writing about music #5

specifically, writing about dance music

aka my replies to a 2001 survey by rockcritics.com of "disco critics"

(full piece here)

Q's by Scott Woods 

1. Because house music and disco are conceived primarily for the dance floor, does this make them harder to write about than more “contemplative” or “conceptual” forms of pop?

As U.K. house outfit K-Klass put it, “Rhythm Is a Mystery.” It is very hard indeed to write about why one groove or beat is more compelling than another. Even if you get into drummer’s lingo (tresillo, clave, triplets, flams, syncopation, etc.) or the technicalities of programming, the “it” — that edge of excellence or distinctiveness you are trying to capture — will just endlessly recede from your verbal grasp. For instance, it’s quite easy to write generalities about “breakbeat science” and apply them to whichever jungle producer you’re writing about — but almost infinitely harder to convey the signature that makes, say, a Dillinja or Doc Scott production instantly recognizable and special…Same goes for the particular rhythm traits or production hallmarks of the other genres — the finicky hi-hats in house and garage, the DSP (digital signal processing) timbre effects in Kid606 type IDM, the filter sweeps in French house, the 303 acid-riffs in hard trance etc., etc…What makes for one exponent’s instantly-audible superiority over another?

And even then, you can write about the programming and production and be strenuous in your attempts at exactness, but you might still fail to convey the electricity, the rush…what can you actually say about the nature of, and relationship between, the guitar, the bass, and the orchestral sounds, in a Chic song, that could actually tell you anything about how its magic works…

Mind you, it’s just as hard to say why in rock or pop, one melody is heart-rending and another isn’t, why one singer’s grain-of-voice reaches deeper into you than another…not to mention the great rock mystery of the Riff…

But dance music, by diminishing or stripping away altogether the other elements that one might critically latch onto (lyrics, persona/biography of the artist, relevance to the outside-the-club world etc.) as a bulwark against the ineffable does rather shove one headfirst into the realm of sound and its materiality. (Which a surprisingly large number of people still find quite discomfiting).

Kind of appropriately, really, writing about dance music does confront you in a very direct way with the old “dancing about architecture” futility/absurdity dilemma — because it is so purely musical, functional…what is there really to say? I suspect a lot of the people who might have made good dance critics, who have real taste and knowledge of its history, become DJs instead — because you can actually support the music and evangelize in a very direct way: playing it to people.

So if it’s so hard to do, so pointless, why bother? As an old comrade of mine Paul Oldfield once put it in a zine we did together, Monitor, because there’s “the possibility that words might fail interestingly or suggestively.”

Also true that this music is very site-specific…a lot of the sonic content in dance music is barely audible on a domestic hi-fi…so that with a house record played at home, the kick drum can sound tinny and weak and monotonous, but in a club, on massive system, the monotony becomes compelling because it’s so physically, viscerally impact-ful…the kick drum becomes a cocooning environmental pulse…similarly with jungle, the bass permeates your flesh…unlike rock, r&b, pop it is not mixed for radio or the home hi-fi.

2. What do you try and get at when writing about dance music: beats, textures, words, voices — or some combination thereof?

Everything…you can still use the trad rockcrit arsenal of interpretive techniques too — you can do lit-crit style exegesis of sampled phrases and catchphrases, the song titles can be decoded and unpacked, the artist names…there is always discourse around the music…then there’s the question of the music as social text — the behaviors it is designed to trigger or enhance…you don’t have to have field-researched it and actually heard it played out in a club, ‘cos the records contain these behavioral cues, clues to how they’re supposed to be used or responded to…you hear a trance record and the structure of it, with build, breakdown, hands in the air refrain, etc., tells you how it is used…what tableaux it creates in the club, out of the audience’s bodies.

3. How much of a technical perspective about dance music (i.e., how it’s actually made) do you bring to your writing about the music? Is a technical perspective even necessary?

Try to, while being aware that a) it’s kind of dry and un-romantic and scientific so you need to be sparing ‘cos you can lose the lay reader and b) it’s simultaneously a crucial part of the way the music works and at the same time doesn’t tell you enough, i.e., all that stuff about signature, aesthetic eminence, why one track is better than another even when using the exact same techniques…often resulting in relapse into the superlative, the ineffable, the imprecise…terms like ‘funk’, ‘soul’, etc…

Most dance reviews, when you boil them down, all they’re saying is ‘this is a funky record’. Or that the guy/gal reviewing it finds it funky which doesn’t even tell you whether you’d find it funky.

