A riotous book that does the good deed of dreaming up conversations between Ludwig Wittgenstein and Kylie Minogue, Words And Music listens past the surface of pop music to home in on the sound of human history. It's an ambitious task, but a strange kind of logic takes hold: If sound strikes hot as both an object and an abstraction, then thinking about sound should be both immediate and imagined—part instinctual reaction and part discursive fantasy.
Ostensibly about one man's life of listening, Words And Music plugs the nose of various musical canons and follows the blowback back to the Big Bang. That one man is no slouch: An English writer who made his name during the post-punk '80s, Paul Morley is a sort of Lester Bangs for readers whose life experience owes more to The Human League than to Van Morrison. In his view, the story of music that's been handed down plays like a trampoline, to be romped upon and returned to only when gravity serves as an interesting alternative to its opposite.
Which is what allows for an entire book framed around the coupling of Minogue's gem "Can't Get You Out Of My Head" and "I Am Sitting In A Room," a wowing avant-garde composition in which Alvin Lucier plays back tape-recordings until his spoken words turn to a sonic mush of feedback and sour frequencies. Morley returns again and again to his twin pillars, circling around Minogue's rigid robot-pop and Lucier's shapeless conceptualism. But he also wanders: Eccentric timelines take pop stock of T.S. Eliot, Charlie Chaplin, Kraftwerk, Dean Martin, The White Stripes, Brian Eno, and so on. Some of it is cryptic and obscure to the point of comedy, but what arises is a rough sketch of a world ripe not just for pop music, but for the very idea of it—a dreamy fantasyland populated by real people and plastic idols fighting for the attention of bystanders who sometimes hear more than they can stop to listen to.
Morley is a whiz as a writer, winding wondrous paths around stories of losing his "existential virginity" to Tangerine Dream and staring down the visage of Minogue, whose "eyelids seem to slightly click when she blinks." Once his wild style settles, though, Words And Music stands to alter how readers hear the sounds all around them, from the whirring of a hard-drive to the photocopied notes of garage bands to the silence that never really exists, even when we want it to.