BLOG 19/08/2020
The Jan Diaries — Reading for the End of Summer
Jan Kinčl took a week off, went to the beach and did nothing but read. Three music books went down one after another — in one breath, as he puts it — and this entry is the report. It is the lightest column in the series and the one with the longest tail, because two of the three books are about how music actually gets made rather than about who made it.
What the piece covers
First is George Clinton’s memoir, written with Ben Greenman under the title Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain’t That Funkin’ Kinda Hard on You?. Kinčl follows the arc from a modest doo-wop quartet in the 1950s to concerts in front of tens of thousands with a giant spaceship descending onto the stage, told album by album and padded out with private anecdotes. What the book earns as it goes, he argues, is the word genius across several jobs at once — bandleader, businessman, visionary, philosopher — while it also documents problems that grew in exact proportion to the P-Funk collective’s success. His verdict is unqualified: excellent from beginning to end.
Second is The Beautiful Ones, the book Prince began with Dan Piepenbring and did not live to write. Piepenbring records that Prince did not want to be better understood but misunderstood in a new way, which is a working brief for an autobiography and an impossible one. Prince died shortly after the work started, leaving around thirty pages, so Piepenbring spent an entire summer at Paisley Park going through the archive — handwritten lyrics, photographs, notes and sketches of scenes from Purple Rain — with his own account of the collaboration filling the gaps around the fragment. Given that Prince refused to discuss his past in interviews, Kinčl finds the book’s existence improbable, and the glimpse of childhood and adolescence genuinely useful for making sense of what came later. Third is Questlove’s Creative Quest, a distillation of more than thirty years spent working with musicians — The Roots, teaching in New York, the Questlove Supreme podcast — and Kinčl singles out Ahmir’s logical analysis of each example as the thing that turns familiar anecdotes into a book useful to creatives of any kind. The stories with Stevie Wonder, D’Angelo and George Clinton are the bonus.
The part that stayed
The most quotable judgement is the one on Prince: “Ne pruža potpuni uvid, jer se to Princeu ne bi svidjelo, ali otkriva više nego što skriva” — it does not offer complete insight, because Prince would not have liked that, but it reveals more than it hides. The column signs off with three more titles for the shelf: Thomas Jerome Seabrook’s Bowie In Berlin: A New Career In A New Town, Miles: The Autobiography written with Quincy Troupe, and Dan Sicko’s Techno Rebels: The Renegades of Electronic Funk.
Read the full piece
The full column, in Croatian, is on Red Bull Croatia. Four minutes.
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