Book Review: Nic Harcourt's Music Lust

According to the press release for his book, Music Lust,

"After listening to just one radio show from Nic Harcourt - Music Director at LA's KCRW and host of "Morning Becomes Eclectic" - you'll not only have discovered new music, you'll be introduced to an artist or album that you may have missed in years past. Harcourt is arguably the most savvy tastemaker to grace the airwaves these days.

Ever read High Fidelity or seen the film? Remember how the guys in the music store would sit around and endlessly count angels on the heads of turntable needles? You know - "name your all time top five side one, track ones." "Name your top five country songs about death." Now Nic Harcourt has now made a book out of his particular lists. From what I've heard of him and his output, Harcourt has good (if quirky) taste in music, so this an interesting notion.

The idea for Music Lust comes from an idea by a Seattle librarian named Nancy Pearl, who wrote a book called Book Lust, a set of recommended-reading lists that updates a venerable library tradition of culling the good stuff according to a given librarian's quirks and considered opinions. Pearl made a splash recently in the library field with that book and with the accompanying "shushing librarian" doll modeled after herself. The title Book Lust is itself a pun on the American Library Association's trade publication Book List, which reviews new and forthcoming volumes of interest to all sorts of libraries, both of which have in turn inspired a much snarkier version of Book Lust in the online magazine Bookslut.

It is from this ongoing dialogue of belletrists and literary enthusiasts that Harcourt drew his inspiration, even borrowing his subtitle nearly intact from Pearl's volume: "Recommended Listening for Every Mood, Moment and Reason."

The trouble is, the longer one spends with Music Lust, the less likely it appears that Harcourt grasps the true spirit of the tradition he is engaging, and the more likely it appears that he has instead produced a well-meaning but shallow quickie that does little to help the noble cause of introducing good music to good people.

It's not that Music Lust is a bad book. In fact, to be actually bad, Harcourt would have had to have failed much more spectacularly. For example, Martha Bayles' 1996 Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music is a bad book. Exhaustively researched and carefully argued, Bayles nonetheless manages to misconstrue nearly every single salient point about the development of American pop music in the 20th century, ultimately coming to the conclusion that but for African-American musicians, American pop traditions would have long ago become brutal, spiky creations of the dry European intellectual pitfalls of modernism and postmodernism. I mean yeah, I guess, but... no. That's a bad book. Music Lust, which aspires to nothing so lofty, is instead well meaning but superficial and fundamentally confused.

Article Author: John Owen

John Owen is a music writer, multi-instrumentalist and music industry veteran based in coastal Massachusetts.

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