Robert Christgau
Editor's comments on the February 2011 issue
This second issue of Perfect Sound Forever constructed from student papers draws on a somewhat smaller pool than the first -two years instead of four and no Princeton ringers. All the pieces here were written by students in my Artists and Audiences course at NYU's Clive Davis Department of Recorded Music over the past two years. Artists and Audiences is required for sophomores in the major. Though it has "a strong writing component," it's basically an introduction to pop history and aesthetics. So these students are pretty young and don't conceive themselves as writers, though ReMu counts several professional journalists among its graduates, including Drew Hinshaw and Michael Downes, who got their feet wet in the June, 2008 PSF. Some of them enter the class in as naturals, others learn the craft; almost all of them get better, and some get very good indeed. Every year I learn things from the ReMu papers I grade and edit; every year individual students' turns of phrase and sense of language hit me where I live. Because all of them regard music as their vocation, their strictly musical insights tend to be especially sharp -sharper than the run of rock criticism on the web or elsewhere.
Because the pool was smaller this year and several papers under consideration were withdrawn by their authors, I ended up providing the final piece myself -unpublished portions of a Robert Forster interview my wife and I conducted for The Believer. A few more selections than last time are 800-word second papers rather than 2500-word final papers -including the Scriabin essay by Brian Parker, whose Jay-Z essay had already been scarfed up by PSF. I like that one enough to have put it in the Artists and Audiences syllabus this year. I can't think of a better way to demonstrate to a new bunch of students the writing they're capable of if they put out. I worked to sharpen all these essays -usually no more than I would on any professional submission back when I was editing for the Village Voice, but in a few instances, when the information or ideas were good enough to warrant it, quite a bit. The main reason I put in that kind of time is that I hate to see good thinking or writing about music go unread. But inspiring my students and others comes a close second.