ILXOR in todays Guardian

It's certainly no duller than the "which is better? fried or scrambled eggs?" shenanigans of ILE.

Since you asked.

Marcello - EWWWW!!

Who is the editor for the Internet page??

Honest, that line always pops into my head.

btw

i mean at least Petridish knows the word "microhouse" exists. i bet the "3am" girls don't and they're supposed to be the "youf" and "entertainment" section of that rag.

Answered by swarms of failed chefs.

I truly thought ILM meant

I
Love
Masturbation

so I thought it was no coincidence that I found myself here...

and being surrounded by a swarm of rock journalists came as no surprise

I had found home

This board provides me with the same thing I get from music mags: recommendations and avenues to pursue.

Marcello, I was actually kidding (and drunk) when I posted that. I read the Guardian too, even though I live in Los Angeles!

If ppl trust his opinions then they're better off somewehere else.

But what if he meant it as an analytical statement: i.e. all music criticism must necessarily fail, so everyone who tries to write about music, whether 'published' or not, will fall into the same category... And since everything on ILM is in the public domain, it might as well all be considered music journalism.

i'll go back to lurking.

sorry for the intrusion!

I think the book exhausted Morley; since then stuff like the goodbye-to-singles piece in the Grauniad or the dreary Pop Idol judges = Marx Brothers thing in yesterday's OMM is the kind of sentimental keech which the younger Morley would have slaughtered had it come from CSM or Kent.

(ps. yer blog hits cool strides with me, marcello ...)

(of course one of the ten thousand subtexts of my blog is my extended internal battle to avoid turning into Nick Hornby or Tom Cox. thank the lord for laptops wot you can use in bed ;-)

yeah no doubt.

but to be honest i know very little of the subject i'm speaking of. and the fact that i'm listening to krystopf komeda's soundtrack to the fearless vampire killers and writing an entrance review shows that i'm happy and snug in my indie-ghetto.

re: it feels odd to have a personal subtext to writing. not the best example but i did an elliott smith piece in about twenty minutes after i heard that he died. i'm not sure if it came off well but it felt odd to be thinking about music in a personal manner - and i appreciate it when it is done well - thus the reason why i started to read morley.

Paul I fancy that Mr Wyngarde wishes you to come and sit over here, as it's closer to everything.

"No the lights haven't fused, it's candlelight!"

(and does it mean you get to have courtney love's email address?)

will sell it for cheap group sex.

Deborah Curtis book is well worth reading, the levels of denial-at-the-time she reaches are quite spectacular, really.

Haha - Luciano Pavarotti's!

But "the best album to dance to while drunk" ?

So lame, we have much more obscure/geeky threads than that.

"There has never been a worse time to be a music writer. Where Britain once had three weekly titles, only the NME remains, and the monthlies are prey to narrowing markets and strict advertising targets. The daily flash of today's global sonic network remains undocumented in print. Which is why more and more music writers are joining the likes of Salam Pax and firing off broadsides via their weblogs. Freed from editorial shackles, music bloggers cavort in a paradise for anyone who retains a belief in the worth, nobility and sublime-to-ridiculousness of music criticism. A reverie on the latest ragga choons might be interrupted with an aside that begins: "For those of you interested in contemporary political philosophy... "
The best of the crop - Simon Reynolds's Blissblog (www.blissout.blogspot.com, a gateway for all others mentioned here), k-punk, Robin Carmody's House at World's End, Philip Sherburne's Needledrops, Dave Stelfox's World of Stelfox - wear their learning lightly. They are crammed with analyses of genres, microscopic rearrangements of the week's tracks, meticulous lists and riffs on the notion of, say, progressive (anatomising the genre from afro-prog to prog 'n' bass). Others - Marcello Carlin's Church of Me and Matthew Ingram's Woebot (formerly That Was a Naughty Bit of Crap) - are personal journals, detailing the lives to which the music forms the soundtrack. Still others, such as Ian Penman's Pillbox, Mark Sinker's Radio Free Narnia, Taylor Parkes's Anal Hospital and Sasha Frere-Jones's S/FJ are written in a code designed for a few initiates. They run the gamut of narcissistic excess, vaunting ambition, friendly recommendation, linguistic tease and a sense of playful fantasy.

