weird for me, not only because the character in question was Elliot Templeton, who at the time of this "description" had already been psychologically analyzed about a million times before, but also because I always thought a person's library always said more about them than they did, or could only hope to.
Maybe this extends to music- to Nick Hornby, it most certainly does.

When I first read High Fidelity, I didn't know half the music he was talking about- was I extremely uneducated? Maybe. Having expanded my musical horizons, however, I expected to know or at least have heard of most of the artists Hornby was talking about- nope.

Look, I don't consider myself completely ignorant when it comes to music. I'm not a music snob, either- as evidenced by the couple of Taylor Swift tracks on my iPod (yes, I still have an iPod and it shall be burried with me). That being said, I still found myself in alien territory with this book, even after having the songs accompany the essays while I read them.

Bruce Springsteen? Too melodramatic for me. Bob Dylan? Still pissed about him winning the Nobel Prize; will not submit myself to hearing more of his songs I already have. Nelly Furtado? Natural selection of popular music has spoken, and for once I agree with it.

With Hornby talking about music that in my list goes from bland to downright insufferable, I didn't get as much out of this book as, say, a Teenage Fanclub fan would. But I still found it enjoyable- it's always nice to be in Hornby's company, even if he's bashing Noel Gallagher and jazz and Pink Floyd, who in the end, to me, are the ones who Truly Get It.

Of course, I'm not saying everything's a matter of taste and therefore taste does not matter. It matters very much. The question of Aesthetics has a permanent spot in philosophy courses because, contrary to popular belief, there is such a thing as Beauty- and its opposite, which can be just as powerful.

Some elitists will exclude an entire genre and declare it "Not Art"; some will simply ignore it. Truth is, we can't separate stuff by genre: like Hornby says, there are quite a few awesome pop songs that are just as good as any Mendelssohn tracks- which were way too popular in his time, and made too much money, too; so I bet he had his share of elitist hate.

Point being, if you love music, you're gonna have to dig through the trash. Sometimes your trash might be somebody else's treasure, and good for them- that's how serious criticism begins, and we're all the better for it. Not to say, of course, that you can't like shit songs while knowing fully well how shit they are- for instance, I love Miley Cyrus' "Wrecking Ball" because it reminds me of High School Math. I love "Total Eclipse of the Heart" because it's so cheesy and ridiculous but even the snootiest people I know sing along to it. So, you're allowed to like your shitsongs. You don't have to prove yourself, and it took me a long time to understand that. And it's not like you will only ever love shitsongs, because no one is That Vapid, so don't worry.