"New Yorker" Gets Rough With Diamond

Not really, actually. But I liked saying "diamond" and "rough" in the headline. The New Yorker has really improved in the last few years under editor David Remnick. It doesn't feel desperately timely as in the Tina Brown years. Like the New Yorker of old, you can pick up an issue that is months old and not feel you're wasting your time. Still, timeliness is useful when it comes to reviewing movies and books and theater. And CDs.

Oddly, they run a review of Neil Diamond's marvelous new album "12 Songs." It came out November 8th ( ages ago when you're talking about a weekly magazine). The CD made tons of news for being produced by Rick Rubin, for being very good and -- unfortunately -- for being one of the Sony releases saddled with "security" software that exposed listeners who wanted to legally rip it to lots of complications. The album started strongly and then collapsed amid all the bad publicity.

So it's wonderful the New Yorker is shining a light on his music, but surely they might have acknowledged somewhere the events of the past few months. The article reads as if it were filed in October 2005 and that ain't a good thing.

Other problems: the article wheels out the old canard that Neil Diamond has been dismissed for many years. He's hardly Barry Manilow, who was praised and then ignored and then somewhat rehabilitated. Diamond has always been recognized as a terrific songwriter, one of the last in the Brill Building tradition. He's rarely been out of the limelight (even if his new music hasn't made the charts) and barely a year goes by when he isn't profiled by some major publication as if they've just "rediscovered" him.

Then the reviewer talks about his lyrics being far inferior to his melodies -- fair enough; everyone else has been saying it for years. Then she quotes a "typically opaque" lyric: "'I am,' I said/ To no one there/ And no one heard at all/ Not even the chair." That line isn't typically opaque -- it's astoundingly opaque, even by Neil Diamond standards. I'd argue it's one of the most ridiculed, quoted and discussed lyrics in all of pop. Again, check out all those loving profiles that thought he was underappreciated and many of them will quote that line. Singling out this famously odd passage as typical is like saying "To be or not to be" is typical Shakespeare.

Further nitpicking: the author says his best work came from '66 (the year of his first charting single "Solitary Man") to '72 and "Song Sung Blue." Perfectly fair and quite defensible (those certainly were his salad days).

But why not extend his streak to the early '80s? Why cut out "Desiree," "Longfellow Serenade," "Forever In Blue Jeans," and "September Morn'" (that one I can't forgive). And while the movie was a bomb the songs from "The Jazz Singer" I think are as good as anything he's done: "Love On The Rocks," "Hello Again" and my personal choice for our national anthem "America." (I'll give her the cutting of "You Don't Bring Me Flowers" but I'd sing along anyway if it were playing.) She's not "wrong," mind you. But the cutoff date seems rather arbitrarily tied to his commercial peak rather than the fine songs he continued to produce.

So ignoring the piece's ignoring of the simple fact that the album came out more than two months ago (an awfully long time for a weekly) and ignoring its patently untrue claim that Diamond has been ignored, here's hoping its honest appreciation of his album spurs more people into checking it out.