After the Fact

Michelangelo Matos interviews Rob Sheffield over at eMusic’s blog, and it’s long.  It’s also compelling and funny and just plain great.  This bit made me tear up a bit.  Sheffield has a knack for doing that.  I’ll be back tomorrow, with something much less wonderful than this:

A lot of listening to music is memory, and a lot of memory is listening to music. It’s funny that music is always in the present. It always confronts you with the new, the right-now. But it’s always connected to memory. Even if you’re writing about a song that’s playing right now, you’re always writing about it after the fact. It’s always after the moment. Especially writing about dance music—if you can call it a genre of pop-music criticism, it’s my favorite genre, because that’s built into it. The impossibility of trying to recapture that moment—even if you’re writing about something you heard last night, the immediacy of it makes it more exciting to read. There’s something retrospective built into it.

Filed under: Matos  Rob Sheffield