There are some music and film books I don't want to read because I don't really care to know that much about the background of certain albums and movies I love. This runs contrary to my nature, which is to gobble up as much context and history as possible about art and literature I enjoy, but some things are so magical bordering-on-holy biographical detail isn't necessary, and I'm even afraid it might ruin something for me. I don't think I'll ever read a book about Astral Weeks or Andrei Rublev, for instance. I can't decide if this is a childish way to think and if I'm consciously deluding myself about the nature of art, but I'm mostly fine with this attitude. So little mystery exists anymore, I'm happy to preserve what little remains.
Spiderland has always been a pretty mysterious album, especially in the first few years after it's release. With so little information in the limited liner notes, and not much written about it, all we had was the music itself. Former Slint members would pop up in other bands we liked, and that somehow added to rather than clarified the mystery. I was a bit apprehensive about reading this book, and when I first saw it was being published I assumed I'd never read it. But the album came up in discussion with a friend a few weeks ago (as it's wont to do), and we both were talking about how we had no real information about the background of the recording, and how that was just a given, so little was available you didn't necessarily want any. But then it occurred to me that the album is such a strange, singular thing, there probably could never be any explanation or history of it that could mar or alter my enjoyment of it. Those guys were so young when they made it, and it seemed to have no precedent, so even a great writer couldn't elucidate the mystery of how they came to make it. So I read it.
I was right about that supposition, and Scott Tennett even admits something to this effect in the beginning of the book. He just loves the album and wants to write about the history of the band that made it, knowing he can never fully explain the strange power it had on listeners who encountered it in the '90s. It's more a history of Slint than Spiderland, often funny and surprisingly low on nostalgia-baiting, though it did make me want to listen to a few bands. I had revisited For Carnation's small discography about a month before I read this, but already want to listen to it again. In lieu of a personal reminiscence a la my last post, I may have something on Bitch Magnet's Ben Hur once I dust it off and give it a whirl.
Edit: I chose Andrei Rublev as an example of a film I'd never want to know too much background about because it's probably my favorite film ever, and retains qualities of mystery no matter how many times I see it. Thinking about it, though, of course I'd want to read a book about the making of it: A Russian historical epic that took over a year to shoot in remote locations during awful weather conditions, the incredible raid sequence resulting in injuries to actors and the more or less torture of animals, with several scenes cut and the film forbidden to be shown in its home country once completed. And it was only Tarkovsky's second film. I want to read as much about that as possible. Let's leave the mysteries to some other favorites, likw Mulholland Dr and Wizard of Oz, the former I'm convinced Lynch made up much of as he went, a suspicion I never care to have confirmed, and the latter so full of imaginative effects and camera tricks that would now be done with ugly looking CGI that the film seems like a minor miracle of human ingenuity and imagination, imbued with no small quality of, no kidding, magic. In the old school, non-Disney sense.
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