Three signs of age, and a question
Only opening the mail yesterday did I realize the conjunctions of my musical past were beginning to collide.
There, in a plain brown envelop, I found an expanded edition of the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack. As Peter is wont to point out, the first review of the Ryman show the performers used to wrap that project, filmed for what became Down From the Mountain, was reviewed in our pages. I can remember hearing somebody at Lost Highway tell me, when I went by to pick up a live photo to adorn the review, that the soundtrack had already sold 70,000 copies in France, and they hoped to do somewhat better in the U.S. But they clearly weren’t confident. This re-release marks the tenth anniversary of that phenomenon.
Not in my mail, because I long ago fell from those lists, is the revised and expanded twentieth anniversary celebration of Nirvana’s Nevermind. I still have my original copy, which you can tell is an original because the first 60,000 pressed by Geffen didn’t have the bonus track of noise at the end.
And, in the coming edition of Bust is a terrific photo spread featuring Frances Bean Cobain, who is somehow now old enough to be tattooed and featured in a magazine photo spread.
My question, this morning, is this: In our increasingly diffuse culture, is there any release this year which will resonate so deeply as to warrant this kind of attention in a decade?