4. Talk technology. Have technological changes in the recording industry — samplers, computer sequencer programs, etc. — improved, damaged, or made no difference whatsoever to the music?

When a new piece of tech comes on-line as it were, there is always a gap where the trad musically skilled don’t know how to deal with it, and the discursively sharp, culturally astute types — often non-musicians in that Eno mold — seize the time and surge ahead, finding unexpected applications for the new machine, ways of (ab)using it. But then things level out again as everyone assimilates the new technology and the old hierarchies of talent over non-musicality return…you can see it time again — with synthesizers (Daniel Miller of Mute/The Normal said the synth was only any good when used by non-musicians), with drum machines, with sequencers, with sampling…At first the canny ones move in and do stuff, perhaps superficially striking stuff, with it, and then the more musical ones come in and do stuff that’s more sophisticated, in key, arranged a la trad musical values…being an old punkie at heart I tend to valorize the surge moments when the sharp-witted DIY barbarians seize the new tools or think up new ways of bending existing tools…e.g., hardcore rave and early jungle, with the whole speeding up the breakbeats, using timestretching etc. thing. Because they don’t know the Rules of Music…you get all kinds of interestingly wrong-sounding music, improperly integrated fusions…when “musicality” comes back, it’s less interesting, because “music” has been done really hasn’t it, there’s no shortage of pleasant melodies or harmonious, euphonious stuff to listen to.

Ultimately though I tend to think in any era the really musical ones will rise to the top eventually once the new technology-induced commotion settles down… although a lot of musically talented folk get caught in the ‘wish I could make music like the golden age’ retro-trap and get pulled out of the innovation game, as it were.

5. What are the biggest assumptions and misconceptions about dance music that a person writing about it must challenge or at least consider?

That dance music is mindless, that dance fans are not listening closely — a dancer is “listening” with every sinew and muscle and nerve ending in his/her body.

That crowd responses are essentially de-invidualizing — well, they are, but what’s wrong with that? What’s so great about being an individual? That sort of dis is like saying I don’t like cheese ‘cos it tastes cheesy…the whole point is to get lost in the crowd, merge with something bigger than your paltry self.

6. Does one have to go out dancing — participate in the activity and culture of disco — in order to write well about it? Are you a good dancer?

Honestly and truly I’d say, absolutely. Participation is essential… or at least, you have to have gone through a phase of being intensely into clubbing and dancing at some point to really undertand the appeal…the collective synchronized rush induced by certain tracks or certain DJ manoeuvres… dance culture is full of Gnostic refrains like “this is for those who know” or “hardcore you know the score” and so forth, and what they allude to is this physically-felt knowledge that comes from having experienced what happens on a dance floor when a certain kind of bass-drop takes place, or a certain drum build, or whatever…the way goose bumps ripple across the crowd-body…The crucial distinction: it’s not elitist, but it is tribal.

I can almost invariably tell from a piece of dance writing if the writer has experienced this stuff ever…or whether they are writing from “outside” the experience…they might have interesting insights through being totally detached but…well, I would never follow their consumer guidance tips, shall we say.

And needless to say, drugs play a big part in this as most dance styles are full of effects and sounds that play into, enhance, or trigger certain drug sensations…

A great piece of dance music, or a great DJ, makes me into a good dancer, I find… awakens the Dionysus within… the music dances you, as it were…Nietzche: “Now I am light, now I fly, now I see myself beneath myself, now a god dances through me!”…otherwise one can find oneself just shimmying along adequately as if at some office party disco, dancing as social ritual rather than flash of the spirit…

7. What do you think is the most important development to have taken place in dance music in the last ten years?

Drugs — both the highs and the darkside — have massively mutated the evolution of the music and caused it to splinter as it adapts to different social-racial-sexuality-drug oriented factions — not just Ecstasy, but the ever more powerful forms of weed, relatively newer and nastier drugs like ketamine, the perennial amphetamine and acid…and also the rise of the polydrug culture that mixes and matches all of these substances.

Production — with ProTools, plug-ins, Virtual Studio Technology etc. — the level of intricacy and detail in production is staggering — rhythmic complexity of accents and nuances far exceeding any real drummer’s capability…it does mean the music sometimes loses the power of a simple Big Riff though…

Growth of sound systems and a “big room” aesthetic in the music, with tracks designed to exploit the quadraphonic potential of the club space, the frequency spectrum…tracks that are sculpted in four dimensions, riffs like blocs of sound in motion that swoop through the crowd-body…full of almost a-musical wooshes and FX…the music becomes spectacular, a sonic spectacle.