What they add up to is a fertile breeding ground for a new style of music writing - just when the trade needs it most. The ludic quality of music criticism merges with a serious approach to the subject rarely found in a mainstream that treats music as entertainment rather than art. Add encyclopaedic knowledge, genre-crossing frames of reference and a disregard for celebrity, and you have the key traits of the music blog.

Above all, music blogs are free from the business plans and targeted readerships that determine the content of commercial publications. It may be, as one blogger recently admitted, a "hermetically sealed and potentially borderline-autistic pursuit", but this unregulated zone contains fantastic, stimulating and piercingly acute writing. Savour the moment before its protagonists have to find proper jobs."

If every UK music mag stopped putting the Beatles on the cover of EVERY SINGLE ISSUE, people might start buying them again.

Jesus.

If every UK music mag stopped putting the Beatles on the cover of "EVERY SINGLE ISSUE" (which they, strictly speaking, don't), people would most probably never buy them again. That is why they do it.

It's called "demographics."

[runs away and hides]

I think that's highly reductive. So people only read about/listen to dead artists because they want to fuck corpses? No. They do it because they're interested, and because the artists' music doesn't die with its composers.

And as I said on the other thread, Mojo averages roughly 1.5 Beatles-related covers a year, which isn't bad when you consider the demographic of their readership and their aim. Don't NME still put Oasis on their cover at lleast once a year?

No I've never written anything for Mojo, under my name or anyone else's.

Buy the new Dizzee Rascal album instead, it's album of the year innit?

Actually I do appear (or at least my writing does) in the Xmas 1994 issue of Mojo. But that was a different time and a different me.

Actually it may have been the Xmas 1995 issue. It had Noel Gallagher and others on the cover brandishing Their Favourite CDs Of That Year.

I dont think you've actually reduced it far enough to reach the point; I think the assumption underlying the analogy is that the only reason anyone would want to fuck a corpse would be because they're unable or unwilling to enter into and maintain a relationship with someone living.

Why did I hear Gloria Swanson's voice when I read that?

;-D

And for fuck's sake, MOJO COVERS MUCH NEW MUSIC!!! Sure, there are the letter-writers who hate Hip-Hop, who only want the Beatles, Pink Floyd etc etc, just like The Telegraph et al get letters from barmy old majors, just like NME is doubtless still assailed by screeds from Manics fans. Mojo still covers new music, and gets slated by all sides for doing so (but give me a magazine that runs long features on Mars Volta & My Morning Jacket, and pieces on Comets On Fire, Secret Machines, Icarus Line, Reigning Sound, etc...).

but Mojo also covers non-reactionaries like Hunches, Comets On Fire, Icarus Line, bands who deny that 'indie/guitar' lineage is defunct.

xpost - six page primals feature in Mojo this year (march?)

mojo also needs to find more interesting perspectives on the old stuff. as someone who is generally quite indifferent to the kinks, i found the 30-page job in this month's uncut a fascinating read - and i'm not just saying that 'cos i write for them - theirs is a great story and you realise that it's seldom told properly. and it sent me back to village green, arthur, muswell hillbillies, greatest hits etc. so it did its job.

Bliss!

just genres. demographics. no illuminati style conspiracy. its just selected entertainment for different demographics (sheesh - i claim taht as the title of my bio.)

But if you do the maths, that means 1 in 8 Mojos have Beatles covers. I mean for chrissakes. I don't even hate the Beatles, I just can't see the point of reading anything else about them. If I see the Beatles on the cover, I'm less likely to buy the magazine. I have no problem with a magazine primarily focused on old music, as there is a lot of old music to discover and rediscover. This doesn't include the Beatles.

xpost
I still think The Beatles' music, influence and story is fascinating. I can understand getting tired of hearing it again and again, but stuff like the new Mojo issue's piece offers a new perspective on specific moments in their story... I still think that can be interesting.

I didn't actually suggest anything of the sort, I was merely explaining the analogy, not defending it.

Fwiw, I read Mojo (and Uncut) every month.... although admittedly in a slightly disgruntled "best of a bad lot" kind of way.

