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Only
Solitaire: Introduction |
Chained Forever To A World That’s Departed: One More Introduction
Greetings and welcome to the third
(and probably last) version of Only
Solitaire, my personal site of music reviews which has been functioning,
on-and-off, since almost the early dawn of the Internet age.
The first incarnation of Only Solitaire, which ran from 1998 to
2007, covered lots of bands and artists from the 1950s up to the 1990s in no
specific order other than personal preference and random chance; suffering both
from really crappy writing and from too much ambitiousness backed by too little
knowledge, it was eventually retired (though you can still access the original
texts if your curiosity overrides your squeamishness).
The second incarnation, which was
reprised in 2009 and ran all the way into 2020, was planned more strategically
and presumed to cover a variety of great and not so great artists in alphabetic
order, separating them into several chronological layers so as not to lock
writer and readers alike into a specific time period, and also permit myself to
get better acquainted with what was happening to popular music in the 21st
century. This version (I dare say) was already much better written and
benefited from all the benefits of the Internet age (easy access to all sorts
of music and data), although nothing is ever perfect. Eventually, however, I
ran into much the same problem as Franklin Clarke from Agatha Christie’s ABC Murders and realized that it would
be really weird to leave this world
somewhere around the letter G. This led to various modifications of the
original strategy, none of which really felt suitable to me. Then, along with a
large chunk of the world around me, I somehow fell into a period of darkness
and disillusionment, and pulled the plug on the project altogether. (The second
incarnation of Only Solitaire is still available in its complete form on the Only Solitaire blog, and is also
archived on this website).
Once the darkness had somewhat
dissipated (or, rather, settled into a form of permanent grayness with which I
have somehow learned to cope), I came up with the idea to revitalize Only
Solitaire once again — but this time, as a straightforwardly historical
project. Subtitled A Subjective History
of Rock’n’Roll (And Its Neighbors), this version of the site now follows
time rather than people, starting at certain milestones in the history of
popular music (namely, the rise of early rock’n’roll in the United States and,
several years later, in the UK) and going from there. This makes the entire
project more wholesome and systematic than it ever used to be, and it
guarantees a certain "intermediate completeness" in case something
were to happen to me (no one lives forever, and certainly not in a world beset
by Covid-19 and an alarming growth of all kinds of neo-fascism). At the very
least, writing a comprehensive history of rock and pop music in the 1950s and
1960s is quite a realistic perspective — whether I will be able to move on from
there, God only knows.
Sadly, this means that in the
current incarnation of the site I shall not be covering any modern music
(something that I quite diligently tried to do on the 2009-2020 blog, but which
ultimately contributed to my depression, I think; the summary of all my dark
thoughts on the subject is still
available here). As far as I am concerned, music has essentially ceased to
be a major cultural force in this day and age, though, of course, it still
preserves its entertainment function, and can have all sorts of meaning for
specific individuals on their own individual level. To me, however, this means
that there is no principal difference these days between trying to dig out an
obscure, mediocre, but still curious album out of 1957 or 1964, or rummaging
through the 2021 charts of RateYourMusic in order to "stay up to
date" with "current musical trends", which hardly even exist any
more, certainly not in the sense in which "current musical trends"
were understood in 1957 or 1964. I’m still listening occasionally to new stuff,
but I won’t be covering it again any time soon.
Now, onward to current technical
details.
1. What kind of music gets reviewed these days
on Only Solitaire?
I am writing a selective history of
those kinds of popular music which (mostly) have their roots in the blues,
R&B and (to a lesser extent) country tradition of the United States in the
first half of the 20th century — call this a "history of rock’n’roll"
if you wish, but with a very, very broad understanding of
"rock’n’roll", which would also include some folk, a lot of
singer-songwriter stuff, some more or less "pure pop", and
theoretically might even extend to electronica or hip-hop if I live long
enough. To make things a little more exciting, I am dividing the reviews into
two geographic sections — America (including USA and, probably, Canada) and the
rest of the world (mostly the UK, but also artists from other European and,
again theoretically, Asian and South American countries); the American section
tellingly starts out with Bill Haley’s Rock
Around The Clock, while the UK / World section starts out with (the rather
unjustly forgotten) Lonnie Donegan and his skiffle explosion, without which
there would be no... actually, never mind.
For all those worried about the
diversity factor, I can only say that I mean no harm to other musical
traditions, from Western classical to Latin American dance music to French
chanson to Indian ragas to Beijing opera, but there have to be limits set
somewhere, and while I might love to share my thoughts on Françoise Hardy, Ravi
Shankar, and João Gilberto, my experience with all these musical worlds has
mostly been limited to the topmost artists, and I wouldn’t want to sound like a
clueless tourist. Additionally, most of the local traditions are precisely what
they are — local — whereas rock’n’roll, want it or not, has remained a more or
less universal language (in the Western world at least) for more than half a
century, probably for the same reasons which cause me to be writing this in
English rather than in my native tongue. Anyway, I will be covering some non-US / non-UK bands and artists,
particularly those whose musical language is more or less compatible with the
most common one for me.
As to what precise artists get
reviewed (obviously, I cannot review everybody),
I have two main criteria here — they have to have at least some historical
importance (for instance, at least minor chart success, or at least some
objectively unique feature to their sound, or some transparent and acknowledged
influence on future musicians) and
they have to have at least something that piques my interest — this is a
"subjective history", after all. Fortunately, it turns out that most
of the time, these criteria overlap.