The gradual emergence of a single unified bass-beats-bleeps culture, a trans-Atlantic confederacy of street sounds — whether it’s 2step garage coalescing as an only-in-London hybrid of house, jungle, ragga, and Timbaland-style R&B, or conversely, with techno-ravey-drum’n’bassy sounds and riffs infiltrating US gangsta rap (due to Ecstasy catching on with B-boys?), R&B, and even Jamaican dancehall.

8. Overall, do you think dance music is in healthy shape today? Why or why not? (Feel free to talk about this in comparison with the rock and pop – or any other – world.)

I’m not sure if it’s any more healthy or unhealthy than rock or pop or rap — 90 percent is shit is the general rule — if it has an edge, in terms of being alluring to youth, is that the drugs-loudmusic-brightlights-bizarrelydressedfolk combo of clubland is still an unbeatable leisure paradigm — and also, because the music is functional, even hackwork and clones can play their part by providing DJs with grist to the mixing mill, whereas lame copyist rock or pop is just lame…

9. Where’s the best stuff in dance music today coming from? (You can approach this question in a number of ways: Is it happening in underground circles or on radio? North America or Europe? Is it taking place in some exciting new sub-genre?)

re: dance floor oriented music, London pirate radio culture is still the cutting edge as it was all through the nineties: hardcore to jungle to drum’n’bass to U.K. garage to 2step. Time for another paradigm shift from that quarter.

Germany’s rockin’ it with the Cologne glitch stuff, weird house, Berlin’s dub-techno Pole-types, Timo Maas on the populist Sasha-with-balls tip…

America’s got it’s own post-rave vanguard with the kid606 and friends, Schematic, kit clayton etc. etc. types bringing in humor, personality, urgent opinions and emo-core venting to the rather sterile world of post-Autechre IDM — not sure if much of it really counts as dance music though.

Actually there’s good stuff going on all over the place, mavericks and hacks alike come up with the goods, so much it’s impossible to keep up with it. But at the same time there’s no obvious scene that has surged ahead of everyone else and is the obvious leading edge, as there was with jungle in 93/94/95…there’s no sense of revolution, no next big thing but lots of next medium-sized things.

10. What are the greatest challenges and obstacles in writing about dance music these days?

Er, not being boring? Actually, not being bored is more like it.

Avoiding boosterism and developing a truly critical language for dance music. Most dance reviews are 7 or 8 in essence even when un-graded. there should be 3’s and 1’s and zeroes. Of course, the boosterism is based on feeling like the scene is underground and needs support, so it’s sort of understandable to an extent.

Resisting nostalgia for the early, less professionalized and more anarcho days of rave, before it became an industry. Things can never stay the same. Don’t fall into the Meltzer trap!

Learning that “vibe” migrates and that you can’t keep looking in the same place for your bliss. Knowing when to leave the party (and find another, more pumping one)

Retaining the capacity to be astonished. (So much stuff comes out that the landmark releases don’t stand out so starkly against the plains of lameness).

writing about music #3

an interview with Paula Hearsum, from about six or seven years ago, for an academic study of music journalism and rock criticism she was writing, 

1. One of the pieces I mentioned with several other music academic friends, was using an old Barney Hoskyns piece for NME ‘Subbed Culture’ which he wrote in 1984 and he described music writing as a 'metamusic' and says there are four things a piece of writing about music should cover:

•Distinguish musical form
•Give explanation of production style
•Explore emotion

•Contextualise

I remember it well -- read it at the time, cut it out (like I did most of Barney's stuff) and still have it somewhere. I thought it was very interesting and persuasive, but at the same time I'm not sure it actually influenced what I do, or even that it really describes what Barney was doing in his greatest writing. It's a bit too methodical. 

In practice most musical journalists, if they're anything like me, just come up with as many interesting thoughts as possible, and then try to organize it into as an attractive a shape as they can. Often it's a bit of a struggle -- trying to come up with the ideas first, then trying to make it flow. Probably more energy and worry goes into having a start and an end to a piece than it does to any one of those four tasks that Hoskyns describes. And you could have a fantastic piece of music writing that only attempted to do one or two of those four things, whereas something that conscientiously applied itself to all those tasks might not make the grade as a spectacular piece of rock writing (which wouldn't mean it was devoid of value, of course).

