The Queen is back - oh no, not again...

"NoJones4Jones" replies to a post about Norah Jones:

In your blog, "The Return of the Queen," you noted that it was "painful to hear the article's author Rob Hoerburger refer to Blue Note as a boutique jazz label." Consider the source. This is the same guy who wrote the embarrassing obit for Peggy Lee in the magazine last January -- reducing her long, illustrious career to the joke he claimed she had become in her later years. The sheer wrong-headedness of the whole thing boggled the mind and prompted no less than Cy Coleman to write in and decry the piece; he hit the nail on the head when he said it
was mean-spirited and juvenile. Hoerburger (who spends most of his time as a grammar policeman at the New York Times Magazine) had a previous piece on Norah come out in the Magazine just prior to the release of "Come Away With Me." (Anyone see a pattern here? Anyone besides me think that Norah is pretty damn disingenuous when she keeps
insisting that her success happens without any prompting on her or anyone else's part?) All you need to do is look at his first piece on Jones to see that Hoerburger doesn't know the first thing about jazz (or objective arts coverage for that matter). Anyone who did wouldn't waste much time on a pop flash-in-the-pan like Norah. What puzzles me, however,
is that the Times has some of the nation's best jazz writers at their disposal -- Will Friedwald, Ben Ratliff just to name two. Why do they keep giving assignments to this piker Hoerburger? You almost wonder if perhaps the guy isn't on a couple of payrolls....

I had not heard of Hoerburger before the article under discussion, so I'll simply thank NJ4J for casting new light on the journalist. While it was pretty obvious that it was a fluff piece (granted, it did acknowledge its own hypocrisy, as the only comments on the album itself, right at the end, were rather unenthusiastic). NJ4J later added:

My reaction to the latest piece on Sunday was simply this: historically, what kind of records sell in the 10s of millions? The ones calculated to have the broadest possible appeal, which pretty much means the really boring ones. And in that department, Come Away With Me -- like dinner at McDonald's -- is an all-time classic....

Come Away With Me's musical substance is rather toothless, for something that has provoked such strong reactions (not just in NJ4J). Personally, I was offered the album as a Christmas present a year ago and listened to it a few times. My father commented: It sounds like she's always singing in the same key, a general feeling (rather than precise technical analysis) I agree with. That notwithstanding, I kind of enjoy the album: sometimes you just need to be comforted in a certain way, and Jones does that for many people. I listened to it a few times and moved on. I can't really get worked up about her or her hype/success/brief omnipresence.

Is she a pop flash in the pan? Obviously, I don't know, but I don't really place withstanding the test of time as the ultimate arbiter of value. This is partly because what gets remembered is very much a factor of the structure of the music industry, perhaps even more so than artistic merit, but also because if something excites me now, why should I worry about what value it will hold for me in 10 years? I see even less reason to worry about how others will rate it that far down the line. I never can remember the formula for calculating compound interest, anyway.

The obsessive modesty displayed in the marathon (6 Internet pages) article is another matter, and one that started to irritate fairly rapidly, in a Oh won't you just shut up kind of way. Maybe she really is like that. Maybe Come Away With Me's success was totally unforeseen (surely 17 million in sales was unforeseen, I meant relative to other Blue Note releases and, say, Diana Krall). But the constant need to downplay it is tiresome.

Are 10 million sellers (worldwide) always boring? A bit difficult to say, as not very many albums have sold that much and I don't know where to find a list of them. Off the top of my head, I can think of Thriller, an Eagles greatest hits, The Fugees The Score, Britney Spears's first album and an N'Sync album. There's probably an Elvis Presley album of some sort in the 10 million club as well. I'm not sure we can deduce anything of the nature of such massive sellers from such a small sample.