The Extra Lens/Todd Snider

"I don't think I said Jimmy Cliff has 'no fiching talent.' He had a fair amount. I think I said 'he's not good enough.'"

Well, Bob, of course I wasn't there. But I was impressed by the audacity of the quote (to be fair to the departed George, the discussion seemed to be as much about editorial turf as it did musical talent). It was drawn from my memory of Kevin McAuliffe's The Great American Newspaper: the Rise and Fall of the Village Voice (1978). But damned if I can find my copy. I will, however, obtain another one and get back to you.

Okay, the passage I remembered reading 33 years ago goes as follows:

He [new Voice editor-in-chief and publisher Clay Felker] went up to Robert Christgau one time, saying, “There aren’t enough stars in the paper. What’s hot?” and looking through the latest copy of Variety until he came across an ad for the hit Jamaican movie The Harder They Come starring reggae [sic] singer Jimmy Cliff. “This guy Jimmy Cliff. Can we do a feature on him?”

“No,” said Christgau.

“Why not?”

“Because he’s not going to be a star,” Christgau said.

“Why not? Why not?” Felker was poking his finger at him.

“Because he doesn’t have enough talent, that’s why,” Christgau told him, watching a look of horror cross Felker’s face.

So I badly misremembered it. Which is what happens when you reach back three decades in your mind and don’t check the source. I feel a bit less bad about not checking the source because, thinking harder about The Great American Newspaper, I recalled that when I first moved to Cambridge MA I was too broke to buy books and that I had read it as a new paperback in the Central Square library. So I never owned a copy to check. Until now.

Highly recommended piece of journalism history.

(Glancing through the book, it seems to do a particularly fine job of showing why Richard Goldstein was an important writer and presence.)

Finally, I read that author Kevin Michael McAuliffe had passed away but have been unable to find out any details. Anybody know what happened?

NMM:  I get your logic and knew that it was there, hidden in my argument even when I was making it.  Yet somehow it doesn't ring entirely true to me, since that would cause me to also overlook the intention of art that did deliver.  Since I'm not an art scholar I can't get into a painting, sculpting or even writing dialogue on the subject, but since "Guernica", "The Last Judgment" and "The Pieta", "Cry, The Beloved Country", "Oliver Twist", and "The Emancipation Proclamation" clearly do deliver, then yes, I do think we can know and care about that.

And I also think there is a more subtle point here too.  We're taking about art that "delivers", as if it were a clear light switch decision.  Yep, that makes it; nope that one doesn't.  It's never that precise.  All human outcome is flawed to one degree or another, so sometimes, yes, the effort itself counts.  Not at the expense of a decision about the artistic accomplishment, but as a companion to it.

EDIT:  Maybe this will be the spot we truly diverge, but I think most of Springsteen's stuff from The Rising to The Promise, is exactly what I'm referring to.  None of it is artistically flawless; some people don't like any of it.  To me, the material I like, roughly half of Magic for example, takes on an extra gleam because of what he is grasping at but not reaching -- some kind of pop music distillation of Poor Richard's Almanac, the Bible, "Wild In The Streets", "Mr. Smith Goes To Washington", and "Battle Hymn of the Republic".  To me, although I'll grant perhaps not to you or others, it sets a noble target and fights the good fight in that direction.  The fact that he doesn't completely "deliver", as we're using the term, is only part of the final judgment.