Last week, I took a drubbing for considering what the obits for Willy DeVille might say about him and his art – not because I was necessarily wrong, but because what I wrote didn’t seem to be what his fans wanted to find. I gather they expected to find an appreciation of him, and anything else wouldn’t do. So it goes. One point I will clarify, though. I wrote that he never integrated himself into the New Orleans music community in public way. Some of the writers pointed out that he loved New Orleans music and recorded with Dr. John, George Porter, Jr., and so on – something I know and pointed out in the piece. What I meant, though, was that he wasn’t a fixture performing live in the clubs. someone who played regularly around town. If you didn’t know DeVille had moved to town, you didn’t discover it through a progressive ubiquity on the city’s stages.

My penance for not writing the piece readers wanted is Pitchfork’s Top 500 Tracks of the 2000s. As someone who resists lists, I found looking at it exhausting and depressing – so conceptually shaky (with 2009 just over half over), so forgetable (I can only hum/sing five or six of the songs I know I have from the 500-401 section), and so irrelevant. Still, people are semi-talking about it, not with passion but because Pitchfork.com has become too big to ignore. Most are as skeptical as I am, but that doesn’t stop them from speculating as to what number one is going to be.  I’ll pass.