About the Book
Non-fans regard Céline Dion as ersatz and plastic, yet to those who love her, no one could be more real, with her impoverished childhood, her (creepy) manager-husband's struggle with cancer, her knack for howling out raw emotion. There's nothing cool about Céline Dion, and nothing clever. That's part of her appeal as an object of love or hatred - with most critics and committed music fans taking pleasure (or at least geeky solace) in their lofty contempt. This book documents Carl Wilson's brave and unprecedented year-long quest to find his inner Céline Dion fan, and explores how we define ourselves in the light of what we call good and bad, what we love and what we hate.
About the Author :
Carl Wilson is the music critic at Slate and also writes for The Globe and Mail, Hazlitt, The New York Times Magazine and many other online and print publications. He lives in Toronto, where he is the doorman at the Trampoline Hall Lecture Series.
Review :
"Let's Talk" about one of the most interesting music books you'll read this year... The always critical and erudite Mr. Wilson actually approached Let's Talk About Love as a non-fan grappling with questions of "good" and "bad" taste... It's almost certainly the only installment in the series to discuss French-Canadian race relations, rockism, and Milan Kundera's thoughts on kitsch.
This could be the best book of the series...razor-sharp and unerringly intelligent.
This book seriously explores the wide divide between mainstream pop that is mass-marketed and purchased, and the critics who usually sneer at it for those very reasons. It's a heady work that examines everything from 'reductive Marxist theories of culture' to why critics value restrained singing while 'American Idol' fans embrace 'show-offy' technical power.
A book pondering the aesthetics of Céline risks going wrong in about 3,000 different ways...Instead, this book goes very deeply right.
Let's Talk About Love is a rigorous, perceptive and very funny meditation on what happens when you realize that there's more to life than being hip, and begin to grapple with just what that "more" might be.
A bit of a departure for Continuum's 33 1/3 series exploring classic records...readers of the dizzingly dweeby intellectualizing that often makes Wilson's blog an exhausting pleasure to read will not be surprised that, for him, a discussion of the love theme from Titanic must encompass an examination of Quebecois culture, the history of parlour entertainment as it relates to the immigrant experience, the philosophies of Hume and Kant and the sociological experiments of Pierre Bordieu.
Blending pop culture, cultural history, music criticism with Wilson's eclectic sensibility, the book is a fascinating look at how highbrow, middlebrow and nobrow rub meaningful observations along the way, moving on to the next without ever belabouring a point. The book is clever without the writer himself ever coming across as trying to be clever...It's like having an interesting conversation with a friend whose opinions you respect.
This erudite and eye-opening book attempts to explore not only Dion's polarizing appeal but also the very concept of "taste." Along the way, Wilson traces his loathing for Dion back to her Oscars performance alongside Elliott Smith, examines the meaning of "schmaltz" and Dion's French-Canadian roots, meets her adoring fans, sees her Vegas show, reviews the album (it's the one with that Titanic song), and analyzes theories on taste from David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Pierre Bourdieu (turns out social distinction plays a big part). By the end, Wilson has set the blueprint for a kind of music criticism that "might put less stock in defending its choices and more in depicting its enjoyment, with all its messiness and private soul tremors-- to show what it is like for me to like it, and invite you to compare." In other words, let's talk about love.
Erudite and eye-opening.
I teach in a university drama programme and I plan to integrate the book into our first-year Critical Theories course as a way to introduce students to principles of aesthetics, and to the discourse around pop/high culture. It's difficult to make Kantian aesthetics accessible to 18 year olds. Let's Talk About Love is a rare instance of the transmission of complex and sophisticated ideas in language that is accessible without being dumbed-down.
Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste offers a rare combination of compelling research and enormously entertaining writing, a real find for students of popular culture. It's a compact little volume packed with keen insights into the ideologies that have shaped music criticism and scholarship, thought-provoking commentary on problems of aesthetics, and sensitive reflexive analysis. That reflexivity, along with a careful balance of critical theory and field research, makes this work particularly appropriate for courses with an ethnomusicological angle. And as ethnomusicologists continue to cultivate a growing sub-field in popular music studies, Let's Talk About Love is a timely and valuable resource.
Written keenly and with great generosity.
The book [is] an engaging and intelligent study of taste and critiism framed by Celine Dion's tragic music.
...a brilliant read and a total eye-opener. Unlike other contributors, Wilson doesn't shore up another crumbling wall of the canon but dives into a world of kitsch to ask what makes us hate music. How can we know that 'bad' music really is bad, and what is taste anyway? It'll shake all your critical certainties, which is not a very good idea when you're in my line of work.