Of course it's great when they do "manage to find more interesting perspectives on the old stuff"; but it's a shame they (apparently) have to spend such a hugely disproportionate amount of their time attempting (and of course often failing) to do so, rather than just being able to write about what (presumably) interests them and which would (probably) also interest the remaining, non-necrophiliac, part of their readership.

i grew up in the late '70s, a time when musical barriers were being broken virtually on a weekly basis. on a saturday i'd go down to bloggs records (in st vincent street) or listen records (round the corner in renfield street) and spend ludicrous amounts of time/money looking through their new releases (and buying most of them). then i'd rush to the newsagent on thursday morning on my way to school and read what morley/penman/whoever had to say about them (usually of course it worked the other way around; you read the rave review on thursday, then went out and bought the record on saturday). the nowness seemed much more urgent. there wasn't really time to spend delving into "old stuff" - there was too much new stuff with which you had to keep up.

whereas now 16-year-old kids dutifully file to the neatly ordered cd racks of their local record shop, look at the special offer back catalogue stuff, and just consume that. as a consequence the music press has become much more of a service industry and ended up like the starship enterprise - its mission being to observe history, rather than try to change it. whereas the post-punk music press at its best did its damnedest to try and change things.

that's the kind of excitement i miss.

If the musicians don't create the excitement, the magazines can't report it, can they?

And are there still that many "musical barriers" left to break?

(These might sound like loaded questions btw. but I can assure you they aren't, I genuinely want to know the answers to this).

We might have feigned a disinterest in what had gone before in the punk era, but if you didn't know what had gone before, how would you know what "musical barriers" still existed and which had already been broken?

Of course it was easier then because there was an awful lot less history to assimilate.

isn't it more a case of knowing about 40-year-old music as well as, rather than instead of, music of their own time?

when i was 16 i liked suede. suede got me into bowie, bowie got me into eno, eno got me into kraftwerk, etc.

it was all education and it was all very exciting. when i was 16.

It was easier for me because my parents were both fanatical record collectors so I kind of had all of the history in the house from day one so I didn't need to learn about it - it was already there.

It's a bit like kids in the '60s going out and buying Al Jolson records (let's leave the Black & White Minstrels and the New Vaudeville Band out of this debate for now).

The thing is that now, extremes in music are no longer extremes. You want some tabletop thrashing? Go and read about this month's Keiji Haino albums in the Wire (hardly an example of wild youth). You want some warped grime? Any number of blogs will cater for your needs. But there doesn't seem to be much urgency in all this activity. Everyone wants to keep (their music/scene) to themselves and are reluctant for it to spread (or, if you're Wiley, you regard grime as a "noise" aberration, presumably only of value as a passport to making the bland Luther Vandross records you really want to make).

Perhaps it's simply a result of there being too much "choice" now - "choice" in inverted commas because it's questionable whether there really is a choice. Girls Aloud doing a song called "Graffiti My Soul" sounds great in theory, but already you know you've heard the song from beginning to end and know exactly what it's going to sound like - and, having now heard said song, it is depressing to realise just how right I was. It's a perfectly good piece of pop, but it doesn't surprise me. It didn't come from nowhere unlike who-the-fuck-is-this-Throbbing-Gristle-lot?

That doesn't mean that great music isn't still being made, of course - but I tend not to write about current releases so much on the blog any more unless they make such an impact on me that I have to rush to the computer to write about them. No point wasting time and words on indifferent stuff. When something like Showtime pops up and surprises me by sounding exactly like I DIDN'T expect it to sound, it makes the experience of listening to new music all the more pleasing. But to me there's no longer the semi-illicit thrill of threading through unknown names and unknown records, taking them home and not quite (or at all?) knowing what was going to happen when you listen to them. We're all braced now to expect "extremes."

(xpost to Peter Watts)

You're not the same Peter Watts who writes for Time Out, are you? If so, well met, sir - I'm doing the singles column next week!

This is also the only reason I can think of why I managed to miss The Homosexuals the first time 'round. How about you, Doc.?

