Mickey Hart: Best music writing 2004

This annual collection of articles about rock, hip-hop, country, jazz and elsewhere stands or falls on its guest editor's taste. This far into the new year seems a good place from which to take a look back.

The selections by Nick Hornby (2001) were terrific and diverse, last year's by Simpsons' creator Matt Groening somewhat less so.

Mickey Hart, drummer with the Grateful Dead and longtime world music aficionado, should be an excellent, free-ranging editor but a couple of slight and somewhat eccentrically lazy pieces (karaoke singing, 69 love songs through the years) let the otherwise strong collection down.

The best articles show how music can be the vehicle to write penetrating social history: Dan Baum's New Yorker article about the jake leg which blues musicians in the 30s sang about was a verifiable epidemic and he tells how a medical researcher in New York diagnosed it through the songs.

Elsewhere Ta-Nehisi Coates' Village Voice article on the bullet-ridden rapper 50 Cent shows how his allegedly authentic street style is far from the truth and the ghetto-gangsta image is both patronising and nostalgic for a crack era which has passed.

There is an enlightening interview with Harry Belafonte about race and the music business; salutes to Johnny Cash, Nina Simone and rock writer Lester Bangs; an analysis of the pervasiveness of hip-hop culture's second generation; and a wonderful piece of research into the life of Little Miss Cornshucks, a forgotten star of 50s r'n'b whose work inspired audiences and is named by music business heavyweight Ahmet Ertegun as the best blues singer he has heard, to this day.

Add in a lengthy piece about the rise and fall of Lauryn Hill (now seemingly quite off the planet after her unhappy brush with fame) and a worrying piece about how the Clear Channel combine has sewn up radio programmers and venue bookers in the States, and you have a collection of more than 30 pieces that cover the diversity of contemporary music, from the bad business to the great artists.

* Graham Reid is an Auckland freelance writer.

* Da Capo, $39.95