Music Writers Who Influenced You

The writers I've most consciously tried to rip off recently have been Paul Morley and Matthew Collings - dismal failures at both though thanks to Collings my sentences are at least shorter*.

*(credit also to Isabel who refuses to read my stuff if the sentences are too long.)

Why oh why is everyone ever so damned afraid of long sentences? Are they just ... too prog for some folks?

The other day someone chopped up a perfectly well-structured long sentence of mind -- I'd actually spent quite a bit of time stitching the clauses of that sentence together -- and made it into two sentences, one of which was gramatically incorrect and one of which suffered from an unclear object (because suddenly the damned object was in a whole different sentence). Why this belief that short sentences are of inherent value, as evidenced by deciding that two horrible short sentences are better than one good long one?

[end rant]

Sentence of "mine," clearly.

[end rant correction]

Tom has influenced how I think about music... not so much making me pop friendly but more by suggesting that good pop didn't stop at some arbitrary point in the past.

I'm not aware of any influences on my writing style.

i'm forgetting many others...

I've read next to no Eddy, but reading others ON him was a big influence. I always liked Sarah Vowell, & her passion for music was fairly formative, as was Goldberg's at his best moments. Mainly posters/bloggers here, more than anything.

Oh yeah on topic: Reynolds, Eshun and Penman.

Nick Tosches & Stanley Booth

I don't share much musical taste with either, but the way they look at covering music, mainly that the people who make it are the story, not the music itself (particularly with feature pieces), was something that resonated with me. Plus, Hellfire and True Adventures of the Rolling Stones are two of the best pieces of writing I have ever read, regardless of period or topic.

Jon Savage for England's Dreaming, and Reynolds for writing an article on "rave" music in Details in June of 1992.

The rave article was the first time a 15 year old mt had read about electronic dance music, and Detroit Techno in particular.

Glenn McDonald knocked me out when I first discovered him - so much so that I even bought one or two Marillion records - and even though I only check in semi-regularly I imagine he still has that effect on a lot of people. Important points here being his combinations of music crit, personal details and random philosopical musings, which when you're fifteen are as far out as, oh, Lester Bangs I guess. At the same time Anthony Carew, both in my local magazine and as Gravity Girl on the web, pretty much had the monopoly on my more tasteful non-TWAS- inspired purchases.

Then it was Simon R obviously - I discovered him at the same time as I discovered ecstacy, which is probably the key to the whole thrust behind what I listen to and write about now. Strangely, I remember Ned recommending "Generation Ecstacy" to me, and I replied that I didn't think I enjoyed dance music enough yet.

Tom E was equally important in that when I first stumbled across FT and the formative beginnings of the ILM/FT coterie in mid-99 I already liked pop but would never have considered thinking about it that much - there was a great article that really explained and sold the general FT aesthetic, about The Shangri- las and acid house... Tom? Sterling's bang on about the real pop/fake pop article too, and I'd add the Singles of the Nineties list as well (another strange thing: Tom was the first person to recommend UK Garage to me. "I think you'd like it," he said).

I haven't read nearly as much rock crit as others here seem to have, though I'm currently digesting the first issue of Frank Kogan's "Why Music Sucks", which is a wondrous thing. Otherwise, yeah, weblogs. Josh is crucial, not just because I envy his thinking skills but because he frequently forces me to extend or remodel my own ideas. Sterling's credit to me is v. pleasing but quite often my posts are secret homages to In Review anyway. Everything I read that's good tends to buffet my writing and listening in certain directions though.

Helen, when I say "influenced" I mean reading something and thinking to yourself, "That's an interesting way to go about things -- I might try that myself."

i feel i ought to do this properly so will not asnwer now, except to point out that as helenf says the i-word is extremely poorly formed and unsatisfactory

I still have that issue somewhere around, great article. I already knew Reynolds' work very well, so for me it was a logical extension of his MM pieces in ways, and eventually was rewritten for...

Strangely, I remember Ned recommending "Generation Ecstacy" to me, and I replied that I didn't think I enjoyed dance music enough yet.

Sometimes it just takes a little time. :-)

Later, I was thrilled to find that the writers for NY Rocker had the same taste as me--they had a Top 40 column as well as features on disco, No Wave and all the latest stuff from all over the world. Really diverse. Can't say was influenced by them so much as relieved that somebody had the same way of looking at things as I did, i.e. "Just get me off!"

Changing the way I write about music: Christgau, now and forever. The man is the best, toughest editor I've ever worked with, and I think a lot of things I try to do in my writing come from having imprinted on his '70s guide at an impressionable age, even if what I do doesn't come out at all similar.

