You know the score

Son vaults ahead of father by joining the select grouping of music critics who have had diss songs aimed at them by aggrieved musicians.  

In this case, the wounded ones rather disingenuously claim that  "this song is about the modern American music critic, not about one single person, and any resemblance between the characters in this video and any persons, living or dead, is their own problem" - oh yeah, pull the other one, you start the video with screenshots of the measly score he gave your record. 

(Funnily enough I rather enjoyed the Callahan & Witscher record Think Differently). 

Still waiting for an inverted-tribute like this to happen to me, although I did get gently piss-took in this Saint Etienne advertisement, which delighted me (although I'd still rather have been in a Saint Et song like Joe Dilworth and Simon Price were)

Here's some new Kieran - a piece for Mixed Feelings on "Rollywood"  - TV soap operas and full-length movies made using Roblox.

more reading matter

Had a fun chat with Lawrence of Mozart Estate / Go-Kart Mozart / Denim / Felt legend, condensed into this pithy Pitchfork Q+A 

Kieran on Kirkslop (it's what you think it is) for GQ

Did a bunch of interviews while in Argentina - this one by Romina Zanellato for Cenital is a good read (and can be easily flipped into English). 

Another one worth a look is Carlos Priego's for Le Tempestad but somewhere between AI doing the transcription and AI doing the translation (I'm guessing but I'd be surprised if wrong), somewhere between those processes and condensation of the conversation for space reasons, the most marvelous error has been generated. For during an explanation of the reasons for writing Retromania, I am said to have uttered these words:  

"I, in particular, had become addicted to U2, listening to all their albums and feeling like I was drowning in the past, so a lot of what I wrote had that feel."

It took me a while to realize what had happened - YouTube has been mis-transcribed as U2.

Except I wouldn't have said I had been addicted to YouTube. 

What I might have said is that I was addicted to downloading albums off blogs. There had been a long unhealthy phase of OCD / manic greed I got caught up in. To this day I have thousands and thousands of never-unzipped, never-played files stowed away….

Reading Matters

A couple of things to read:

Kieran spends a "messy evening" with Bassvictim, whose music is one of the rare things he's alerted me to that I actively enjoy, but who sound rather alarming as an interview experience. 

And then this mega-post from Matthew Ingram at Sick Veg which is not just something else worth reading but a gateway to an enormous number of other things worth reading. 

In the tradition of his 100 Best Records and similar epic sweeping-survey bloggerations at Woebot and its precursor blogs, this is an inventory of non-fiction books that Matt read while researching his trilogy of linked books:  Retreat, The 'S' Word and The Garden.  Organized into categories such as Psychoanalysis, Eastern Philosophy, Self-Sufficiency, Acid, Anti-Psychiatry, Beat, Agriculture, Communes, Permaculture, Anthropology, Tibet....

Actually, inventory is the wrong word: the Sick Veg 100 is the distillate of, or extremely selective selection from, the two thousand  books he read -  the nutter that he is! An obsessive after my own heart, Matt, but with a capacity for research and filtration that far exceeds my own. 

This is one of the handful books on the List that I own - and, naturally, I haven't read it.  

(Theodore Roszak's work is so important to Matt that he actually has his own category in the List.)

My rate of reading has slowed down grievously. I must have at least 400 never-even-opened or started-but-got-only-a-little-way in tomes lying around the house in neglected piles. (And many, many more in naughty PDF or epub form).

Supposedly having lots of unread books is the mark of the true bibliophile (was it Benjamin who said that, or Eco?).  But this seems like an odd way of loving books - not reading them. 

Not counting all the text I consume on the internet, reading seems to occupy a smaller and smaller portion of my waking hours. Which is sad to consider, given that, outside of spending time with beloved people, reading is probably my greatest pleasure - perhaps even more so than listening to music. 

As a child, I could read several books a week. I would burn through the stuff. Such that rereading was a big feature of my life. Certain books, or book series, would get read three or four times. 

What is to blame for the eroded capacity? 

