| ||
 | ||
|
Critiquing the critics
By Simon Warner In late 2002, a new volume appeared on the shelves--the first coordinated attempt to gather a group of serious essays on popular music journalism, an area that has excited millions of us as readers but one that has only now, somewhat belatedly, begun to attract the close attention of the academy. Although Simon Frith in Sound Effects (1983) and Roy Shuker in Understanding Popular Music (1994) had acknowledged the power of the rock press,their accounts had been part of a bigger overview and necessarily truncated.
However, Pop Music and the Press, edited by Steve Jones, invited writers from both sides of the Atlantic to offer an analysis of an extensive body of print commentary that is certainly as old as the end of the 19th century--Billboard dates from 1894, for example--but one that has been regarded for many decades as an entertaining adjunct to the main meat of the business--music and money--but little more than that.
The rise of the alternative press in the mid-1960s, in the US, the UK, and elsewhere, and the New Journalism, particularly in America, changed the way the pop press worked and transformed the manner in which rock magazines spoke. No longer merely for the industry, a service to the trade, magazines like Rolling Stone, Creem, Crawdaddy, International Times, and Oz, then Melody Maker and New Musical Express, started to regard rock music, specifically, as a key sign in the cultural landscape of the times, a harbinger of possible social transformation, and maybe even a challenge to the industrial hierarchy which manufactured and promoted it.
The intriguing contradiction that rock could be both revolutionary symbol and conveyor belt product, to be mass produced and mass consumed, made the new and serious critique of the music--its sounds and its gestures, its styles and subcultures--by writers like Robert Christgau, Greil Marcus, Dave Marsh and others in the U.S. and, a little later, British journalists like Mick Farren, Nick Kent, Charles Shaar Murray and Richard Williams--all the more engaging.
And, if it was primarily a fresh wave of rock criticism (learning, it must be said, from the socio-political readings of folk and jazz from the years after the Second World War) that began to carve out a territory and a readership from the late 1960s and through the 1970s, by the 1980s the hothouse of hip hop had begun to cultivate its own body of journalism--the founding of The Source in 1988 is an important date in this history--that would similarly give insightful attention to the postures and substance of the rap revolution.
Last year this author penned reviews of the Jones edited volume in websites dedicated to this arena--Rock's Backpages and musicjournalist.com .
A few months post-publication, I spoke to Steve Jones, Professor of Communications at the University of Illinois, Chicago and previously author of Rock Formations: Popular Music, Technology and Mass Communication, about the book he'd overseen and what he hopes Pop Music and the Press will add to the discourse of popular music journalism and its scholarly exploration. Simon: Why do you
feel this collection is needed?
Steve: Probably the
main reason is that so far no one had done it. I take
rock criticism to be a fairly serious thing, actually.
I think it tells us a lot not only about music, but
also about music's relation to society, and it can
tell us a lot about a variety of social and cultural
issues to which music may or may not be related,
but that are worth writing about. To put that another
way, I don't see anything wrong with music criticism
serving as social criticism, or even with music
criticism serving as an excuse for social criticism.
So, having said that,
what was on my mind when conceiving the book was that
it would be worthwhile and interesting to take a
serious look at music criticism's history, its texts,
at critics, and so on, as broadly as possible.
Simon: Is this an academic
book or aimed at a wider readership?
Steve: It's really
aimed at a wider readership, though just how wide it
can be is left to guess. On the one hand it's
published by a university press, so obviously there is
an academic audience intended at least in part. But
with most anything I write I try to use whatever
skills I may have as a journalist to make it readable.
It isn't journalism as such, but it isn't highly
academic writing, either. My hope is that music
critics will be an audience for it, as will readers of
music criticism who have an interest in the criticism
along with the music.
Simon: Has academe finally
caught up with this cultural area?
Steve: Well...yes,
and no. It has caught up with it insofar as it seems
easier now than before to make the case that we
should study the popular (if for no other reason than
that it has consequences, though just what those
consequences are is still hotly contested). But
studying the popular is still enormously undervalued
in comparison to studying...well, most anything else.
