REVIEW:
Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste
By Carl Wilson
(Continuum)

Continuum’s 33 1/3 series has typically focused on albums that could be considered critical favorites – Forever Changes, Daydream Nation, Pet Sounds. However, in a recent volume, Carl Wilson (music editor at Toronto’s Globe and Mail) expands the scope of the series to an album that few rock journalists would admit to liking: Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love.

Yeah, the one with the Titanic song:

To Wilson’s credit, he doesn’t defend the album, or Dion’s oeuvre, but examines the factors of personality and environment that go into determining our individual tastes.

The premise of Wilson’s treatise is a good one: If Celine Dion is so incredibly popular, how come everyone I know hates her music? If I examine her music with all my critical faculties, will I uncover something of value? What does my hatred of her music say about me, and what does it say about the millions of people who love it? These are interesting and worthwhile questions, and I cautiously embarked on the book growling to myself, “Wilson, if you turn me into a Celine Dion fan, I will fucking kill you.”

Thankfully, no such tragedy occurred.

Instead, Wilson takes us on what is essentially a beginner’s course of aesthetics, and while it’s broadly interesting and well-presented, this reasonably scholarly exercise is not nearly as hilarious as one might hope. He charts the course of Celine’s global domination—she is horrifically popular in all parts of the world—and considers the philosophy of taste by citing David Hume and Immanuel Kant. These extended passages are brainier than your average music book—but, all told, they don’t really connect with the discussion of the music at hand in a satisfying way.

In one of the book’s more interesting stretches, Wilson provides an in-depth history of schmaltz (a word originally derived from the Yiddish for rendered chicken fat): he concludes that schmaltz is “an unprivate portrait of how private feeling is currently conceived.” With admirable intentions, he strives to level the critical playing field by democratizing art so that all of it is of equal value; the only quantifier is how much it jibes with the beholder’s personal tastes. Surely such generosity can’t end well, and it doesn’t: Wilson eventually finds himself in the audience at Celine’s live show in Vegas, sobbing about his recent divorce to the accompaniment of her maudlin caterwauling.

Yet by putting his hands in the fire (i.e. allowing himself to cultivate a personal relationship with Dion’s wretched music), Wilson overlooks a very important point. Fundamentally, some art IS worth more. One of the great abilities of art (and music) is to convey ambiguity, so that the specific meaning and significance of a piece can be shifted and valued in many different ways by various observers. Dion’s steamrolling histrionics allow no such subtlety of interpretation. Her songs are all about the sentiment she screeches; it’s impossible to listen to “My Heart Will Go On” and find room for any emotion other than the one she crams down our throats (except, possibly, revulsion to such force-feeding). Many listeners take comfort in such obviousness; Wilson should know better.