The obvious things: the computer, the phone, the immense amount and range of television and film available in the domestic space nowadays, YouTube...  The kind of everyday places and phases of down time that would once involve reading a book or at least magazine - commuting, using public transport, waiting in a queue or for an appointment - you will now reflexively fill up with phone scrollige. 

The desire to read is there.... but things seem to get in the way.  I'll have four or five books on the go at once, but make tortuous headway with all of them. 

I finished the Gormenghast trilogy - but it took me over a year.

And there's a sense of time running out. 

Which then creates an almost voluptuous feeling of sin when you succumb to the temptation to reread a favorite, knowing all the while that there are thousands and thousands of books out there you should be reading.... hundreds in the house alone, already paid for or otherwise acquired... 

Rereading is never a completely empty, reiterative act of nostalgia - so much that's contained in the beloved book you will have completely forgotten. New details in the text will be noticed for the first time...  fresh perspectives emerge through accumulated life experience or different knowledge... 

Still, it feels deliciously indulgent, a dereliction of duty. 

For instance, I quite fancy picking up Titus Groan again... 

it takes two to tango

Me and Kieran are going to Argentina this week for the 20th anniversary celebrations of Caja Negra, the Buenos Aires publisher who have put out nearly all of the books of mine that have been translated into Spanish. 

Actually it takes four to tango because the panel event we are doing on Saturday November 15 at 7pm at the Deseo Club is a quadraphonic colloquy with Argentinian writers Pablo Schanton and Antonia Kon. 

The event is wittily titled Presentemanía - and you guessed it, Kieran is there to represent the present: the !NOW!-minded younger generation of music critics. I, inevitably, will be there to stand for the past-it cohort. Yes, it's all a bit of a set-up but I shall graciously accept my role as the grizzled old fart in the rocking chair mumbling about Omni Trio and Associates. 

Still, who gets top billing, eh? Eh? 

I have no idea if this lot have any cred in Argentina but I have long loved this tune

On your Marx

A couple of related pieces from Kieran Press-Reynolds:

1/ A sharply observed portrait for GQ of the trio behind the popular left-wing podcast TrueAnon. The show started out with deep descents into the foulness pit of Epstein-Maxwell, but quickly diversified, becoming "an oracle of our hysterical times," K writes. "In an online slopscape dominated by far-right furor and mercenary clipfarming, TrueAnon offers something unusual: carefully researched takes, delivered with humor and genuine empathy." 

I was tickled to learn from the piece that one TrueAnon, Liz Franczak, used to read Blissblog and K-Punk back in the day.

At the unmentionable place, the winning witty comment: "The podcasters have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it"

2/ For his Pitchfork column Rabbit Holed, K delves through the dankness of Marxist brainrot - ultra-left teenage meme-makers battling the "alt-right slop all over TikTok", with a particular focus on the mythos of  "Red Shambhala, the idea of a communist utopia from Tibetan Buddhist lore."

Grassed Up

Here's a funny and sharply observed report by Kieran Press-Reynolds on a  "no phones" event called OFFLINE, the brainchild of  ex-politician / President-wannabe Andrew Yang. People pay through the nose to reconnect briefly with undistracted living-in-the-here-the-now. Cool animated graphic by the team at Rabbit Holed / Pitchfork depicts Kieran and Yang both fondling some Astro-turf.

Apropos of nothing

Poptimism - the debate that refuses to go away, yet never goes anywhere. Deadlocked, yet churning. 

The recent rechurn stirred up memories of the fierce arguments of the early 2000s - 20-plus years ago! 

Supposedly, during these initially amiable, soon adversarial blog back-and-forths, it was me that came up with the term "poptimist".  Probably not true, in fact - but certainly I was an early adopter.

Now one of the things that always mystified me back then was this idea that taking pop seriously was some sort of radically new gesture, a daring step forward into Enlightenment, leaving behind the Bad Old Days when Rockism had our minds in chains.

It always felt like a myth, this idea that before the pro-pop insurgency of the 2000s, music journalists universally treated pop with disdain; that there was never any enthusiasm or respect for artists operating in the commercial mainstream, no serious discussion of chartpop. 

