The imperfect beat: Paul Beatty's Slumberland

I'm now so far behind with (supposedly) reading the music books I've got on my shelves that I've  basically given up. Will I ever read that much-reviled Morrissey autobiography? Or Julian Palacios' book on Beck? Or Michael Bracewell's book on Roxy Music, or Daniel Makagon's Underground book on US DIY punk? Er, maybe not. They're all gathering dust. I've had them for years and I keep ignoring them. However, on the plus side, following Pete Shelley's death and a few weeks of dipping into Buzzcocks bootlegs, I'm making great progress with the Tony McGartland Buzzcocks book I've had for about 12 years. It's gone all the way from my bookshelves to the book pile on my bedside table. (Niluccio - thy name is procrastination and thou shalt be damned for all eternity. Yes, it is so.) Anyway, as is the way with these things, instead of reading the books I've had for ages (some of which I even paid good money for) I've instead just ploughed through a novel about music I acquired (completely randomly and cost-free) a couple of weeks ago. And the book in question? Paul Beatty's Slumberland.

So here, for what they're worth, are a few thoughts on this book. Most of all, Slumberland is, er, kind of zany. It's a piece of fiction based on the "story" of a Los Angeles DJ who goes to live in Berlin so he can track down a legendary jazz musician to get his approval on the DJ's own sample-heavy composition, the "perfect beat". The DJ, the book's narrator, is a sort of slacker musicological genius, always tossing off musical references, including completely invented ones. This is a big part of the fabric of the book, the "rap" and jive (much of it heavily ironic) of a very self-conscious African American called "DJ Darky". It's kind of an acquired taste and - frankly - can get a bit wearisome, but here's an example:

"I continued with my list. 'Brando's creaking leather jacket in The Wild Ones, a shopping cart tumbling down the concrete banks of the L.A. River, Mother of Invention, a stone skimming across Lake Diamond, the flutter of Paul Newman's eyelashes amplified ten thousand times, some smelly kid named Beck who was playing a guitar in front of the Church of Scientology, early, early Ray Charles, Etta James, Sonic Youth, The Millennium Falcon going into hyperdrive, Foghorn Legorn, Foghat, Melvin Tormé, aka 'The Velvet Fog', Issa Bagayogo, the sizzle of an Al's Sandwich Shop cheesesteak at the exact moment Ms Tseng adds the onions ...'"

(Hmm, that's exactly a list of all my favourite sounds!). So, these are some of the components of the fabled perfect beat, and DJ Darky is reeling them off to his awed DJ/muso mates (the "Beard Scratchers") in Los Angeles. It's typical of the book's approach - irony piled on top of irony, piled on top of irony, piled on top of ... more irony. Beatty's pretty good at it but I did begin to wonder whether there was much point to this endless feedback loop of musicological satire. If it is satire (and I'm not sure that's quite what it is), who is he satirising here? Is it something like LCD Soundsystem's Losing My Edge applied to the hipster jazz/funk/soul/hip-hop heads who make a living on the DJ circuit in LA? - an extended dig, with a large degree of complacent fondness for the type of person being satirised? Not sure. And in fact, as the book progresses I less and less understood its point or purpose. We get a lot of stuff about racism in pre-unification Germany just before the fall of the Wall, with increasingly broad comedy content about the people he hangs out with in the bar (the Slumberland) where he's an expert jukebox programmer ("jukebox sommelier"). Some of it's fine - I liked the self-deprecatingly hopelessness of the narrator for example. But a lot of it feels like Beatty was more or less indulging himself. There'a a reference to Nabokov fairly early on in the book and I think there's a bit of Nakobovising going on in places (I was reminded of the faintly annoying inventiveness of Pale Fire and Ada at times). So no, Beatty's perfect beat book didn't hit the mark for me. I think Slumberland thinks of itself as a child of the Beats, loose in all the right ways, while operating at 150 BPM when it comes to spitting out all those names and song titles. In a way, it's a tour de force - but a tour de force without a point.

So now I've chewed that one up, next I'm going to read one of my many dust-lined music books and report back. I bet you can't wait ...