Writing about music: aside from some reviews here and there that I never really paid much attention to the bylines on (though I remember subscribing to Stereo Review in high school mostly for the record reviews, since I didn't have the money for the equipment, and being constantly pissed off at Parke Puterbaugh), I barely read any Music Writing before stumbling across Glenn McDonald. Like Tim I bought a couple Marillion albums because of him, though I also had plenty of recommendations from people on rec.music.progressive (come to think of it, I read usenet and other places like that, before this, which counts for something). I didn't like them (some of a live one for a while, but it didn't stick). I think my infatuation with McDonald's writing came mostly from his enthusiasm and just the idea of some guy somewhere spending all his time writing about music, liking what he liked, writing the way he liked. Now, though, I'm totally fed up with him and only check his site out of a weird sense of duty, and I skim through to see if I think he's changed any. (Nope.)

After that: Tom Ewing, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Mike Daddino, and Lewis Rowell, who wrote a cool book called Thinking About Music. Ideas about approach from the last three, and from Tom some kind of respect for a historical viewpoint, the kind of contentious position-taking that I usually want to avoid, and the aforementioned thing about my tastes.

After that: the FT/ILM massive, though more often on individual people's sites or in their articles, and nothing specific, often (though I'm sure it's traceable). Despite Tom's frequent disparaging of 'community' I think it's pretty obvious that some kind of Reynoldsian/Enoian 'scenius' thing is at work here, for better or worse.

Greil Marcus - his essays on the Beatles and punk rock in that big Rolling Stone anthology knocked me out when I was 14. The latter led me to Lipstick Traces, which I may never actually finish, but which seriously shook up my whole view of the world. I've read nearly all of his books, and I'm afraid his particular way of looking at music has become inseparably entwined with my own. These days he's starting to sound like a parody of himself (I could write his Salon columns myself: just find one or two really obscure albums of covers of old folk music, add a few inscrutable remarks about recent television, find a pointless reference to Elvis somewhere in the morning paper...) but he can still surprise me every now and then.

Lester Bangs - haven't read him in a while, but easily the best writer of any rock critic and probably the only one who ever made me laugh. My favorite is probably the Astral Weeks review, and I don't even like the album much.

I have a big post about long sentences which I wrote before the crash. Maybe I'll start an ILE thread with it.

Although the main influences on my writing here and on CoM tend to be outside music - owe v. great deal to David Thomson, Iain Sinclair, Peter Ackroyd, and going back to the roots, William Hazlitt.

The ghosts of Orson Welles and Dennis Potter of course hover behind all of it.

Simon gets the nod for reaffirming and reupping a hundred times my love for and interest in dance music/culture; he wasn't too shabby a theorist when it came to rawk, either, though his and my tastes differ pretty sharply there.

two recent books I can't recommend enough, that have really crystallized or enhanced my own hearing or, hopefully, understanding and/or writing, are Tomorrow Never Knows by Nick Bromell, which deals with '60s rock through the prism of psychedelic drugs (he manages to make the kind of connections, on the page, that a lot of folks make with their favorite music while tripping/stoned/whatever, and he manages to not sound like an idiot doing it--one of the most difficult tasks any writer can accomplish, much less so smartly); and Fargo Rock City by Chuck Klosterman, a memoir/group of critical essays about listening to hair metal in the American Midwest during the '80s. Everyone who contributes to ILM needs to read both of these, point fucking blank.

20-23: simon r. (in an odd twist - although not -so- odd for suburban american kids - i was raving to simon's beloved hardcore between the ages of 15-18 without knowing a single thing about the music or the culture that birthed it. [cue napster era downloading of certain tracks: "holy shit, i remember that one!" ad nauseum] discovered his work at precisely the same time i was getting back into dance; it all made sense. what i aspire to, more or less.)

(also for 20-23, plenty of issues of The Wire, both past and present. i'm still recovering.)

except...

23-now: ft/nylpm/ilm massive. (i can't even really explain the shift in both my writing and thinking since stumbling on ilm, etc. this past summer. tom - if nothing else - has been a major influence, if only in his gentle mocking of my tastes and critical stances. the ilm regs of course, and all the links on the nylpm sidebar. which frankly i'm honored to be a part of. sometimes, i will agree that there's a little too much inbred backslapping going on among us. but not a single piece of "real" music writing has felt as...well, good since.)

and nitsuh, the reason i hate long sentences is because i can't stand that nasty green underlining beneath half of my paragraphs in Microsoft Word.