I don't think this was even true in America, where generalism had long been a fairly established mode. But I know for sure that in the U.K. it was an utterly commonplace occurrence. For certain writers, it was a shtick, a specialist territory they set themselves up in. For others, it would be part of having a well-rounded approach to being both a fan/consumer and a commentator/thinker. 

So let's take a little journey into the Not-So-Dark Ages before poptimism came along to sort everything out. 

In the Nineties, on the UK music press, you often had people writing excited pieces about R&B, or all that Eurobeat pop-dance (Snap, etc). Sometimes, admittedly, with a contrarian, look-at-me aspect, to them. But the reason that that was irritating, from my point of view, was because there was absolutely nothing audaciously against-the-grain about taking a pro-pop position - either with specific instances of pop or the entire field. That  move was already well established, had an extensive history...



In the Eighties, New Pop emerged right at the start of the decade. There were two ideas here: that 

A/ it was cool and valid to "go pop" (the move made by ABC, Scritti Politti, New Order, Style Council, et al), and that

 B/ pop already contained great stuff  (all the glorious disco-funk of the era, for starters, but also things like Dollar, the mascot group for New Pop ideologues, the Annie/Robyn of their day ... You would even get writers sticking up for Bucks Fizz). 

New Pop thinking was virtually hegemonic on the rock press for some years, although it's true that the readership was not as taken with it as the writers. It's worth recalling that the term  "rockism" itself was coined in 1980, by Pete Wylie of Wah!, as a sort of auto-critique from within postpunk rock culture. It was propagated energetically by Paul Morley and others, and rapidly became the mindset of perhaps a score or more critics working on the rock weeklies and the new style magazines (where anti-rockism became dogma).  (I won't bring Smash Hits into the discussion - its only innovation was that arch, taking-nothing-too-seriously mode). 

NME's Richard Cook with a rave review for ABBA's best-of (1982)

But in the second half of the Eighties, even when there was a backlash within the rock weeklies and the post-postpunk scene against pop gloss -  a return to indie / underground values, to harder-darker and more abrasive music - the pro-pop move remained a stock critical maneuver. I remember colleagues speaking up for Aha, or Curiosity Killed the Cat, or Mel & Kim...  Pet Shop Boys were widely lauded... Everyone liked Janet Jackson...   I'm sure I made that move a few times myself. 

As for black music, it was very much on the inkie weeklies menu  - hip hop, funk, reggae, a bit of R&B, some jazz... African music in quite a big way. Even Sounds covered reggae regularly and surprisingly thoroughly, given its image as an Oi! / heavy metal paper..

In the Seventies - the period that you'd probably imagine to be the absolute darkest age of rockism - the UK music press was actually catholic and remarkably comprehensive in its coverage. The weeklies conceived of themselves as music newspapers (Melody Maker, in the early 70s, was based in Fleet Street) with an interest (in both senses of the word) in reporting and analysing everything. It was their job. So Melody Maker - according to received wisdom the "progressive paper" - would routinely cover things like Osmondmania, David Cassidy, the Jackson Five, Isaac Hayes, early disco, etc, with depth, intelligence, and respect - alongside all the things you'd expect (Hatfield and the North, Steeleye Span,  Nucleus). One week, there'd be a centre spread on Stockhausen or Sun Ra; the next a 4000 word investigation into the top producers of teenybop, or a report on the new boom for fan clubs. 

Oh look, this has just popped up at Rock's Back Pages - the late Colin Irwin, who did the folk column in Melody Maker, does a report on the funk scene at clubs like Lacy Lady and with deejays like Chris Hill (RIP). This is in 1976, three or four full years before Danny Baker would make much rhetorical hay at NME out of how the true working class Britfunk scene isn't A Certain Ratio / Gang of Four but the jazz-funk scene with its All-Dayers and Weekenders as hosted by Hill and other jocks. 

Both NME and Melody Maker reported on Northern Soul - Sounds I'm almost certain did too. "If it moves, cover it".

MM's Richard Williams wrote circa 1976 one of the most perceptive pieces about dub reggae and its revolutionary implications. 

