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A Cover Album Is A Tiny Museum Of Songs

The cover of Justin Vivian Bond's album <em>Silver Wells</em>, on which the cabaret performer uses other people's songs to construct a plotline that echoes the Joan Didion novel <em>Play It As It Lays</em>.
Courtesy of the artist
The cover of Justin Vivian Bond's album Silver Wells, on which the cabaret performer uses other people's songs to construct a plotline that echoes the Joan Didion novel Play It As It Lays.

I'm sorry, word police: I like the word "curator." When it started becoming fashionable in new media circles half a decade ago, I thought its rise as a catch-all for describing the paste-and-link proclivities of bloggers and their kin made a lot of sense. "Editing" felt too static, like something that belonged on paper; besides, old-media journalists claimed it as a badge of their superiority. "Borrowing" leaned too close to "theft" to feel comfortable. "Linking" was a little dull. To be a curator was (and is) to be elegant, educated, influential, and most importantly, monied. Even though no real new model for paying creative folk for Web endeavors has solidified, self-style curators can imagine themselves in couture black.

But ever since laptop whackers started calling themselves curators, others have decried the sloppy use of the term. The excellent Choire Sicha reignited this conversation recently at The Awl. Responding to a particularly sweeping statement by the artist Jonathan Harris, Sicha fumed, "As a former actual curator, of like, actual art and whatnot, I think I'm fairly well positioned to say that you folks with your blog and your Tumblr and your whatever are not actually engaged in a practice of curation." Others concurred.

Of course, this is a losing battle — language changes, that's all there is to it — but it got me thinking about what activities outside the world of museums and art galleries do, in fact, approach the curator's classic achievement. Within pop music, one effort most often gives artists this chance to fulfill the curatorial opportunity: the covers album.

What makes someone a true curator? Like Sicha, I held the official title for a while (at Seattle's EMP Museum), and I learned that it's more than picking out cool stuff to show off. This is true for musicians as well as Tumblr builders. Curators build cultural legacies. They tell stories through artful juxtapositions of words, images, sounds, sometimes textures, even smells. They make connections, sometimes virtual, often real, between creators, interpreters, and subjects.

Obviously not every covers album qualifies as a curated effort. Artists don't always select their own material. Others do so to appeal to a bottom line: the many releases by rock and pop elders designed to soothe tired baby boomer ears are mostly the equivalent of a mall gallery's display of flower paintings. (Some aren't so bad, though.) And sometimes curating seems built into playing certain kinds of music: jazz and folk make reimagining others' material fundamental. (There are certainly more self-conscious, high-concept efforts, like Roger McGuinn's Folk Den or the Blue Note 7). But when an artist makes a strong statement or tells a vivid story through careful and even provocative song selection, well-considered arrangements and thoughtful performance, I think she earns the lofty title Sicha's "filthy bloggers" don't really deserve.

Lately, there's been a rush of excellent examples of singer-songwriters acting as curators across the stylistic spectrum. Two goodies, Kelly Hogan's I Like To Keep Myself in Pain and The Cherry Thing, Neneh Cherry's collaboration with Swedish jazz ensemble The Thing, have recently been features as NPR Music First Listens. That's just a start in what's becoming a very good summer for the art of assertive interpretive pop. Whether exploring a genre, honoring an elder, bringing a community to life or exploring previously hidden crossroads, these inventive explorations demonstrate how appropriation becomes a creative act. Here are six standouts.

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Ann Powers is NPR Music's critic and correspondent. She writes for NPR's music news blog, The Record, and she can be heard on NPR's newsmagazines and music programs.
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