One of the insights in that piece, which he may have developed out of something Simon Frith said, is when Barney talks about showing off being part of rock writing. Self-preening I think is the word he uses. There is a performative aspect to rock criticism, or at least to the stuff that I think is central to the, ah, tradition.  The writer, who most likely in person is not terribly impressive or commanding a figure, manages to create a kind of charismatic effect through language and through the creation of a persona, a sort of super-self. I think of it very much as being in the same game as fronting a rock band, or better still, being a rapper.  There's a whole range of personae -- fabulously hip and in the know and "down with the scene", or an authority in terms of knowledge, or a prophet with a messianic line of patter, or the gonzo persona who's a little out of control and brutally honest (Lester Bangs to Everett True), or wry, ironic, or...

It's about rhetoric and the art of suasion. There's skill and tricks but there is also, as with a rapper, just confidence, the arrogance to make a categorical statement about an artist or genre's worth. To be a judge. 

The first person I got this buzz off was Julie Burchill in NME, the absolute certainty with which she decreed things, and the vehemence and viciousness, and also the way you were hypnotized by the cadence of the prose into believing she was right, at least for the duration of reading the piece. Years and years later, when I started to think critically about music journalism itself, I realized that a lot of this "truth" effect was achieved simply through her use of alliteration and other word tricks.  It was the music of her writing as much as its meaning.

I think of rock criticism as being different from both academic writing and from journalism in the conventional sense. It uses journalistic methods to an extent (interviews, observation etc) but rarely properly (certainly in the UK weekly press we never got secondary quotes or outside opinions, almost none of us had any training in reporting). And some music journalists have used riffs and ideas from academia, but again almost always in a fast-and-loose way that wouldn't be approved of within academia.

2. You're obviously known for threading theory into your writing, particularly theory pertinent to popular music studies (particularly around Western Marxism etc...) - you are obviously preaching to the converted here but can you reflect on the style you take - what do you think it adds to your reader's understanding?

In a way, I think the music actually substantiates and elucidates the theory rather than the other way around. Like I understood Deleuze & Guattari much better through the music of Can or early 90s jungle.

So in a funny sort of way when I put theory into articles, it's more like I'm selling the reader on theory and philosophy, than elevating and dignifying and legitimizing the music. If you apply Marxism to hip hop, it's not that hip hop suddenly seems more weighty and interesting, it's that Marxism seems to have more purchase on reality, because hip hop provides evidence to substantiate it. You can see the effects of money and reification and commodity fetishism on human relations.  But all this is writ large and clear in hip hop already, the Marxist gloss in a way is superfluous.

So why bring it into play, then? In truth I don't tend to think much about the reader when it comes to the theory stuff -- the compulsion to connect theory and music just comes from indulging my own interests, amusing myself to an extent. But also I do it when I think it's "true" --when a theoretical concept just seems to fit what's going on in the music or the subculture.

The other thing about theory is something I wrote about in this piece for Frieze, which is that you can get a real buzz off it. It's a kind of stimulant drug, your mind races, you get this sense of clarity and levitating above things and have a panoramic view that is also a diagrammatic view, like you can see the structures and the forces at play in the field of socioculture you're looking at.

 3. With the current state of both the music press (certainly in the UK although I am less certain of the States) what skills in music journalism are going to be the ones that should be focused on in order for survival?

I couldn't say what should be focused on, but I think I can see what kind of things are being fostered by the new climate, none of which I particularly like. Flexibility and generalism (finding the good in as wide a range of musics as possible. Which is obviously a good career move, expanding your range). Brevity. Coming up with a contrivedly inflammatory or polarizing angle, in order to increase your clicks through tweeter-isation. etc. I can do the last one well enough but I'm not cut out for brevity and my personality doesn’t suit generalism - I came up on that kind of rockwriting that was very polarized in its viewpoints, it's too ingrained for me to break with now, although a certain mellowing does creep in with age inevitably. What I find disconcerting is how many young writers are very reasonable and sane in their approach, and overly fair-minded. It's not what I want to read, at all. I'd much rather read a very fierce denunciation of something, even it was attacking something musically dear to my heart.

4. What makes a strong piece of music writing for you? What qualities if you can nail it? Who were you influenced by and currently?

I do read and enjoy pieces that are subtle and ambivalent-- they can have all kinds of insights and shrewd analysis in them. But as is probably clear by now, the kind of stuff I came up on and that means the most to me is the messianic mode of rock writing, where there is a sense of absolute conviction and urgency. If I find myself in the frame of mind about a band or a genre where I can produce that kind of prose, that is a glorious feeling.

