Featured Book Rview: Marooned: The Next Generation of Desert Island Discs by Phil Freeman

By Michael Lee Jan 9, 2008, 17:05 GMT

In time every man and woman will succumb to the notion of what is most essential. The degree of worth is irrelevant to its subject. The topic is amplified in a new book called “Marooned”, which asks twenty music critics which album they would take to a desert island. A sequel to the 1979 book Stranded, the market in taste here does not suffer from variation; its range bounces from Dionne Warwick to Miles Davis, from the Scorpions to Elton John.

 The first sincere declaration appears in the third essay, specifically halfway down page 37, when writer Ned Raggett unveils the impact My Bloody Valentine’s “Loveless” had on his evolution.

 “…Take this away with you if nothing else- that was the uniquely profoundest moment of my life to date, and I have no shame in saying that, and I have no problem with ascribing it to something so ‘simple’ as a record.  Because if everyone has had or will have something happen to them- whatever the context, whatever the creation- then we are all truly an amazingly fortunate species.”

 Inevitably a book comprised of several different voices will bare inconstancies in quality and style. There are stretches in Marooned when the book fails to leave a choice in the matter of caring.  At least half of the entries read like extended record reviews, exposing more of a band’s back catalogue and historical rank than its singular affect.

 Phil Freeman’s essay on Motorhead’s “No Remorse” crosses the trite – “Volume, speed, power (and power chords)- those were the greatest sounds I’d ever heard” – with, a few pages later, the hyperbole: “When I saw Motorhead opening for Iron Maiden at Madison square Garden in 2004, the arena was still half-empty.during their set (Dio was also on the bill) and the waves of sound crashing off the steel and concrete nearly brought tears to my eyes.”

 Dave Queen’s write-up on the Scorpion’s Virgin Killer is devoid of pronouns and indefinite articles for the first half of the essay. This use of primal diction eventually obscures any insight the author may own on his topic.

 In another Rob Harvilla examines the Cars’ 1978 self-titled album, notably the first sixty seconds of the song “Just What I Needed” in what he deems “the greatest drumroll ever recorded.”

 Curiously too few of the writers here address their album’s ability to translate its power from their place of comfortable listening to the placidity of a desert island. Music’s command depends massively on location and its amenities: Compare the difference and reward one achieves if, say, they play the Willard Grant Conspiracy’s “Dance with Me” at a backyard barbeque to playing it in the expanse of a dark empty room as they dance slowly with their love for seven minutes barefoot atop a cold hardwood floor.

 There is a chapter, however, in Marooned when the reader glimpses the sole reason of why isolated books like this are published. The subject is Dionne Warwick’s 1994 album “Legends.”  The writer is John Darnielle, a singer songwriter for the indie folk rock band the Mountain Goats.

 The essay is a masterpiece on the way memory can sustain up through the years and morph into its own form of knowledge when given the space and toil to germinate. After watching Warwick perform the song “Heartbreaker” on the television show Solid Gold, a young Darnielle, sitting in his North Carolina home, is smitten.

 “The emotional weight of the song is beyond me, calling to me through a veil I can’t breach. I want to press my face up against that veil to get whatever glimpse I might steal of life on the other side of it, and at the time I want to keep well clear of it. I have this sense that once you’ve gone over to that side of things, you can’t come back. Still, the attraction of the veil itself, and the allure of the unknown that it represents, is practically narcotic in its draw. “Heartbreaker” represents a ne plus ultra rather more sophisticated than your garden-variety point of no return: it’s a quiet, nagging inevitability.”

 Darnielle’s contribution weights equally an appraisal of creation with an infusion of nostalgia- a kind of sawed off memoir. 

 To think of this book in its literal intent would reveal a glean of minimal reach. Beneath its foundation Marooned examines in idea the way our days, in the disguise of tedium and the seemingly trivial, are poised on chance and discovery, and with it determined to alter lives and subvert all previous held perceptions.  

 Review first appeared http://statenislandadvance.com/