Writing about music...

is still writing.

Today I am faced with a short review of The Song Is You by Arthur Phillips in EW and then his playlist blog for Living with Music. Guess which was more effective in making me want to read the book?

EW gave The Song Is You an A-, but the reviews are so wildly unreliable in determining what I will like that it's amusing. But then they're not reviewing for me, are they? Who are they reviewing for? Who does anybody review for?

I'm not going to answer that.

So I read Living with Music religiously, yet somehow seemed to have fallen behind. Today, I caught up and when I read the following, I was like, "I'm sold..."

2) Sympathy for the Devil, the Rolling Stones. Mick Jagger, channeling Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel “The Master and Margarita” and feeling more than up to the task of speaking for Satan, ends up producing one of the great works of the 20th century, encapsulating a couple millenniums of evil in six minutes and, like a good alumnus of the London School of Economics, blaming the Russian Revolution on the Prince of Darkness.

I managed to write about music and a book. I'd say that was a pretty successful use of my time.

[4.17.09: My copy of The Song Is You came in today. At Cheers, I read the prologue and since it deals with Billie Holiday's I Cover the Waterfront, I put that on while I read. I honestly got chills. It was hard to put the book down and get to work.]