This kind of writing is a specific genre of music journalism, strongest perhaps in the U.K. although you had your Lester Bangs and various fanzine writers in the US. And it is a vanishing genre, as far as I can see.

The people who influenced me when I was first reading the press would have been Julie Burchill, Paul Morley, Ian Penman, Barney Hoskyns, and they were very much in this writer-as-prophet mode. Then a little later, as a student, I started checking out the academic writing, so figures like Simon Frith, Dick Hebdige, and so forth, would have been an influence, in terms of ideas not style. I also would have been catching up with certain legendary figures like Nik Cohn. Then a year or two into working at Melody Maker I got hold of work by canonical Americans like Lester Bangs and Greil Marcus, although by this point I'd have been pretty set in my writing identity and not so capable of being formatively influenced. But there's loads of other people subsequent to this that I've got a lot of from reading, ideas-wise -- Joe Carducci, Brian Eno, Greg Tate, Fred and Judy Vermorel,  Camille Paglia, Kodwo Eshun, more recently figures like Mark Fisher. Tons more.

The messianic and highly intellectualized modes of music writing are not the only valid approaches, by a long shot. I get a lot out of reading academic studies, and conventional histories of music or biographies. And also from more conventional record reviews and reported pieces and star profiles. 

But in terms of the buzz that got me into this field in the first place, it's this disappearing mode of journalism that I most miss. The lead album review/ singles page/ cover story as a manifesto in disguise (often very thinly disguised, in the music press's heyday). I mentioned the performative aspect of it, and I think this is where music criticism comes closest to matching the music itself. I read pieces growing up that would actually make me tremble with excitement.  Or cheer at the end. Things that I read over and over again, cut out and kept, and know by heart (well patches of them, not the whole piece!).  Very much in the way that people in the 18th or 19th Century could recite long stretches of poetry.  The greatest of these pieces have had an effect very nearly as powerful as listening to the music they're about.  I don't come across music writing like that much anymore, that has that effect on me -- and this may partly be a result of not being as impressionable as I was as a teenager and a student / dole layabout in my early twenties. (For similar reasons I'm pretty much beyond being influenced these days, although I obviously get useful ideas from reading all kinds of sources). But mainly I think it's because people aren't writing this kind of stuff anymore, because they don't want to write like that anymore, for a number of reasons. Perhaps music culture simply can't sustain that particular kind or degree of seriousness, the sense that music is central in the culture and that it has this transformative or catalyzing power. 

6. What is the purpose of music journalism (add enjoyment, add knowledge, heighten experience of music, support sales for music itself…)?

All of those. Also hype, which I think of as meaning as much hype as in getting people hyped up, over-excited, as in shifting units. Music journalists, especially in the UK, have always been in the business of hype. It's nothing to be ashamed of, just so long as you actually believe in the hype yourself.

writing about music #2

from about 10 years ago i think, an interview with Angelo Di Mambro for D News, covering topics like role of music press, the music critic, dancing, pitfalls and biases, etc

1)   Once there was the musical press, with an acknowledged role in forming opinions and a market in music. Then the web and digital devices arrived. And almost everything has changed: production, distribution, opinion making and marketing. And the role of the reviewer, of the criticism: has it changed? And how? The web and the proliferation of voices talking about music have eroded the monopoly of knowledge that supposed to belong to critics?

I don't think there was ever a monopoly as such, you had a thriving underground of fanzines, the letters pages of the music press were lively forums for discussion, and people debating music with great fervor and subtlety went on in bars, cafes, school yards, etc.

But certainly what's changed is the role of music criticism as gate-keeper, the music critic as someone who gets to hear the music before the general public and can influence its reception. Nowadays with MySpace allowing anybody to check out a new band as soon as the buzz starts, and leaks of albums onto the internet long before they are released, there is much of a decentralized nature to opinion-formation, a chaos of voices and positions being taken.  In these circumstances, the role of critic changes, to offer the more considered view, to make larger connections and map out the state of the music scene in much broader terms. Of course people who are non-professionals can do that kind of writing on blogs too, or have that kind of discussion on message boards and other online forums.  Some of the most interesting  "macro" writing is done by bloggers. But generally most blogs are part of the early  buzz process, it's very much about the quick reaction to things and then moving on fast to the next hot new band or genre.

