READING IS FUCKINMENTAL / Jason Matthew Smith

Reading is fundamental, and finding a good book is as good as locating that great album in the used record store. Harry Crews and Jonathan Lethem are as cool as David Bowie and Devendra Banhart, right? Each week, alongside our various and sundry music tips, BLURT’s gonna blow you toward good reads, music-related and otherwise. First up: a little of both.

LOOKING AT LIT RIFFS

A short story collection that reinforces the songwriters’ constant entreaty to ‘Never mind what my song is about—what do you think it means?’

For most of us, a goddamn great song (and maybe even the gawdawful ones) will knit together a little narrative in your head every time you hear it. You can’t help it. Your brain will construct a story and try to figure out what the song is about, maybe conjuring something far afield from what the songwriter intended, but hey, once inside the cranium it becomes your song and all the gray matter packed beneath that bad haircut you’re currently sporting can pretty much have its way with the tune.

That’s the idea behind Lit Riffs (Pocket Books/MTV Books, 2004), a book I just came across at Borders after cruising through a half-dozen clearance bins of publishers’ scat like Rachael Ray cookbooks. In Lit Riffs, great writers—such as Jonathan Lethem, Aimee Bender, Neal Pollack, and so on—offer up stories based on songs. My fave so far is Tom Perrotta’s “Dirty Mouth,” inspired by Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down.” (You know Perrotta—we can thank him for the ambitious resume-builder Tracy Flick in his novel Election, played to terminal perkiness by Reese Witherspoon in the movie by the same name.) Perotta’s tale is about swearing. Cussing. Four-letter words. And the linguistic S&M that occurs when kids start throwing those gems around. Good stuff. Reminds me of the time my mom blistered my backside for screaming, “Frankly, Scarlet, I don’t give a damn!” to a rival gang of seven-year-olds across the street. If I could go back in time, I’d kick my own ass for yelling that.

Jason Matthew Smith is a Texan who never developed an accent, thanks to a steady diet of television reruns during his formative years. He now lives in Utah, where everyone thinks he sounds just like John Astin, the original Gomez Addams.