Editor's Idea: November 1996
ISSUE 153, November 1996
Editor: Tony Herrington
Reading through Meaty Beauty Big & Bouncy!, a recent collection of "Classic Rock & Pop Writing from Elvis to Oasis", I sense my heart sink, the sky cloud over, radar going haywire with dull and familiar sightings. Despite that sub-title, the book isn't a celebration of music journalism per se, but rather a homage to certain breeds of music journalist. On one level, the selections of Editor Dylan Jones bolster the notion of the latter-day music critic as a pop-celebrity mortician, laptop wielded like a coroner's scalpel, eviscerating the bloated organs of one wrecked pop-life after another.
In a darker place altogether are the "rock journalists" who manifest "the power, the glory and the depravity of rock music, not just the theory" (my italics). Dylan is particularly in awe of these guys (they're nearly always guys), and hits on arch fuck-up Nick Kent as his dream model of "the music journalist as überhack, the gonzo journo as superstar, a drugged-up, shook-up, Biro-toting longhair".
Dylan wants to be able to live the rock 'n' roll life vicariously through the poison pens of his rock hack heroes. He dreams of 70s excess and access, when the critic as pathological hanger-on would be allowed to lig for weeks with the likes of Led Zeppelin, documenting the Visigoth exploits of Bonzo and co in the pages of Rolling Stone or Crawdaddy as they ritually abused the women, hotel rooms and swimming pools of the American Midwest. Dylan wants music writing which gives a sense of "the sheer visceral thrill of rock 'n' roll... the flavour of rock, not just the aftertaste" (my italics again). More to the point, and in inevitable contrast, he lampoons music writers who grapple with the complexities of music in the 90s, "dissecting a culture of margins surrounding a collapsed centre", as he puts it, effectively characterizing them as "recalcitrant pseuds", "young men with handshakes like fish whispers, shrill voices in the dark".
Bleep bleep, goes the radar: Same Old Shit alert. It's not the actual journalism collected in Meaty Beaty Big & Bouncy!(God, that title!) that sends my well-balanced critic's posture morphing into a warped, no-quarter fighting stance of extreme prejudice, although with one or two exceptions this is a humiliatingly conservative collection, full of half-wits mooning over the Godlike genius of Keef and Bono, or dessicated hacks taking pot shots at sitting ducks like Ringo Starr, Robert Palmer and Annie Lennox (I mean, why bother?).
No, what sticks in the craw is the implication, once again, that any critic who tries to think hard and deep about music - who attempts through the application of original thought processes, intelligence and quicksilver prose to cast light on matter which often exists at the far edges of perception - is some kind of detached, limp-wristed fop who would faint dead away were they offered a toke on Shaun Ryder's crack pipe.
For Dylan Jones, 'classic pop writing' is defined not by the quality of the journalism, but by the celebrity-rating of the subject. In this world, a particularly codified and mundane place, Rod Stewart's haircut or Kurt Cobain's suicide can give rise to a piece of 'classic pop writing' because they are an agreed part of the programme, instantly recognisable signifiers in the global pop canon. By extension, incisive, in-depth and connected analysis of, say, Photek, John Oswald or Patrick Pulsinger will be mere pretension at best, pissing in the wind at worst.
The activities of these musicians and their multifarious contemporaries in the areas of breakbeat science, sampleadelia and lo-fi Electronica typify the sense of cultural fracture which Jones and most of the journalists collected in Meaty Beaty... are either too dumb, too lazy or too intimidated by to engage with. This explains the absence from the book of such 'marginal-culture' critics as David Toop, Greg Tate, Nelson George, Simon Reynolds, Kodwo Eshun. Never mind that these writers are among the most electrifying of their times, exploding old myths and erecting new paradigms as they go: the musicians they write about are, well, they're taking the piss a bit, aren't they, old boy? And the critics themselves? A bit up their own arses, don't you think?
Ah yes, the anal factor, a popular characterisation, and one which for some reason, I can't imagine what, is sometimes levelled at this magazine. While I naturally refute any such notion, personally, I reckon it's better to be up your own arse than up someone else's.