2)      One of the blunders or rock criticism was to hide the role of producers and musicians to contribute to build an artist ideology: the music as a genius work rather than a collective work. Something has changed?

Rock critics do tend to focus on the singer and the songwriter, and in the process ignore the other people who contribute, where it's the other musicians or the producer or studio engineer.  For instance the person in Joy Division and New Order who had the hippest taste and some of the most interesting ideas about music was Steven Morris, the  drummer. I know that because I interviewed him for my postpunk book and also put the whole conversation in my new book of postpunk interviews, Totally Wired. He was probably the driving force in New Order's adoption of an electronic sound with programmed rhythms. He'd also once been a music journalist himself! But generally your typical music reporter would focus on Bernard Sumner, because he's the singer.

I think the role of the producer is something that music journalism has become more aware of, though, and that actually began in the postpunk era with people like Martin Hannett, Martin Rushent,  Dennis Bovell, Trevor Horn.  You would have profiles of Hannett and Bovell and Horn  in the New Musical Express.  At that time you also had people treating managers as auteurs, people like Malcolm McLaren, Bernie Rhodes the Clash's manager, as so forth. It's certainly improved from the early days of rock criticism which by and large focused on the person who wrote the lyrics.  But then it was the Seventies and the singer-songwriter era.  It had to improve because so much of the important music of the Nineties and onwards has been driven by producers: hip hop, R&B, rave, electronic music.

To an extent it's understandable that music journalists focus on the lyric-writer because they are likely to be a better talker, because their medium of expression is language. Most music journalists don't know much about music in the sense of how to play instruments, musicology,  or equipment, or recording techniques -- so they can't talk to musicians about what the latter actually spend 90 percent of their time thinking about!  Most music journalists are happier talking about what the songs are about, or the group's opinions about what's going on in politics or elsewhere in the music scene, or just gossipy stuff.


3)      Another historical bad habit: talking about English and American production as a worldwide production, a sort of ethnocentric prejudice. Yet the music grows with hybrid. Are those days past?

I don't quite understand the question, but certainly it's true that the Anglo-American pop culture has a bad history in terms of accepting pop music that isn't Anglophonic.  I wonder if that will change as the American Empire wanes, and as the UK gets more integrated into a larger Europe. [HISTORICAL IRONY ALERT]

4)      In “Rip it up and start again” you write that the scenes between 1978 and 1984 was so plentiful and fast that finding a record of a couple of years before was impossible. No past (and no future…) seemed to exist. Now the tribute and the homage are a real cliché, many Italian mainstream musicians have made cover albums (Carboni, Battiato, Irene Grandi, as Johnny Cash did, or Paul Anka playing swing some rock classics). Pop has stopped to eat itself and has began to put itself in a museum?

My next book is about this topic: retro culture.  There is what academics call a "musealisation" -- everything becoming like a museum -- of culture, in the West at any rate. It affects every level of culture, but it's particularly strong in music.  We have become archive crazy, documenting everything, digging over the past for lost treasure. New bands recycle ideas; old bands return as their own tribute acts. It's a historically unprecedented phenomenon, at times it almost seems to me a kind of crisis. Yet at the same time it is very enjoyable to explore all this old music, I could spend the rest of my life trawling through YouTube or digging in old vinyl record stores, or buying up vintage music magazines. And some great music has come out of this archival sensibility -- I'm particularly into this genre "hauntology", made by groups on the label Ghost Box and some other bands, it's a kind of archaeology of Britain's "cultural unconscious", all the ghosts that  inhabit the memory of any British person who grew up in the Sixties and Seventies.


5)      Music is a serious thing. In your opinion, what does it say to our lives (at the opposite of Morrissey’s “blessed dj”)?

Oh, that's a big question. It says all kind of things, and often it says nothing at all, and that is its point.  Some music is just about dancing, getting in the groove, the intoxication of rhythm; it's not that it is thoughtless, but it's almost getting your body to think, to function at a higher level.  Music can be serious or it can wonderfully non-serious:  I used to think that music and comedy couldn't or shouldn't co-exist, but I've changed my mind. There's too many examples of music that makes you laugh.

