Picking a soundtrack for eternity

Nothing beats the life out of a good recording more than reading about it. It’s the rare pop music critic whose prose can approximate the moon-launching emotional jolt a listener gets from hearing an amazing song. Many don’t even pretend to try, fixating on such nonmusical attributes as “attitude” or “sexiness” to justify, say, the latest assembly-line dance tune mediocrity. Others seem more interested in impressing their peers than in educating readers, cranking out impenetrable tomes of arcana.

Pop music should be fun; it’s meant to put listeners into a state of one sort or another. In the hands of those who take the form (and themselves) too seriously, however, pop writing can quickly descend into pretension. In the new book “Marooned,” 20 critics choose their “desert island disc” -- the one album they’d take with them if they were stranded outside the grid of civilization. The exercise is intended not necessarily to define the best or the greatest but rather to select a soundtrack for an eternity of lonely days and lonely nights. In the hands of rock critics, the exercise is potentially a supersized slippery slope.

“Marooned” is not the first book in which music writers rhapsodize about their must-have music; Greil Marcus initiated the desert island concept in 1978, editing a collection of essays called “Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island,” a form that has been copied in various media ever since.

“Stranded” featured such first-generation rock critics as Lester Bangs and Robert Christgau blathering on about boomer-centric faves like the New York Dolls’ self-titled debut album, the Eagles’ “Desperado” and the Ramones’ “Rocket to Russia.” New York Times critic John Rockwell even made a case for Linda Ronstadt’s definitively unclassic “Living In the U.S.A.” Nearly three decades later, most of the 20 titles are still familiar to the average music fan. (Thanks for nothing, classic rock radio!)

If crusty old music lingers like an annoying relative who never leaves, today’s music-delivery mechanisms are completely different. Listeners needn’t rely on commercial radio to preview new music. Satellite and the Internet and such services as iTunes are making the airwaves pretty much obsolete. There are more choices, and there is more musical fragmentation. The days of culturally transcendent albums like Prince’s “Purple Rain” are long gone.

“Marooned” can be a helpful if uneven guide to finding great music that may have fallen through the cracks. If you approach it like the shuffle mode on an iPod, you won’t be disappointed. If a dry treatise on a British folkie makes you want to poke your eyeballs, just skip ahead to the next essay.

Village Voice contributor Anthony Miccio has the right idea. He understands that his favorite albums may not stand up to tropical isolation. “So what’s needed,” he says, “is a long compilation of music I’m familiar with that’s inspiring without being too connected to human life as I know it.” What does he choose? “Anthology,” a collection of the best of Ronnie James Dio, the metal elf who replaced Ozzy Osbourne in Black Sabbath.

At their best, these essays are cleverly crafted missives about how these albums changed the authors’ lives. The book’s editor, Phil Freeman, recounts his own high-fidelity moment: During a visit to his local record store in the mid-1980s, the clerk behind the counter pulled out a copy of the Minutemen’s “Double Nickels on the Dime” and told the young geek, “I got this in for you. Just buy it.” The album sent Freeman down a thrilling path of no return, one that, oddly, led to his desert island pick of Motorhead’s “No Remorse.” “Volume, speed, power (and power chords),” he writes, “these were the greatest sounds I’d ever heard.”

Laina Dawes, an African American woman knee-deep in Toronto’s mid-1990s grunge scene, offers a mini-memoir with Skunk Anansie’s 1996 album “Stoosh” as her soundtrack. She connects intimately with the band’s gender politics. Dawes conveys honest vulnerability without hyperbole. “I wish this band had been around when I was a teenager. For all the times I cried in silence so my parents couldn’t hear, I wondered what it would be like to scream, to shout in outrage and anger.”

Others, though, devour themselves in cold, clinical prose. To wit: Simon Reynolds’ portrait of doomed English folk singer John Martyn is compelling in a biographical sense, but not once does the reader feel a connection with the writer or his subject.

At least Reynolds’ piece is coherent. Kandia Crazy Horse, music editor of the North Carolina weekly Creative Loafing, writes as if she’s actually spent some quality time in a solitary state and composed her words in a state of delirium. She ostensibly chooses Stephen Stills’ 1972 “Manassas” album as her desert island companion. But Stills is merely a launching pad to extol the work of obscure soul man Lewis Taylor, a British Jew who, it would seem, has very little in common with Stills. Among other outrageous claims, Crazy Horse describes Brian Wilson’s “Pet Sounds” as “failed mid-60s sonic experiments.”

Thoroughly uneven, “Marooned” is like music itself: amorphous, something that can be configured a million different ways. The voices, and the albums, either speak to you or don’t. There’s no right or wrong here. Metal expert Ian Christie, who writes eloquently about the merits of Iron Maiden’s “Killers,” may explain it best: “The adolescent cave of eighth grade is the ultimate desert island in which lifelong musical biases are carved into the mind like hashmarks on a palm’s trunk.”

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Erik Himmelsbach, a writer and TV producer, is at work on a book about radio station KROQ-FM (106.7) and the alternative-culture revolution.

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Marooned

The Next Generation of Desert Island Discs

Edited by Phil Freeman

Da Capo Press: 332 pp., $16.95 paper