There are at least some research centers dedicated to
the study of popular music, and there has been a
steady stream of books and articles about it (though I
don't know that it's one increasing in size). There is
an international scholarly association, the
International Association for the Study of Popular
Music, a bit over 20 years old, and a couple of
academic journals that publish research on the
topic. There are even some places that teach popular
music production, analysis, theory. But more than
anything else popular music has probably sort of
filtered into a variety of disciplines beyond music
(where it has traditionally had at least some role in
ethnomusicology programs), most notably sociology,
communication, English, and a few others. What
may be most notable about it in an academic setting is
that it provides a good site of analysis from which to
try to understand numerous social, cultural,
political, economic, etc., phenomena.
Simon: Why have US
writers--Christgau, Marcus, Lester Bangs and so
on--managed to carve such a niche in the American
psyche--or is this just a British misinterpretation?
Steve: If it's a
niche that's carved anywhere it's one in the minds of
other critics, largely, and in the minds of diehard
music fans. But I don't see it carved in the psyche of
a larger segment of the population. If anything it's
movie critics who have a larger hold on it, but not
rock critics.
Now, if the question
is whether U.S. writers have carved one in the psyche of
rock critics generally, I think it's largely because
US critics have probably had a fair bit of license to
roam. Most of the well known ones have practiced a
form of the New Journalism as much as they've written
rock criticism per se. And there's probably an
argument to be made concerning the export of U.S. rock
criticism alongside U.S. rock music.
Simon: Is rock'n'roll
criticism then, post-1966, an arm of the New
Journalism or is it simply an extension of the
culture industry?
Steve: Many of the
1960s critics who've hung on into the 1970s (and
beyond) were writing for counterculture
publications in the US, and many must have at least
been reading the New Journalism just judging from
their style. Now, did the New Journalism influence
them to write, influence their writing, cause them to
be more popular than other critics, or all of those?
In part the answers
to such a question depend on what one means by the
"New Journalism." If it's intended to denote
a less "5 Ws and an H" approach [see author's "Note" below] to journalism, an approach that it eschews, when it cares to,
traditional writing styles like the inverted
pyramid, concerns itself with context, then in many
ways rock criticism was very much part of the New
Journalism. But if one means it in terms of,
say, investigative reporting of a particular stripe,
very personal reporting (e.g., many of the
hard-hitting very personal reports from Vietnam), then
probably not so much. I can think of few examples (Bob
Greene's "Billion Dollar Babies" being one of them)
that fit that mold.
The thing that
provides the connection between rock criticism and the
New Journalism to me is that the experience
of music, even when it's at a mobbed festival with
tens of thousands of others, is intensely personal. To
get across that personal experience one cannot by
definition hew to the "Old Journalism" that strives
for
objectivity. That's true both in the case of reviews
of live performances (for example, a review that
starts out with a classic "Old Journalism" lead
might be "At 8:59pm Michael Philip (a/k/a Mick) Jagger
walked out onto the stage of Chicago's United Center
to begin a one-hour and 48 minute long performance of
classic Rolling Stones music in front of an audience
of
15,052 people." Now, that's not to say that a rock
critic couldn't do that, and in fact, for a change of
pace, might affect that style in some way, perhaps for
part of a review.
But it wouldn't fly
for most rock fans, because it wouldn't get across to
them what it was like to be there, what the show was
like, what the people were like, what the music was
like. And there is no single formula one can follow
that gets that across. That's what I found challenging
and frustrating as a critic, and that's what I find
most enjoyable about reading criticism. It combines
the journalistic necessity to get the facts across
(because the facts do matter, as any critic who
has ever fudged them even a little knows from the
incessant phone calls, letters, emails, from fans who
want to set the record straight) with the music fan's
need to get across the "flavour" (if you will) of the
experience.
It's part and parcel
of why music is a social phenomenon (and for me anyway
greatly explains online music trading)--we want to
share music, plain and (not so) simple. I'm reminded
of one of my favourite lines from the movie Almost
Famous, when Lester Bangs [Phillip Seymour
Hoffman]says, "The only true currency in this bankrupt
world is what you share with someone else when you're
uncool." Now, I'm not saying music critics are uncool
(although I'll point the finger first at me and say
that I am not cool, and most rock critics I've known
are not "cool" by mainstream standards for that term
(though they're damn cool by my standards)). What I'm
saying is that music gives us a means of being social,
of being with one another, of being expressive, even
if it isn't music we've made. The best rock criticism
is that expression.
Simon: How influential has
UK writing been on this landscape?
