MAROONED: THE NEXT GENERATION OF DESERT ISLAND DISCS EDITED BY PHIL FREEMAN (DA CAPO PRESS)
That’s why I was looking forward for so long to Marooned, this month’s belated sequel to Stranded. The MO is the same–20 critics, 20 desert-island discs–but this time the writers are all post-boomers like me. Finally it’s our chance to push back, to begin to extend the musical canon beyond 1979 and redefine it for the years before. The selections range across genres and decades, from Brand Nubian to Dionne Warwick to My Bloody Valentine to the Meters, and editor Phil Freeman connects some of the dots with a 40-page annotated discography, “Return to Treasure Island,” that picks up where Marcus’s canon-making appendix to the first book left off–his choices are almost exclusively from 1979 or later.
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But just as often Marcus’s pet ideas mean he’s blindsided by the essays in Marooned–he natters on about alien tongues, though even a casual reading of the book reveals a great deal of warmth and communality. Scott Seward’s moving piece on Divine Styler’s Spiral Walls Containing Autumns of Light details how this proto-undie rap masterwork helped him pull himself out of the depths, where he’d ended up with a noose around his neck. But Marcus wastes ink quibbling. When Seward homes in on the couplet “My mentor says I’ve dropped too much acid / Mommy thinks I’m a psycho-spastic,” making the simple assertion that “many people who hear that line don’t even speak English,” Marcus somehow takes him to mean that everyone needs to hear the record as if it weren’t in English. Not only is this presuming a default English-speaking listener, it’s ignoring the fact that Styler’s music has already touched people who don’t understand a word of the language.