2. How often does stuff get reviewed? What’s the schedule?
Currently, the preferred schedule is
to review 2 (two) American albums and
2 (two) UK and / or world albums per
week (I also have to allocate some time for a completely different reviewing
project – story-based video games), usually in chronological order, though
sometimes I find myself obligated to break up the queue with some earlier
record that I had accidentally missed in my research. On some weeks when I’m
particularly busy or particularly indisposed there may be no reviews at all; on
the other hand, it is not excluded that I might also return to a busier
schedule some day. Unfortunately, any good review requires a modicum of
inspiration, and inspiration can sometimes be hard to come by.
Completed reviews are posted both
here (on my own personal website) and on my new blog set up at Substack.
This is done for (a) reasons of security — doubling the info on two websites
protects it from getting lost; and (b) reasons of convenience — on the Substack
blog, users may add their comments. As usual, comments are very welcome,
particularly those that indicate typos, spelling mistakes, and factual errors
(I will try to correct all these), but also those that add alternate
perspectives and opinions.
3. Why the different formats?
To save myself the hassle of working
in different editors, I continue writing everything in MS Word format, from
which the finished texts can be automatically converted into Web-compatible
formats. The HTML variants look a bit clumsy when done this way, which is why I
put them next to PDF variants, which look a bit more elegant to my eyes and
which I therefore recommend as the default format — unless your computer or
gadget somehow does not support PDF, in which case you can always fall back
onto the HTML variant. If everything fails, there is always the Substack blog
(although I only post the bare text there, without ratings, external links or
extra pictures).
The individual files / pages are,
like they used to be, for artists
rather than albums (having a separate
file for each album is very tedious, and it would be quite a hassle for you,
too, if you ever wanted to download the entire site) — but they are being
filled up very gradually, in chronological order.
4. Are there any changes to the old format of
the reviews?
Very minor ones. As usual, I include
the complete track listing, occasionally highlighting the outstanding ones if
anything stands out in any particular way (red tracks are the ones that I deem
unquestionably superior, even if only slightly, to everything else on the
album; brown tracks are those that sound fairly odd or unusual compared
to the rest; blue tracks are those that are markedly inferior) — reserving
only one instance of each color per album, however. I also regularly post links
to Wikipedia (so as not to have to waste space on all the historical details
and trivia which can be easily looked up in more reliable sources), Discogs
(where you can find lots of useful technical info on specific releases of the
LP in question), and RateYourMusic (where you can find many alternative points
of view, which will certainly give you a better overall perspective on the
album than any «official» critical reviews from the so-called professional
music journals).
If possible, I try to provide a bit
more context in the new reviews than before — for instance, long-playing
records by artists in the 1950s and early 1960s were commonly inferior to their
single releases (the most common recording market those days), and it is often
useless to discuss the LP without also discussing the singles that surround it.
Sometimes they are included as bonus tracks on newer CD releases; just as often,
however, they are not — all of this deserves some commentary. I also occasionally
include links to YouTube, where you can find almost anything these days free of charge (I do not subscribe to
any streaming services and probably never will).
5. Are there ratings for albums, and if yes,
what are the principles?
Okay, yes. Given how much people love to fight about ratings, I decided
to bring them back for this version of the site, almost the same way they were
functioning in the earliest incarnation of the site. Each reviewed album gets
its own numeric V-A-L-U-E, with each of the five aspects rated on a 1 to 5
scale, somewhat like this:
|
V |
A |
L |
U |
E |
|
4 |
2 |
3 |
3 |
2 |
The five parameters are: (1) V = Variety
(Diversity), assessing the overall variety of genres, styles, and moods
captured on record; (2) A = Adequacy, assessing how well, on the
whole, the artist is suited to performing these styles and genres, whether the
levels of ambitiousness and pretentiousness that are brought to the table match
the actual musical content, and suchlike; (3) L = Listenability, assessing the general
care taken to please the listener, ranging from production (sound quality) to
presence / absence of fleshed-out melodic hooks; (4) U = Uniqueness,
assessing the overall amount of new musical, lyrical, emotional content of the
recording; (5) E =
Emotionality, assessing just how hard of a gut-punch the record delivers.
Just as it always has been, these
numeric ratings are not hard science, and merely serve to summarize my current
opinion of the strengths and weaknesses of the recordings, which, hopefully,
will be better expressed in the review itself. Needless to say, some records
are actually not meant to be
"diverse" (AC/DC), "listenable" (Captain Beefheart), or
"unique" (99% of music ever made), so a low number in a certain cell
all by itself is not necessarily indicative of its poor quality. Probably the
worst score to have is low Adequacy,
which typically just represents artistic cluelessness (this is something I’d
probably slap on every Kansas album ever recorded – the band, that is, not the
state). But generally, if you ever want to fight me in a fair fight, I’d be
obliged if you agreed to fight words
rather than numbers.
6. How can I contact you and chip in with my
opinions?
This is what the Substack version of
the site is for — reviews posted there are raw variants, to which you may add
your comments, observations, corrections, alternate perspectives; I shall try
to take them all into consideration when posting the finalized texts on the
main site.