The other difference is when you get interested in old music but it's not the common/uniform history of old music, e.g. I loved Northern Soul as a kid (it was one of the things that first brought Laura and I together as a matter of fact) but apart from a few one-off hits in the mid-'70s it was still very much a secret music (almost a parallel to Brit folk and Brit improv if you think about it), an underground which No One Else Knew About. And that made it more exciting. Now of course all history is available and anthologised, so the risk of finding out about something off the CD-beaten track becomes scarcer.

Another question is: does young people's predominant interest in old music influence what young people do as musicians? In other words, instead of trying to create something new, it's more a case of following the ancestral trend/profession, so that it becomes, strictly speaking, more of a "folk" music and less of a "new" music? There are advantages and disadvantages in both.

As far as availability of new records in the late '70s goes, well all I can say is that Bloggs and Listen (both in Glasgow, btw) were extremely up to speed with things (and likewise, 23rd Precinct down the road in Bath Street were always on the case with developments in dance music); almost on a par with Rough Trade (and there was also Gloria's Record Bar on the south side, in Battlefield Road down Cathcart way). Ask Bobby Gillespie or Edwyn Collins or any of the other regulars at the time and they'll confirm all this.

Oh yes, and they did stock The Homosexuals...

personally, i think talking of music in terms of 'new' is misguided, but i'd say a number of the current garage bands are taking the ethos of the bands who influenced them in new directions, principally The Hunches' artful use of no-wave sonics - white noise explosions, no-fi production, *amazing* dynamic guitar playing that ricochets across the specturm - and Dirtbombs' synthesis of *all* eras of recording technology in their bubblegum garage, and Tim Kerr's recent bands' eclectic embrace of gospel and hard-bop and Negative Approach hardcore aesthetics (Lord High Fixers et al). Comets On Fire make stunningly new out-music that could and couldn't have existed any time the last few decades. music's not a linear progression, it's a whole bunch of ideas spurting between periods of growth and hiatus, all at once. that's why it's great.

I await Sarah Kent's Dizzee Rascal review with interest...

"At the Lord High Foxhunters retro-disco club, the Toffs will be playing their 'elegant musick of the beat' to an audience of mostly expatriate Americans..."

thinking about it, TO has taken the ball and run a considerable distance. there's even less worth reading in it than the Voice.

There are at least two people at Uncut (OK, one of them's me) who would dearly like to do a special bubblegum issue, but bubblegum is noticeably devoid of barbed wire tequila soaked Elmore Peckinpah crossroads so I guess it's out of the question.

I liked it more. Much as I am delighted to be able to go out and get say, all the early Passage singles on Object, on a nicely packaged LTM CD, I kind of miss building up an impossible to find release into a vital thing-of-mystery. For me that's part of loving the music - having to work at getting it, trying to find out something about the band. If I'm honest, I suppose I haven't as much time now, so maybe off-the-shelf obscurities are better.

These days however, what with CD's and t'interweb and pretty much everything that's ever been recorded apparently being made available (with the sole exception of Lick My fucking Decals Off Baby, it would apear!), my (not insubstantial) salary never seems to be enough to allow me to keep abreast of all the new things that are being released as well as all the older stuff which is constantly being unearthed or re-released in a variety of different versions and configurations.

x-post

Stewart that'll be Lick My Decals Off Baby and Starsailor, neither being available on CD due to endless legal dispute with Herb Cohen/Gail Zappa/whoever else is involved re. the Straight Records catalogue. Ditto Cameo-Parkway (Allen Klein, who else?) which is why you can't get the original ?/Mysterians 96 Tears on CD nor any of the gaping holes in any Northern Soul CD compilation ("You Didn't Say A Word," "Night Owl," etc.).

I dunno about Starsailor, but I believe one of the guys from the Beefheart list actually tracked Herb Cohen down several years ago and managed to persuade him to write a letter to Warner Brothers, advising them them that he didn't have any legal title to Lick My Decals Off Baby (as they had previously been insisting), they did!

The really sad bit about this is (and I have this on extremely good authority btw) that a couple of years ago, someone at Rhino had apparently pretty much assembled the whole thing, completely remastered, additional CD of bonus tracks including various outtakes, the whole instrumental version of the album that's kicking about on tapes, etc. etc. etc.; but then that person left Rhino and no-one else seems to be arsed to finish the job off.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguide/internet/story/0,14702,1483619,00.html