Here's a good musing by Matos on the deluge of music in our "celestial jukebox" lives, and how critics might deal with it. He's taling about getting into Duke Ellington, and the great big learning curve every critic must face when tackling a new genre or mode of listening.
But aside from the obvious fact that we all start somewhere, and not usually from a place of deep knowledge, it still seems willful to use it that way now. We know about more music than we’ve ever known before, and it’s simply not possible to track it all with an equal degree of knowledge. The English critic Tom Ewing, introducing a list of his 101 favorite tracks of 2002 (No. 1: Conway’s “Lisa’s Got Hives,” a mash-up bootleg of records by late TLC member Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes and Swedish rockers the Hives), wrote, in part, “Year by year, the ‘celestial jukebox’ becomes more of a reality, and we are all dilettantes now.” Ewing wasn’t gloating; he was acknowledging the reality that sometimes dilettantism is the only sane option in a river of possibilities. And sometimes, as is the case with Ellington, it’s also the most enjoyable.