Maximum Rock & Roll, but Flipside and Thrasher were always way more fun.

Breathlessly positive let's-support-the-scene fanzines were a big influence before I heard most of the bands in them and imagined all these fantastic bands all in it together FOR THE KIDS! (cf Banned In DC). Not much to do with reality, but having that fantasy was one of the nice things about hardcore.

Trashy paperbacks: Up and Down With..., True Adventures of..., Hammer of the Gonads, Heroes & Villians, Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky, No- one Gets Out Alive, Chet Flippo's Hank Wms bio (as much for that photograph of scrawny hopped-up Hank behind bars as the text), Tosches's Hellfire, Cherie Curie's autobio.

Chuck Eddy's heavy metal list book I read and reread on the can for about a year. I still find new things in that book that make me laugh and think.

Psychotic Reactions & Carb Dung is like something I ate too much of once, I feel a little green just thinking about digging into it again but it must have satisfied some great hunger when I first found it.

Ian Carr's biography of Miles is probably my favourite full length critical jazz bio but the competition is not stiff. I was hostile to the electric stuff at the time I read it and although it didn't convert me it probably made the conversion easier later. Other jazz bios, even rated ones like Russell's Bird, Art Pepper's Straight Life Priestley's Mingus etc I've generally found disappointing. Ditto collections of critical essays by the likes of Gary Giddings and Martin Williams.

Ian MacDonald's "Revolution in the Head" was interesting. The opening essay about 60s culture was beyond-parody awful, typical pop critic thinking he's got something deep to say about culture, but the rest of the book's mixture of scrupulous but not too technical musical analysis and biographical detail seemed to suggest a way forward to a post-adolescent way of discussing pop music, even though I disagreed with many of MacDonald's conclusions.

99% of rock and pop criticism I just find unredeemably bad, with minor exceptions for Richard Williams; and Nick Hornby and Giles Smith who were at least entertaining in a self-deprecating way even thought they'd nothing much new to say about the music itself. All, interestingly, do different things now. Why anyone would read more than one book by the likes of Greil Marcus is beyond my comprehension.

Of non-music writers Nietzche and Thomas Mann made me interested in Wagner and in Manns' case (and to a lesser extent) Schoenberg. I like Forster's description of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony in "Howards End". Frank Conroy ("Body and Soul") Vikram Seth (Indian music in "A Suitable Boy", Western chamber music in "An Equal Music") and Carson McCullers all write very well about music; in a more idiosyncractic way, so does James Joyce.

Mark Levine's "The Jazz Theory Book" is the best analysis of jazz theory I've read and Paul F Berliner's "Thinking in Jazz" is a brilliant cultural history of how the great jazz musicians learnt their trade.

!!

Nah, actually I don't think I've ever gone off a record after reading a bad review (or, much worse, a good review I disagree with). I have occasionally moved from mild dislike to intense hatred after reading good reviews, though its always difficult to be self aware enough to know if that hatred is for the actual music or other people's opinions.

Even more contradictory, the only writer I can actually recall changing my opinion was someone who isn't even slightly a favourite writer, nor (as far as I know) an attractive personality. Stuart Cosgrove. Sorry.

My favorite trashy rock paperback: Going Down with Janis by Peggy Caserta.

Bam Balam, Cripes, All that Ever Mattered.

I really don't know where to post this...Scott Woods and I recently paid tribute to our long-distance friend Steven Rubio--longtime blogger about music, film, and baseball--who unexpectedly died this past March. (Unexpected in the sense of his age, 70; he was hospitalized in early February, and at a certain point it became clear he wouldn't leave.) We give all our background with Steven in the Zoom, so I won't go over all that here. His blog, Steven Rubio's Online Life, had been around for 20+ years; he was also an early Baseball Prospectus contributor, and he has an essay in the book Talking about Pauline Kael: Critics, Filmmakers, and Scholars Remember an Icon.

https://begonias.typepad.com/srubio/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_TxxrtKp34

Not really familiar with his work but sorry to hear he's gone this young. Will check out some of it

Very sorry to hear this. I've enjoyed watching you guys talk movies over the last few years (Steven was a quality Letterboxd follow as well).

Thanks...yeah, I think Letterboxd figured into one of Steven's ongoing series on his blog.

Lester Bangs, in particular his essay 'Of Pop and Pies and Fun'. It really made me think about what a band or a performer could do on stage, particularly in subverting the traditional power dynamic of a rock show (where the performer is a lord way up high and the audience are serfs way down low).

Bob Stanley, for sure. Not necessarily his writing style but his taste. If he bigs something up I need to find out, and fast.