Wussy

Meltzer always wrote well about music per se and still did when he felt like it in the '90s, which is why our little committee gave him the award I refer to in "Impolite Discourse,"

Great new B&N essay.  I had the Paul Nelson collection on my list of books to get and can't wait to order it now.  I enjoyed reading the Ellen Willis collection already and will do so again.  Looking at the list of pioneer critics, I came up with a list of their essential books.  Am I missing anything?

Lester Bangs - Psychotic Reactions & Carburetor Dung, Mainlines, Blood Feasts & Bad Taste

Robert Christgau - Any Old Way You Choose It, CG70s, CG80s, CG90s, Grown Up All Wrong

Jon Landau - It's Too Late to Stop Now (this is the only one whose quality I'm not sure about)

Greil Marcus - Mystery Train, Dead Elvis, Invisible Republic, Ranters & Crowd Pleasers

Dave Marsh - Before I Get Old: The Story of the Who, Louie Louie, Elvis

Richard Meltzer - A Whore Like the Rest

Robert Palmer - Deep Blues, Blues & Chaos, Rock & Roll: An Unruly History

Nick Tosches - Hellfire

Great B&N essay. Ordered the Ellen Willis book. I await the great writing and maybe returning to some of the records/artists she writes about.

Please Mr. Postman bring me FD II tomorrow. Playing my Rigor Mortis ep to satisfy my Wussy fix. I like the **** Ponys but it's not quite the same.

Hell of a thesis at the end of the Willis/Nelson B&N column.

Damned hard to argue with it, too.

I was mystified when Nelson dropped out of writing, and for years yearned that he would come back. Few made you feel the ecstasy of fandom the way he could at his best. Thinking about him recently (still haven't read the book) and focused by Bob's thoughts, there was no way he would return.

Writing about Bruce Springsteen many years ago, Langdon Winner (speaking of astute people who abruptly stopped commenting about music) snorted that before Bruce, rock phenoms wore surprising masks and came from unexpected corners -- but Springsteen looked, sounded, and was found exactly where soulful outsiders were expected.

Winner meant this to indicate there was something humdrum about the Boss (or at least that he was a dead end, and that looking backward was fatal to the spirit of rock and roll). But I thought that his description, while true, always had a more generous interpretation. And now I think it's that the era of the brooding-outsider-he​ro, forged in Westerns and film noir and carried on through Dean and Elvis and Dylan, was coming to an end. And, indeed, Nelson would have little interest in more and more dinky, twilight versions of this figure.

And it's a profound shame Ellen Willis wasn't inclined to keep up with women in rock, at least. It played out in ways different than she imagined, but her insights would have enriched understanding all the way. And yeah, you could make a strong case that female performers was one strain where rock as a political force continued. Her bracing take on punk promised the start of a road that was never taken. But as Bob argued, when an art form stops meaning to you what it once did, silence may be the most honest policy.