There were also individual writers who -  as the Richard Williams Melody Maker rave review of Gary Glitter below shows -   would sometimes put forth the against-the-grain arguments so familiar to us from the poptimistic kerfuffle of the 2000s.  

The NME was just as expansive: even during the sombre height of postpunk, they'd run cover stories on Michael Jackson and Giorgio Moroder, big features on Earth Wind and Fire and Chic...  as mentioned Danny Baker's enthused reports on the UK's burgeoning jazz-funk scene... passionate and informed coverage of reggae from roots 'n' dub to lover's rock ...  an appreciation of Abba... 

I'm not so familiar with the US rock press of the 1970s but I have seen a fair few issues of Creem, and in there you will find writers making arguments celebrating, say, The Sweet, in terms of pure pop excitement, brilliantly effective if  manufactured thrills, etc.  

In the Sixties... well, rock criticism is nascent and unformed at that point, so I'm not sure there's a rock/pop divide clearly marked such that people could dramatise themselves around it. People tended to use 'rock' and 'pop' interchangeably.  

Still, there is an argument  for seeing Nik Cohn as the Original Poptimist, albeit a gloomy one in so far as he thinks Pop's energy flash and pulp heroics have been stifled by the pompous self-seriousness of Rock. 

It is notable that the first two major youth-music books by British writers both use the word "pop" in their titles: Cohn's Pop From the Beginning, and George Melly's Revolt Into Style: The Pop Arts. Also worth noting, as regards differences between the UK and the USA: Cohn's book was retitled for the American market as Rock From the Beginning. 

Perhaps the battle the poptimists keep on fighting is a America-specific problem that regenerates itself perennially;  whereas the battle never needed to be fought in the U.K. in so far as pop has historically not - most of the time -  been a dirty word, a synonym for phony and fabricated - at least for most sensible people. 

So, essentially, the pro-pop approach - in both its attention-seeking mode and conscientious fair-minded generalist mode - has a history going back over fifty years, at least - possibly longer.  

It's easy to see why the notion of a Dark Ages would be appealing, should you fancy seeing yourself - or  being seen - as a light-bringer, someone on the side of Right: boldly rectifying longstanding injustices, and breaking new intellectual ground in the process too ...  

But this narrative is, to a startling degree, a myth. 

Williams making the "don't knock the greasy kids's stuff" move - and even in '72, far from the first to do it.

the trash aesthete move - Glitter can't be denied "except by impossible snobs who lack any real feeling for rubbish"

"he does it to those kids in just the way they want it done" is unfortunate language, with hindsight... 

Prototype Thoughts on Melody Maker (late 60s / early 70s incarnation) as the Original Poptimist Paper (or at least, the Original Generalist Paper). The key general point is this, which possibly explains the rise of poptimism at the start of the 2000s as a response to a narrowing of focus in the UK music press (coupled also with the rise of a Pitchfork in its then indie-ist form): 

... By the mid-90s, music magazine publishing had fragmented so much that this kind of catholic comprehensiveness was no longer tenable. When the music weeklies didn't have hardly any rivals, they could cover rock but also its adjacent genres - soul, dance, etc. But as time went by they got less and less benefit from these attempts at being comprehensive. Their core readership wasn't interested, or was actively turned off; meanwhile, the genre-ist fans gravitated towards the the genre-ist magazines.

....It's considered righteous for people to criticise NME.... or the early, pre-reformed Pitchfork for their failures to cover certain genres, or when they did cover them, lambast them for doing it in a tokenistic way, or for imposing their own rockist biases. Failing to "understand them on their own terms".... 

But you never got hordes of rocktimists railing against The Source or Vibe for their failure to cover Queens of the Stone Age or Arcade Fire, did you?    Nobody ever expected Smash Hits to take on Terrorizer or The Wire type music. No one thinks less of Mixmag and DJ for their lack of "engagement" with indie.  Did Blues and Soul ever put MBV on its front cover, like MM put Bobby Brown on its?...  

It was totally fine for all those magazines to base their coverage on calculations about what their market was, what their readership was interested in.  Yet the accusation of incomplete catholicity always get leveled at the rock magazines. The onus is on rock criticism.