Steve: That's hard to
say by any objective measures. On a personal level,
what was influential for me was reading music
weeklies, actually being able to get my hands on a
newspaper that came out weekly and was entirely
devoted to coverage of music, and was a national
newspaper, so from that perspective NME and
Melody Maker were enormously influential. And I
was beginning as a critic in the late '70s/early '80s
when most of my musical interests were focused on the
UK (and to a lesser extent New York City).
What was influential,
too, in retrospect, was the way in which music was
taken seriously, differently than it was by US
writers. There were considerably more connections
between music and society that U.K. critics were making
(must've helped that at the time I was a student of
Larry Grossberg's and reading everything Simon Frith
wrote that I could get my hands on). The relationships
between music and everyday life, the mundane, were
quite clear. In contrast U.S. critics, while noting the
social impacts of music, had a tendency to want to
find a "big picture," what one might call "Woodstock
syndrome". While U.K. critics did not, of course, miss
the generational significance of punk rock, they
also delved into discussions about school, the dole,
neighborhoods, etc., whereas so far as I recall most
US critics only saw it as a generational thing,
and seemed almost taken by surprise every time punk
surfaced in some particular local guise (e.g., in
Athens, Georgia).
Simon: Have the recent
developments at Rolling Stone and the rise of
Blender, not to mention the death of Melody
Maker in 2000, signalled the close of an era of
serious rock commentary?
Steve: I think it's
the close of an era of a certain type of serious music
publication. It struck me about ten or so years ago
that I was finding much better writing about music in
the annual "music issues" of non-music magazines like
the New Yorker, GQ, Details, than
I was finding in Rolling Stone, Spin,
Melody Maker, etc. I'm sure there is a
variety of reasons that music magazines have become
for the most part lifestyle magazines, not the least
being economic factors, but the magazine industry
itself has undergone significant changes in the last
few years.
Now, concomitantly
(but probably coincidentally) I do see, and hear,
considerable serious rock commentary in other venues,
including online. One of the areas that I deliberately
didn't write about in Pop Music and the Press
is music criticism online, because I think it's too
soon to know what shape it will take. On the one hand
there were some good new venues for rock critics (like
SonicNet, Perfect Sound Forever), and on
the other hand there are a lot of individuals doing
things with blogs that are quite interesting. It isn't
so much that no one has established themselves as an
online version of Rolling Stone as it is
that I'm not convinced that people are interested in
having one source to go to so much as they may prefer
using band sites and fan sites to stay in touch with
what they care about. And that isn't criticism.
So, I'm sort of
watching along with everyone else, not ready to make
any pronouncement along the lines of "rock
criticism is dead," but kind of keeping the shovel
nearby ('cause it's handy to have around for things
other than dirt).
Simon: Where are the women
in this world--is rock crit a patriarchy?
Steve: It's a
patriarchy, but there have always been women. I think
at every magazine and newspaper I wrote for there
was at least one woman, but women were treated as
insufficiently different...that is, they were "one of
the guys," and whether that caused them to have less
of a presence than they might otherwise, or whether it
was caused by patriarchal tendencies, well...yes. And
I think it still does.
Simon: Is there an
international pop press (i.e., non-English speaking)
that deserves coverage?
Steve: I think there
is, and one of the things I wish I could have done
with Pop Music and the Press, but had
neither the time nor sufficient page allotment from
the publisher, is to take a look at both non-English
rock criticism and the influence of U.S. and U.K. rock
criticism in other countries (Bruce Johnson, Roy
Shuker, a couple of other Australian academics have
looked at the music press in Australia and New
Zealand). A couple of the chapters do delve into this
but really only briefly, and I touch on it in my
intro. So far as I can tell there hasn't been research
on it, not even of the informal sort. But given how
much I travel, I know it exists, I've spoken to people
in other countries about it, but the language issues,
among other things...let's just say that it would
be a major undertaking to do something even remotely
comprehensive, and while it would be fun and
interesting I've got a long list of other things to
try to do in the next few years.
Note: The principle Steve Jones is describing is the way journalists traditionally investigate a story, using a series of questions as their investigative framework: When, Where, Who, What, Why and How?
Pop Music and the Press, edited by Steve Jones, is published by Temple University Press, Philadelphia, U.S. (http://www.temple.edu.tempress)
Simon Warner was a rock reviewer with the Guardian in the early 1990s. He now teaches
various courses on rock journalism at the University of Leeds in the UK. He also writes the Anglo Visions
column for Pop Matters.
|
