On Collecting Well

The one book that's always within arm's reach when I'm writing, even if I choose to ignore its advice, which I'm probably doing with these commas, is the late WILLIAM ZINSSER's ON WRITING WELL. It's a guide, an inspiration and, most important, comfort. There used to always be 10 or 20 CDs within reach, too, when CDs were how I listened to music. They were there for similar reasons. The specific titles would change from time to time along with my obsessions, but the pile would always be at the ready, to inspire, to distract, to overwhelm, to comfort. This wonderful ANDREW HOBBS photo of AMY WINEHOUSE's floor, from NAOMI PARRY and CATRIONA GOURLAY's book BEYOND BLACK, is a perfect portrait of the lovingly disheveled inner sanctum of a proper collection. Whether you need a fix of THELONIOUS MONK, RAY CHARLES, DONNY HATHAWAY or the SUPREMES, it's there, waiting. It will still be there tomorrow. You know exactly what that room sounds like, don't you?

If there's one feature I want more than anything from a subscription music service, it's a digital equivalent of that floor: my pile of my current obsessions on my floor or my desk, exactly where I left them, whether it was this morning, last night or a year ago. Not a cold list of titles on a sidebar, and not a neatly arranged screen of album cover thumbnails on a page I have to click three times to find, but something that feels, in a tangible way, like my actual stuff. Is that too much to ask? Is it one more example of me foolishly resisting the internet? Or is the internet foolishly resisting me?

In his essay on "The digital death of collecting," KYLE CHAYKA goes significantly deeper on the disconnect between collecting music in real life and trying to collect music in the cloud, and how the way we collect and organize music affects how we hear it, and how SPOTIFY and other services, with their ever-changing interfaces, actively pull us away from the piles of music we want to collect and listen to and toward the piles of music they want us to collect and listen to. It's a frightening, fantastic, resonant read about design and dissonance and algorithms and agency and playlists and passivity and about how "the endless array of options often instills a sense of meaninglessness." And how with every auto-update of the software, that Thelonious Monk CD gets a little further away.

Etc Etc Etc

With 10 nods, including Album of the Year for his wonderful MIS MANOS, CAMILO leads the pack of nominees for the LATIN GRAMMYS, which will be handed out Nov. 18 in Las Vegas. But a year after the Latin Grammy nominators finally gave reggaetón its due in the top categories, the popular genre finds itself back on the margins, and J BALVIN, despite his own nomination for Song of the Year, isn't having it. "The Grammys don't value us," he tweeted (in Spanish). "But they need us"... Measuring the combined music rosters of CAA and ICM by SPOTIFY monthly listeners... Music critic and poet HANIF ABDURRAQIB and choreographer JAWOLE WILLA JO ZOLLAR are among this year's recipients of MACARTHUR "Genius" grants... KANYE WEST has edited CHRIS BROWN and KAYCYY out of songs on DONDA, which, you may recall, was released a month ago. I kind of admire Kanye's ongoing high-concept art project of releasing music today and mixing it tomorrow, but in a streaming universe it leaves fans in the awful position of not knowing if their favorite song today will exist tomorrow. Remixing a track is one thing; disappearing the original mix is something else altogether.

Rest in Peace

Jazz's master of the Hammond organ, DR. LONNIE SMITH... R&B singer/songwriter ANDREA MARTIN, who wrote hits for En Vogue, Monica, SWV and others... Memphis radio pioneer CHRISTINE COOPER SPINDEL, who, despite racist pressure, turned WDIA into a powerhouse of blues music and other Black programming in the 1940s and '50s, with on-air talent that included B.B. King and Rufus Thomas... Influential Los Angeles radio DJ SAM RIDDLE, who helped shape the sound of Top 40 radio and later went on to produce TV's "Star Search"... 1950s country and pop singer SUE THOMPSON... Minneapolis jazz critic PAMELA ESPELAND, a longtime fixture on the Minnesota arts scene.

Programming Note

I'll be off for the next couple days. MARCUS K. DOWLING, a great Washington, D.C. and Nashville music writer whose stories you may have read here and who's taken a few spins at curating MusicREDEF in the past, will be back to curate Thursday's and Friday's newsletters. I'll be back Monday.