Mixtapes #7: Josh Clover
The best of lists that pop up at the end of the year are often hobbled by chronology or genre. It suggests that listening begins in January and ends in December or that people are experts in only one kind of music. People never really only listened to that which was made in one year, and the modern rock crit area was birthed by professional nostalgists and crate diggers. In asking a variety of professionals to mark what they were really listening to while maintaining the concept of an annual I didn’t want to engage in that act of crate digging, but I really did want to get a sense of what people were listening to. Think of it as the games people play with mix tapes, if mix tapes where really about what people listened to in 2006. The entries, comments (if offered) and biographies (if offered) are written by the critics (with their own eccentricities) themselves and they are arranged by their arrival in my inbox.
Joshua Clover
Bio
Joshua Clover is the author of The Totality for Kids (University of California 2006) and The Matrix (British Film Institute 2005), and contributes to the New York Times; he's working on a book titled 1989: Bob Dylan Didn't Have This to Sing About.
Songs
...The problem is, I actually really do --happily -- listen almost exclusively to newly released "popular" music, except when I discover a Jessica Simpson song from 2004 and think it's a new song. If I check my play count on itunes, the only old songs that appear are "Love In Action" by Todd Rundgren (dunno why that happened), and the Kinks song that popped up in a boring long movie about Paris '68 that I hadn't known before, which proved to me that no matter how overrated the Kinks are, they're still better at expressing their moment than retrospective French films.