Mention in Today's Books
Wilson covers a lot of ground in his 161-page quest; the second half of the book reads like a Cultural Studies power ballad, invoking Roland Barthes, Theodor Adorno, Immanuel Kant, Clement Greenberg, Arthur C. Danto, and scores of other contemporary critics in rapid succession. Perhaps most impressively, Wilson condenses French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's mammoth (and seminal) tome Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste into one spry little chapter.
It's said there's no accounting for taste, but Canadian music critic Carl Wilson certainly makes a Herculean effort in this latest entry in Continuum's 33 1/3 series...En route, Wilson finds plenty of fellow detractors, generously hashes out a lengthy definition of "schmaltz," and drags Elliott Smith, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Clement Greenberg, Pierre Bourdieu, and a gaggle of shameless starry-eyed Dion fanatics into his intellectual and aesthetic morass.
'Morally you could fairly ask', Wilson writes, 'what is more laudable about excess in the name of rage and resentment than immoderation in thrall to love and connection?' That is, indeed, a fair and moral question, and it leads Wilson to wonder 'if anyone's tastes stand on solid ground, starting with mine.' He doesn't reach any definite conclusions, but the conversation he carries on through the centuries with everyone from philosophers David Hume and Immanuel Kant to sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, is by turns enlightening, provocative and unexpectedly moving. Wilson aptly calls Let's Talk About Love 'an experiment in taste,' and maybe as much as anything else, the book argues that such an experiment is one we'd all do well to conduct.
The 33 1/3 of pocket books ... are superb little volumes devoted to classic albums. What unites them is not so much their subject as the standard of the writing and imagination that the authors have brought to their task... every one I've read has been well worth the attention. Wilson's approach to Celine Dione, however, stands out ... Clever and witty.
Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste is Canadian journalist Carl Wilson's Celine Dion contribution to Continuum's inspired 33 1/3 series of short books ... Music criticism is often just guy-world. Wilson is the real thing. I can't praise this small book enough. Smart, but humane.
It's fascinating stuff...By turns hilarious and heartwarming.
Mention on Offbeat.com
Carl Wilson was interviewed by The Onion's A.V. Club
Framed by an irresistible concept...Wilson turns the [33 1/3] series on its head by seriously considering a blockbuster hit by Celine Dion.
Wilson's approach to Celine Dion...stands out. Wilson examines why he loathes it, its creator and everything about her-- and what inspires devotion in her bast army of followers around the world...Clever and witty, it almost make me seek out the album. But not quite.
Constantly interesting and thought-provoking...and I think he can teach us a few valuable things about criticism, for what it's worth.
I still don't like what I know of Dion's music and probably never will. But Wilson's efforts to examine the rote critical assumption that Celine Dion's music blows digs up all kinds of fascinating issues about the nature of taste and the hierarchy of pop culture.
An insightful, engaging and unexpectedly moving book.
Brilliant.
Consistently thought provoking.
This book is especially interesting on Dion's background... His book is intelligent and often moving.
In perhaps the most erudite and humane book of criticism ever written, Let's Talk About Love, the music journalist Carl Wilson brilliantly used Celine Dion's album of the same name to discuss the subjective nature of good taste and to try to understand what makes Dion so world-dominatingly popular.
Music criticism is often just guy-world. Wilson's the real thing. I can't praise this small book enough. Smart, but humane.
By exploring taste, kitsch, culture, fans, the state of contemporary criticism, Quebec nationalism, and economics in Celine Dion's Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, Carl Wilson manages to produce one of the most interesting and erudite books on why people love and hate certain kinds of art...Readers will find themselves evaluating their views on arts with added scrutiny after reading this surprising and provocative book.
A wide-ranging book, one predicated on the possibility that what repels us may say more about us than what attracts us...[an] insightful, engaging, and unexpectedly moving book.
An important study- not just of Dion and pop music but also of the changing nature of criticism in the popular realm.
As refreshing a music book I have read in a long time.
An illustration of the best side of music criticism.
Wilson uses Dion's record as a crowbar, and pries open the assumptions and prejudices which shape our tastes in the first place. Despite our preconceptions surrounding Wilson's ostensible subject (or perhaps, because of them), the results are subtle, and startling enough to give the most jaded of readers pause.
The ironic subtitle attached to Wilson's tome signaled the departure it marked from the series' usual fare. His subject, Celine Dion, was in the eyes music criticism's orthodoxy, the antithesis of the celebrated artist, and, accordingly, Wilson presented his work as a challenge, to himself and others, to approach her with fresh ears.
The most unlikely album made the best 33 1/3: Celine Dion isn't usually afforded the same respect as a Bob Dylan or a Joni Mitchell, but Carl Wilson uses her populist art and personal history to ask questions about class, taste, and race in an effort to figure out how one of the most popular singers in the world could be loved and hated in equal measure. The answers he finds aren't always comfortable, but that only makes them more important and crucial to criticism in the 21st century.
