For Daniel Couch, who got me started on these things long, long ago.
And for Laura d’Herete, who trusts my musical opinions perhaps more than is warranted.
** With thanks/apologies for the title to Toni Cade Bambara
Back in 2012, I wrote briefly for melophobe, a Portland, OR-based music magazine. Though they occasionally published longer features, their calling card was that their album reviews were 50 words long. Not around 50, or fifty-ish. Fifty. For three months or so, after which the mag went belly-up, I got a couple dozen reviews published with them.
I liked writing these a lot, for the challenge that they gave, as I explained a year after melophobe’s collapse:
The 50-word review is essentially critical haiku. There’s no room for sustained (and longwinded) analysis—my preferred mode. Instead, I had to work out my feelings on a record in three, maybe four sentences. I had to, usually, concentrate on a single core element that defined the whole. I had to make bold, succinct statements that, in a longer essay, I would’ve qualified or hemmed and hawed about. 50-worders forced me to be blunt, be harsh, and open myself for hard questions by unequivocally saying what I meant.
Since then, I’ve continued the practice occasionally. (See earlier entries: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and eight.) My 2024 new year’s resolution was to write a 50-worder a day, expanding the concept beyond reviews and into life and thoughts in general. It’s a weird way to maintain a journal but it’s worked for me. A sample:
Backyard smells — anytime I sit out back and read, South Philly, PA — 9.0
The aroma of roasting garlic gets tangled in the leaves. Indian curry overpowers the air. Often, petrichor when the sky’s done pouring. Sure, there’s occasional rotting garbage from open trashcans or someone’s dog shitting in the alley. But marijuana drifts along to smudge foulness. My nose feels the block thrive.
Reminds you of: Rear Window // walking the neighborhood
Slay tracks: Italians putting something on the stove // bread baking
Just say no, Nancy: rotten eggs in an untied trash bag
[5/16/24]
These critical haiku have shaped my writing and organized my observations (and indeed made me a better observer) for a while. I enjoy returning to this format. And so here we are, with my longest set of them to date. As with the most recent entry, I’m concentrating on my (small, scattershot) vinyl collection. Some of which seems to be available only on vinyl or CD, so this becomes a quiet defense of keeping physical media.
Following the original melophobe format, each album is rated on a scale of 1 (unlistenable) to 10 (masterpiece), with highlights (“slay tracks”) and lowlights (“Just say no, Nancy”) tagged accordingly. The older I get, the more experimental these tags get—which is to say my comparisons aren’t always to other music but to the flotsam and jetsam of life. If that means these get oblique at times, well, there’s only so much I can do in 50 words, and I don’t mind being weird if it gets the reader to a new perspective. I dunno.
Also: the “2 parts” bit. You’ll see another entry like this, but focused on a particular group, next week.
OK, here we go.
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Quiet Bubble 