Editor: Tony Herrington
Reading through Meaty Beauty Big & Bouncy!, a recent collection of "Classic Rock & Pop Writing from Elvis to Oasis", I sense my heart sink, the sky cloud over, radar going haywire with dull and familiar sightings. Despite that sub-title, the book isn't a celebration of music journalism per se, but rather a homage to certain breeds of music journalist. On one level, the selections of Editor Dylan Jones bolster the notion of the latter-day music critic as a pop-celebrity mortician, laptop wielded like a coroner's scalpel, eviscerating the bloated organs of one wrecked pop-life after another.
In a darker place altogether are the "rock journalists" who manifest "the power, the glory and the depravity of rock music, not just the theory" (my italics). Dylan is particularly in awe of these guys (they're nearly always guys), and hits on arch fuck-up Nick Kent as his dream model of "the music journalist as überhack, the gonzo journo as superstar, a drugged-up, shook-up, Biro-toting longhair".
Dylan wants to be able to live the rock 'n' roll life vicariously through the poison pens of his rock hack heroes. He dreams of 70s excess and access, when the critic as pathological hanger-on would be allowed to lig for weeks with the likes of Led Zeppelin, documenting the Visigoth exploits of Bonzo and co in the pages of Rolling Stone or Crawdaddy as they ritually abused the women, hotel rooms and swimming pools of the American Midwest. Dylan wants music writing which gives a sense of "the sheer visceral thrill of rock 'n' roll... the flavour of rock, not just the aftertaste" (my italics again). More to the point, and in inevitable contrast, he lampoons music writers who grapple with the complexities of music in the 90s, "dissecting a culture of margins surrounding a collapsed centre", as he puts it, effectively characterizing them as "recalcitrant pseuds", "young men with handshakes like fish whispers, shrill voices in the dark".
Bleep bleep, goes the radar: Same Old Shit alert. It's not the actual journalism collected in Meaty Beaty Big & Bouncy!(God, that title!) that sends my well-balanced critic's posture morphing into a warped, no-quarter fighting stance of extreme prejudice, although with one or two exceptions this is a humiliatingly conservative collection, full of half-wits mooning over the Godlike genius of Keef and Bono, or dessicated hacks taking pot shots at sitting ducks like Ringo Starr, Robert Palmer and Annie Lennox (I mean, why bother?).
No, what sticks in the craw is the implication, once again, that any critic who tries to think hard and deep about music - who attempts through the application of original thought processes, intelligence and quicksilver prose to cast light on matter which often exists at the far edges of perception - is some kind of detached, limp-wristed fop who would faint dead away were they offered a toke on Shaun Ryder's crack pipe.
For Dylan Jones, 'classic pop writing' is defined not by the quality of the journalism, but by the celebrity-rating of the subject. In this world, a particularly codified and mundane place, Rod Stewart's haircut or Kurt Cobain's suicide can give rise to a piece of 'classic pop writing' because they are an agreed part of the programme, instantly recognisable signifiers in the global pop canon. By extension, incisive, in-depth and connected analysis of, say, Photek, John Oswald or Patrick Pulsinger will be mere pretension at best, pissing in the wind at worst.
The activities of these musicians and their multifarious contemporaries in the areas of breakbeat science, sampleadelia and lo-fi Electronica typify the sense of cultural fracture which Jones and most of the journalists collected in Meaty Beaty... are either too dumb, too lazy or too intimidated by to engage with. This explains the absence from the book of such 'marginal-culture' critics as David Toop, Greg Tate, Nelson George, Simon Reynolds, Kodwo Eshun. Never mind that these writers are among the most electrifying of their times, exploding old myths and erecting new paradigms as they go: the musicians they write about are, well, they're taking the piss a bit, aren't they, old boy? And the critics themselves? A bit up their own arses, don't you think?
Ah yes, the anal factor, a popular characterisation, and one which for some reason, I can't imagine what, is sometimes levelled at this magazine. While I naturally refute any such notion, personally, I reckon it's better to be up your own arse than up someone else's.