Project X: The Word On “The Word”
We here at Idolator are obsessed with charts: Sales charts, best-of charts, even charts that chart other charts. In an attempt to keep track of all the rankings and reports that are compiled on a daily basis, we’ve asked Jackin’ Pop editor Michaelangelo Matos to break down charts from every genre imaginable. After the click-through, his take on The Word‘s “Worst and Best Instruments” ranking.
Project X No. 3: The Word‘s Ten Worst and Best Musical Instruments, March 2007
The December 2004 issue of the British music monthly The Word, the first I hazarded $9 on, had John Peel on the cover. So did every other British music magazine that month; Peel had just died, the nation was in mourning, and so was I, despite having never heard any of his radio shows. (I’d loved his interviews and his FabricLive 07 mix CD.) But when I picked up the issue, I was struck by how immense the feature story was: Around ten pages long, with little in the way of the kind of infographic, entry-pointed sidebars magazines stick into even shorter pieces because market testing shows that their readers are (whisper it) morons. Even beyond the Peel piece–the best I read in the wake of his death–the magazine’s editors seemed to assume its readership was smart as they were. In popular journalism, especially music magazines, this is as rare as a paisley pelican.
Like its primary competition, Mojo and Uncut, The Word caters to older rock fans. But it also caters to older pop fans, specifically of ’80s vintage–Springsteen and Waits and Joni are consistently abetted by Bananarama and the Pet Shop Boys and the demise of Top of the Pops. The real difference, though, is the writing: The Word‘s tone is casual but sharp, a personable writers’ magazine as opposed to a more corporate-in-feel editors’ mag. And like the other best-written music magazine around, the U.S. metal sheet Decibel, it aims to be funny.
The most obvious place where this comes out is in the monthly Worst and Best lists. Sometimes these aren’t music-related–a recent issue ranked sex symbols–but usually they are, as in the March 2007 issue, which purports to name the 20 Worst and Best Instruments. Here’s the Top 10 of each:
Worst 1. The acoustic guitar 2. Fretless bass 3. Sitar 4. Children’s choirs 5. Paul McCartney chewing vegetables for percussion 6. Feedback 7. Simmons drums 8. The voice of Mariah Carey 9. Flying V guitar 10. Side of pork which Scott Walker punches for percussion on The Drift
Best 1. The vocoder 2. Double bass 3. Glass harmonica 4. Mellotron 5. Sousaphone, as played by John Simon with the Band 6. The Pet Sounds box of fun 7. The voice of Björk 8. The Flaming Lips’ boombox orchestra 9. Roland TB-303 bassline 10. The melodica
The great thing about The Word‘s lists is their absolute lack of pretense to authority. Most magazines use editor-generated lists to reinforce their canons. The Word‘s lists mostly serve to track the staff’s obsessions, and to lob the occasional honesty-keeping tomato at existing canons, including the magazine’s own. Naming the acoustic guitar its most hated instrument a month before putting Joni Mitchell on the cover is one way of doing it; sniping at Paul McCartney’s mouth percussion is another. McCartney has done this precisely twice, for the Beach Boys’ “Vegetables” and more recently for Super Furry Animals’ “Receptacle For the Respectable,” and its inclusion nicely marks the distance between The Word‘s playful attitude toward rock history and the stodginess of its competitors’.
A friend of Indian descent called bullshit on the Worst list’s No. 3, the sitar, but in this case it’s worth noting the accompanying blurb: “The bored rocker’s way to say they’re switched on and tuned in. The Minute G Harrison knocked out ‘Within You Without You,’ Oasis’s ‘Who Feels Love?’ was as inevitable as Alzheimer’s.” (I said they aim to be funny, not that they always succeed.) I’ll call slight bullshit on No. 8 (after Mariah simultaneously toned it down and and toned it up for Mimi it no longer remotely qualifies) and complete bullshit, not on No. 6, but its accompanying claim that Sonic Youth are “the worst group ever” (not even close, chappies). I’m especially tickled with No. 10, though, for reasons that have nothing to do with pork and everything to do with thoroughbreds, as in, “Scott Walker sounds like a horse.”
I’d argue slightly harder with the Best Instruments list. The vocoder at No. 1 is inarguable–wonder what the editors think of U.S.E.? I’d have ranked No. 9 a lot higher, and heartily second their recommendation of Hardfloor’s “Acperience” as a starting point for the manifold joys of the most jabbering of instruments, though I’d have picked Wink’s “Higher State of Consciousness.” No. 2 reminds me that I still need to get hold of that string bass anthology on Dust-to-Digital. I do find No. 5 something of a stretch, though I’m not an especially big lover of the Band anyway, and Nos. 7 and 8 pretty willful. Björk does deserve mad props for maintaining a career through a 20-year case of the hiccups, I suppose. I haven’t heard No. 8, to be honest, but then neither has The Word, by its own admission: “The resultant 360-degree soundfield was, by all accounts, amaaaazing.” Nothing like being there, innit?
Still, it’s hard not to like a magazine that does this every issue without even calling attention to itself–I have yet to see a cover of The Word with a giant number trumpeting its latest contribution to the glut of stuff you didn’t even know needed ranking. Actually, that’s not quite true: The cover of the most recent year-end issue promised the Top 100 Tracks of 2006. It delivered by printing screen-grabs of its five editors’ Top 20 most-played songs on iTunes. As they say in the vernacular, pure class.