But I do take it seriously  and generally, speaking for myself, one of the main things that music has offered is a sense of something bigger outside of myself, something that I can connect with and become one with. That could be networks of ideas and energy, as with postpunk, or, it could be social forces, as with rave culture in the Nineties, where I found my tastes coming into alignment with "the people" for the first time, I joined "the crowd" at last and experienced the joy of collective energy. Or it could just be a sense of the cosmos, which is what I get from psychedelic music, from the German bands of the early Seventies, also from certain kinds of electronic music, the post-War avant-garde.  I think music allows us to be subsumed in the "trans-individual", we can leave behind the petty concerns of our everyday self.  In that sense, as a force that is transcendent and transfiguring and redemptive,  it could be that music provides for me the same role that religion would have done if I'd been born in an earlier century.  I don't believe in God (or at least in a God that takes a great interest in me and what I do). But I do believe in Music.

writing about music

an interview with someone called Elodie from about ten years ago about being a music writer, fanzines, the music press, the relationship between journalists and musicians, as well as more lofty themes such as obsession, passion, truth etc

What was the very first article you wrote about? When was it? What do you really write about when you write about music?

The first piece was on Bow Wow Wow for an arts magazine at Oxford called Radical Review. This was the winter of 1981. The editor Paul Oldfield would go on to be my best friend and together with some other people we would do a fanzine called Margin, which then became a kind of polemical wall-poster which we'd stick up all around the university and town. Then after graduating we started a new magazine, Monitor, which was a fanzine that had pretensions to being a pop journal--no interviews or reviews, just thinkpieces, and with a strong design aesthetic. Unlike other fanzines, we had no local element whatsoever - no coverage of Oxford bands. We saw ourselves as national, even international!

 That was 1984.  We did six issues, the last one was summer of 1986.

What do you really write about when you write about music?

That's too big a question. I suppose in a strange way it is autobiography, but only glimpsed through the prism of other things--music and everything it touches. I don't have a lot of time for the memoiristic school of music writing, I don't feel it tells you anything much about the music and how it will affect you the reader. Just because it intersected with the memoirist-critic's life in such and such a way… it's too particular, the meaning that is being written about is not intrinsic to the music, it doesn't inhere to the sound in any real way. It can be interesting when done really, really well--and it helps if you know the writer--but I don't think it has much to offer in the way of truth.

What was your experience like as a fanzine-maker?

Great collaborative excitement and a sense of purpose, coupled with a lot of hard work, which was the appeal, and the point. A life without work is empty; a life of leisure, a permanent vacation, would be horrible. We were on the dole, most of us, but we invented a job for ourselves to do. And it led to a real one for me. Not directly, I didn't get a telegram from a music paper, but in terms of me honing my skills and building up my courage.

Do you remember in which context Monitor was started? Were there something missing, a room you felt you had to inhabit?

Nothing so flowery, just tons of ideas about music, lots to say, a lot of ego and ambition. I knew I wanted to be a music journalist, a certain kind of critic, and this was my training phase, a sort of girding of loins.

As a reader I had been a fan of the side of the NME in the late 70s and early 80s that was high-powered intellectually and did think pieces, as well as thinkpieces/manifestos that masqueraded as record reviews, gig reviews, interviews. Around 1983 the editorship of NME started phasing out those kind of thematic essays gradually while the writers who'd been doing that kind of thing either moved on to other things (Paul Morley started ZTT Records) or were getting marginalised. So as a frustrated consumer I tried to supply my own demand as it were. I don't think the others at Monitor were so much the NME fanatic as I was, but that was certainly the impetus for me: the music press has stopped doing this, so I'll do it. Hence the no interviews, no reviews policy at Monitor, which lasted until someone started sending us free records. We immediately started a record review section!  But we only ever did one interview, and that was fairly abstract and didn't feature any direct quotes, as I recall.

Were you into writing before you were into music?

My parents are both journalists and it was a bookish orientated household. Apart from a brief phase of wanting to be a cricketer and wanting to be a cartoonist, my ambitions were always to write -- satirical and Monty Python type humour at one point, science fiction later, then finally music journalism.

Are writing and music two interdependent activities to you?

For me listening is accompanied by thinking, usually -- and writing is a tidied up form of thinking aloud. And I was a fan of music journalism --again a particular kind of music writing -- almost as much as a fan of music.

Does the reality of the written world (the page) convey the reality of the musical, outer world that’s happening before your eyes (the stage) or are these two different realities as it were? Would you make such a distinction/opposition between the page and the stage?

What were you trying best in your early articles: was it to be faithful to your heart or to your eyes?

Dunno. I always think what I'm saying is the truth, if that' s what you mean. I try and avoid going down the path of qualification and seeing the other point of view, because it leads to weak writing, most of the time.

What is the role of emotion in music writing? What about the role of obsession?

