How to critique a compendium of writings on music by the Pulitzer prize-winning editor of the New Yorker? Praise would read like a job application. A hatchet job would be absurdly polemical. In a 2016 piece on the late, great Leonard Cohen, David Remnick quotes a conversation between Cohen and Bob Dylan in which the two singer-songwriters discussed accomplishment. Cohen, Dylan said, was “number one” but Dylan was “number zero”.
Remnick’s stuff is noisomely good. Rightly or wrongly, the New Yorker is often held to be the loftiest spot left in print, where the business of stringing sentences together on interesting topics still exists in an exalted form, insulated from the closures, compromises and clickbait that prevails elsewhere.
