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Ian MacDonald 1948-2003
| Message Board > Music Chitchat - Heavy > Ian MacDonald 1948-2003 |
| Mac User Info... | Revelations In The Head: Ian MacDonald 1948-2003 THE NEWS THAT Ian MacDonald has taken his own life comes as a terrible shock, both to the colleagues who knew him and to the admirers � such as myself � who didn�t. His contemporaries from the great NME days of the �70s were perfectly aware that he suffered from depression, but no one can ever truly anticipate the decision to commit suicide. The fact that Ian�s collection The People�s Music had only just been published � to ecstatic reviews � only deepens the tragedy of his death. I received an email from Ian the day before he ended his life. True to the form of these things, it was an innocuous request for an email address, with some comments about a letter from someone who�d recently read The People�s Music. That brush in cyberspace with someone so perilously close to the abyss has left me as distressed as I�ve felt in some months. Depression has been no stranger to me, though I�ve finally come to see its true source in childhood shame and neglect. I�d have liked more than anything else to reach out to Ian in his darkness, however little good it might have done. The fact that the profound insights into life and pain that he offers in The People�s Music � particularly in a desperately moving chapter about the suicidal Nick Drake � couldn�t help Ian to come back into the light is almost unbearable. By way of tribute to a wise and troubled soul, I offer my Observer review of that book and urge you to purchase it at the soonest opportunity. BH Ian MacDonald: The People's Music � Selected Journalism (Pimlico) Barney Hoskyns, The Observer, July 2003 BROADLY SPEAKING there are three kinds of British rock writers: boring ones, brash ones, and genuinely bright ones. Somehow it's typical of our anti-intellectual culture that the last-mentioned group has come in for the most abuse. Yet just as Brian Eno refuses to dumb down the workings of his formidable dome, so the smartest British rock scribes choose to be true to their own grey matter. Like Eno himself, they make us think about music that hacks manage to reduce to background distraction. Ian MacDonald is arguably the godfather of this erudite group. A lengthy Eno interview, circa '74, is one of the MacDonald pieces I recall best from that golden age of rock journalism. NME's Assistant Editor between 1972 and 1975, Ian Mac eschewed the underground-outlaw stance of Nick Kent or Charles Shaar Murray but was at least their equal. He also wrote about intelligent artists � Eno, Kraftwerk, Todd Rundgren and co. � rather than just glamorous or groovily outrageous ones. The People's Music finds no room for any of MacDonald's '70s work, but it matters not. The 29 comparatively recent pieces in this collection, his first publication since 1994's universally-admired Beatles study Revolution In The Head, are almost all dazzlingly insightful, as closely engaged and beautifully pared as the literary essays of James Wood in The Broken Estate or the entries in David Thomson's Biographical Dictionary Of Cinema. When I first read "Wild Mercury", a brilliant trawl through the life and work of Bob Dylan and the first selection here, I wondered why it wasn't being published in The New Yorker. This is prose to make you pause, laying down the book as you gaze into the new space the writer's ideas have created. Above all, MacDonald's re-evaluations of both pantheon artists (Dylan, Beatles, Stones, Beach Boys, Hendrix) and cult ones (Love, Chic, The Band, Steely Dan, Laura Nyro, Nick Drake) bracingly shake off received opinion and orthodoxy, obliging the reader to come at the music afresh. Randy Newman's 1968 debut album is his best, with a sense of "irony so faint one could walk right by it, oblivious". Steely Dan's oft-disparaged Gaucho is "a gem in the trash can of Californian entropy, a ray of coherent light amid LA's louche neon". Bob Marley's songs are "stranger in retrospect, more alien and sectarian, than they've ever seemed before". The music of Laura Nyro, who still lacks her rightful place in rock history, "happens to be the most original, resourceful and powerful composed by any woman in the field of popular music over the last fifty years" � implicitly superior, in other words, to that of the far more f�ted Joni Mitchell. All the way through its 250 pages, The People's Music is strewn with elegant descriptions, subtle clusters of epithets. The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds is "a polyphonic palette of wide range-spaces and innovative voicings". The Supremes' 'Stop! In The Name Of Love' mixes "gentle sassitude, gospel passion and Streisand melodrama over an imperious high-stepping beat". John Fahey's muse is "melancholy, saturnine, remote and uncanny". The music of the Minimalists (Steve Reich, Philip Glass et al) is "unanimously flat, streamlined, kaleidoscopic and benignly impersonal". Even when he's dismissing an act's work, MacDonald is inspired. He writes of the "lazy provisionality" of Jefferson Airplane's 1969 album Volunteers, and of Cream's "loud, aggressive, obvious blowing on soon-exhausted blues scales". The absolute best in The People's Music is saved for last, in the book's extraordinary title chapter, and in "Exiled From Heaven", a moving and thoughtful homage to the doomed Nick Drake. "The People's Music" is one of the clearest and cleverest analyses of rock's evolution I've read, charting the Sixties shift from "a corps of professionals" to "a body of young amateurs" and taking us up to the present-day "world of convenience and easy self-satisfaction," where "the centre of gravity of social discourse has... shifted from middle age to youth". "Exiled From Heaven" is a long, bittersweet meditation on a singer whose gentle, haunted songs invite us "to step out of this world of pose and noise" and "suggest that what matters is the spirit in which we live" [my italics]. Once more MacDonald overturns the tropes of rock nostalgia: Drake's final album Pink Moon, usually seen as "bleak, skeletal, nihilistic, ghoulish", is in fact "an uncanny, magical record... a sparingly beautiful meditation on redemption through spiritual trial". For MacDonald, Nick Drake's songs � preoccupied with what nature is telling us about ourselves � underscore the mystery of life at a time when marketeers and biological reductionists alike seem bent on squeezing the magic out of existence. "Can it be," MacDonald writes in the book's magnificent final paragraph, "that the materialist worldview, in which there is no intrinsic meaning, is slowly murdering our souls?" It's not such a melodramatic conclusion to come to. MacDonald notes in his Beach Boys chapter that "there are three sorts of sub-audience for pop: those with musical ears, those who concentrate on lyrics and those who like the 'lifestyle' signs (attitudes, clothes, moves, atmosphere)... almost no one responds to all three equally." He himself is a marvellous exception to that rule. � Barney Hoskyns, 2003 - Wed, 3 Sep 2003 11:23am | ||
| Mac User Info... | You don't know who he is/was,do you? - Thu, 4 Sep 2003 9:21pm | ||
| j-drummer User Info... | well I don't but my friend Al the gee-tar player has mentioned him a couple times.. I presume you may know Al? Me, I'm just a drummer in his late-twenties, haven't experienced much tragedy, definitely not my musician bro's, but have lost a friend here and a relative there. - Mon, 8 Sep 2003 1:38pm | ||
| Jo Fancy User Info... | Funny, MY name is Ian MacDonald, but I'm alive. loco. - Tue, 9 Sep 2003 8:18pm | ||
| Zippgunn User Info... | And then there's Ian McDonald who played for King Crimson and then (ugh) Forigner. - Wed, 10 Sep 2003 1:19am | ||
| _Griphin_ User Info... | Ya know, I'm still confused over this death, I didn't quite know who he was, and I feel bad... - Wed, 10 Sep 2003 11:38pm | ||
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