It's all emotion. It may be more abstract and rarefied forms of emotion -- contemplative, the emotion that perfection of  form produces, which is an emotion that has nothing to do with "emo" type emotions, but can be really intense and swoony and rhapsodic, or just a real clarity and acuity of perception.

Obsession is the aim. You're looking for music that is worthy of obsession, and that can trigger obsession. In the mean time you'll settle for delight, or amusement, or in really lean times, "interesting".

Also, do you consider writing about music as a re-presentation of something that happened before (the report of a story) or a presentation of something new (telling a new, and maybe another, story)?

I don't think about that kind of thing very often, at least not when faced with a specific piece of writing. The goal is more to get it into a shape that works. There's probably a mixture of fact and fiction in the end result, in the sense that leaving stuff out is always going to reduce the complexity of reality. Rip It Up is defined as much by what is left out as what is in there.

Did you feel closer to the bands and their language (The Smiths for example) than you were to other music journalists?

Not really. Most bands are understandably wary of journalists, because whatever they write, however flattering or aggrandising it is, it is going to box them into some kind of corner. I've seen that in a limited way when people interview me or profile me. Just the way a quote is cut down to size can give it an emphasis that is deceptive --and you go, "I didn't mean it like that!" - that emphatically or resoundingly.  

Bands and music journalists are symbiotic life forms, they need each other, and are often working on the same side in the sense of trying to will into existence the perception that something (a band, a scene) is happening. But the relationship is freighted with tension. Bands can be very frustrating for journalists if they don't talk themselves up or are evasive, or if they just refuse to rubber stamp the version of what they are about that you the journo are trying to put out there.  

Bands also don't understand why you don't want to keep on writing about them forever, even if (rare scenario, this!) they keep on making good records. They don't understand that to write about the same subject over and over is for the journalists exactly like if the band had to keep remaking its first album again and again.

Was there a sense of community, of togetherness in the Melody Maker team when you joined in for example?

Not at first, but it built up gradually, partly with Monitor members joining me there like David Stubbs and Paul Oldfield, but also new comrades like the Stud Brothers. And generally there was an affable atmosphere among the writers, riven sometimes by discord over particular bands or scenes that one faction or other favoured/disfavoured. But they were great times. This was back when magazines didn't have emails and even faxing was quite unusual, so people brought their copy into the office and then hung out there all day, leading to all afternoon and all night drinking sessions.

I also met my future wife Joy Press at Melody Maker and she was part of our gang, but I had no idea then that romance would be on the cards!

Can you remember your attitudes towards music writing and the music press before you started to write about music yourself?

I thought that that was the life to live.  I probably imagined something a lot more glamorous than it actually was, although it did have a glamour of its own, and in some ways surpassed my expectations.

To which extent would you consider post-punk or indie pop as literary, movements, created in words?

A lot of the musicians were more like critics than actual muso musicians; if ever there was a period when left-field musicians and the cutting edge of music journalism were really close, that was it. Quite a few musicians were actually journalists, and journos were in bands, or involved in the music business. It was a very discourse-oriented culture. My ideas about music were affected by key critics at that time but also by musician-theorists like Green Gartside, Brian Eno (slightly later on), and Malcolm McLaren (more a manager-theorist although he did "make" some great records)

Do you think there is a link that draws together everything you ever wrote about music?

If there is, I can't see it. There's some kind of quest, maybe, but I couldn't verbalise it. It does relate to the idea of obsession being the highest state of being.  Of true music fandom being essentially bi-polar  -- so that you're either in a state of mania or in the slough of despond.  Those kind of  see-sawing rhythms seem to run through the whole trajectory of my writing.

Is there anything you wish you hadn't written?

There' s a fair few dull-ish pieces, but not that many things that are excruciatingly embarrassing -- mostly odd sentences here and there which make me wince. Journalists can sometimes sell themselves on the idea of a group because it's a good story, and I've done that a lot less often than some writers, but there are a few things where I now think, "nah!".

Does your perception of the past and of the past musical scene(s) (such as post-punk) keep evolving with time?

Yes. At any given point I'm generally rediscovering things I was once into and finding new things about them, or exploring areas I never checked out because of various prejudices or simply not having ever got round to them. 

but even things that I lived through very intensely, like postpunk, or the early days of rave and jungle, they don't seem like closed books at all, I still find them fresh to listen to and new ideas pop up. Which is odd given that I've written books about both, you'd think I'd be sated and sick.  But not yet, not yet....