Jeff Buckley's Grace (33 1/3)
by Daphne A. Brooks
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Book Summary Information
Author: Daphne A. BrooksEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2005-04-28
ISBN: 0826416357
Number of pages: 157
Publisher: Continuum
Book Reviews of Jeff Buckley's Grace (33 1/3)
Book Review: As an arrogant musician, I loved it.
Summary: 5 Stars
Thomas Lhamon's review (July 5, 2005) criticizing GRACE for its technical inaccuracies and flowery prose is misguided and evinces the writer's immature taste. To be more direct, it's just plain wrong.
I am a musician--a guitar player to be exact--of the worst kind. At rock shows, I'm the guy who stands next to the stage passing judgment on everything from the year an amp was made to the gauge of the strings a guitar player uses (Blackface Twin reissues don't sound as good as the originals; .09s are just terrible). I feign a kind of meta-expertise that permits me to shrug off other people's opinions about the music I listen to. Ever want to recommend a new record to me? You'd better expect a response in line with, "Oh, that?!? It's okay." The more I like the record, the more apathetically I talk about it.
As such, you might expect a person like me to share Mr. Lhamon's opinions, the reviewer is no doubt a card-carrying member of my pseudo-club (after all, no one but a club member would harp on the differences between a Mexican-made Telecaster and a American one). We're both musicians, we both fiend for those obscure factoids that we can feel cool dropping at parties with our arrogant musician "friends." We should be besties.
Too bad he completely misses the ball.
Daphne Brooks is not a member of our club. She's not even a musician. Rather, Ms. Brooks is a scholar of literature, and her writing is beautiful, nuanced, and evocative. Somewhere along the way, she shared in the experience that many of us musicians hold close to our hearts--Jeff Buckley's transfixing swansong entered her life and she fell in love. With exquisite clarity, brutal honesty, and language so awesome the word "transcendent" underestimates its power, Ms. Brooks' writing redefines Buckley's astral soundscape using an arsenal of metaphors and images that humble even the most diehard club members.
I'll let her speak for herself. Here are a few lines from a description of the one and only night she saw Buckley perform:
"The voice of movement and metamorphosis, disruption and reinvention, transgression and collaboration, revolution and cultural hybridity rearranged the landscape of our tiny rock universe in the hall that night.... Summon every rock and roll cliché that you like--the d.j. who saved my life last night, the boy who strummed my life with his words--Jeff Buckley destroyed and rebuilt my musical world in one fell swoop" (11).
I love "Grace," it's as simple as that. I've listened to the record more times than I can count. I know it so well I can tell you exactly how many seconds elapse between each song. And yet, Ms. Brooks' book gave me an entirely new way of loving "Grace," a work of art that has defined, to a great extent, the way I listen to music. Read it with an open mind, it will do the same for you.
Summary of Jeff Buckley's Grace (33 1/3)
The power and influence of Grace increases with each passing year. Here, Daphne Brooks traces Jeff Buckley?s fascinating musical development through the earliest stages of his career, up to the release of the album. With access to rare archival material, Brooks illustrates Buckley?s passion for life and hunger for musical knowledge, and shows just why he was such a crucial figure in the American music scene of the 1990s. EXCERPT: Jeff Buckley was piecing together a contemporary popular music history for himself that was steeped in the magic of singing. He was busy hearing how Dylan channeled Billie Holiday in Blonde On Blonde and how Robert Plant was doing his best to sound like Janis Joplin on early Led Zeppelin recordings. He was thinking about doo-wop and opera and Elton John and working at developing a way to harness the power of the voice?In the process, he was re-defining punk and grunge ?attitude? itself by rejecting the ambivalent sexual undercurrents of those movements, as well as Led Zeppelin?s canonical ?cock rock? kingdom that he?d grown up adoring. He was forging a one-man revolution set to the rhythms of New York City and beyond. And he was on the brink of recording his elegant battle in song for the world to hear.Music Books
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