This collection notably strives to treat all music with equal respect: the thirty-nine genres mentioned on the book cover include opera and doo-wop, rap and zydeco, new wave and vocals. An index in the back itemises fifty-two subcategories within the ‘world’ category. Another index, of ‘occasions’, suggests which recordings are better for workouts or cocktails. 146 of the 1,000 are classical. Folk song populariser Burl Ives and folk song moderniser Charles Ives are both represented; Russia's Modest Mussorgsky makes the cut while grunge band Modest Mouse, from a different North (Issaquah, Washington), well might have. In a much cited 1996 American Sociological Review article, ‘Changing highbrow tastes: from snob to omnivore’, Richard A. Peterson and Roger M. Kern claimed that the elitist who followed the orchestra with a score in hand had given way culturally to the cosmopolitan who gained status by demonstrating a range of expertise. Few documents sum up the omnivore as well as this one.
But 1000 Recordings also provides a second sort of summation. It marks the end of an era when listening smartly to albums of every kind, having access thanks to record labels and their genial publicists to the means of consumption, qualified the full-time professional critic. And when to be such a music generalist was to confront, in small but therefore plausible contexts, innumerable aesthetic and political questions of cultural pluralism. The form of Moon's 1,000 summations is one I came to know well in my days as a rock critic: the three-paragraph record review. It was great fun. You got an opening paragraph to insert a provisional theory: maybe something about ‘those kooky sixties’ or the aesthetics of ‘poise’ or whatnot, to use a couple of Moon's discursive stabs. Then a paragraph that reviewed other work by the same performer or related ones. And finally you detailed the album in question. All of which presumed a readership that not only wanted to know whether to purchase an album, but also how to fit that album into larger narratives about performers, genres and the meaning of music.
Tom Moon was a US daily newspaper critic at the Philadelphia Inquirer for twenty years. He also, he notes, has been edited by Anthony DeCurtis (the line editor here) for twenty years, principally at the US publication Rolling Stone. Outsiders may not follow editorial shifts the way that journalists do, but the years in which DeCurtis edited the record reviews section at Rolling Stone and oversaw updated versions of the Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll and the Rolling Stone Album Guide marked a particular juncture. The magazine was at its most profitable and secure, a distiller of the ‘essential’. Moon comes out of that moment, when CD reissues and boxed sets appeared in a sanctioned critic's mailbox by the dozens each week and time and space opened up – at least so far as recordings past and foreign were concerned.
These days, things aren't so genteel. Newspapers are declining and so are the space and salaries they give arts criticism, which is how Moon came to have the time to write this book. The place of record reviews in US magazines is perenially threatened: abandoned by Vibe, rated of least interest by Entertainment Weekly focus groups (I was told by a staff critic subsequently laid off from there), shaved for length in Rolling Stone, the now defunct Blender, and Spin to the point where the conferral of even a second paragraph is a designation of significance.
The devaluing of the role of critic as surveyor and travel guide, I suspect, owes something to what could be called ubiquitisation: the past, present, and putative future of music are now an ethereal jukebox of easy accessibility, requiring none of the discrimination that previously went into purchasing and canonising. As an experiment I searched in my Rhapsody.com subscription service for albums listed in Moon's book under F and G. I found that fifty-one of the seventy-one were fully available, seven partially, and only thirteen difficult to find. (This was mostly the classical material, which is not Rhapsody's speciality, and even that was usually available in alternate recordings. US country music singer Narvel Felts may require a purchase from the Amazon website, but the ‘life's list’ labour of constructing alternate canons by tracking down the records of him, or singers like Doris Duke and the Four Freshmen, or Spanish Flamenco's El Camarón de la Isla and so on have been replaced by technology that allowed me and anyone else who has Internet access and so wishes to stream instantly as they read.
However, there is another contributing factor. The genteel omnivorousness of the subsidised critic was never as ecumenical as it pretended. Even with all these recordings to choose from, Moon leaves out a lot, and the omissions are revealing: no US rapper Jay-Z or singers Mariah Carey and Mary Blige, which is to say few of the mainstays of US Urban Contemporary R&B; ditto for US country music, where Garth, Reba, Shania, George Strait et al. are all unwelcome. In the cultural sociology that Peterson's article inspired, listeners focused on genres such as these (we can also add hard rock) were termed univores. Such genres, remained, by and large, too declassé for even polyglot elites. So, while the triumph of the omnivore generated a massive archive of listenableness, this showy diversity produced a rigged outcome: 1,000 ways to avoid writing about the full flows of the popular. Once the Web, with its instant tabulations of reader ‘hits’, came about, the jig was up. The ears of much of the world had moved on.
