Recently a social media acquaintance of mine was complaining there about the casual cruelty of the UK music press back in the day.... speculating that the insulting things written must have discouraged so many musicians with something to contribute from ever entering the fray in the first place, for fear of having their sensitivities bruised...
This stirred a number of thoughts...
The first was that to be a public figure, then and now, you really do have to be pretty thick-skinned.
The second was that there's hardly any shortage, then and now, of people coming forward with their musical offerings... If only more of them had been discouraged! (Same applies to creatives in any and all fields).
The third was that one of the things that gave music journalism its exuberance and spice - we're talking back in the day more than nowadays - is that it's only a notch or two above how people talk about music in pubs or in the living room with their loved ones. It's a slightly better organised, marginally more literary version of vernacular speech - a poncified version of casual shit-shooting.
Think about how you and your partner, you and your pals, you and your family, talk about music, or sport, or any entertainment of any kind - like what's on the TV. About any public figure at all. Think of the things that are said in the privacy of the home, or around the pub table. No punches get pulled! The talk is colorfully and humorously insulting - often physically insulting. And generally it's categorical - insult or praise is daubed in scathing black and white, rather than gentle shades of grey. The natural modes that your civilian opinionator seems to fall into are the sweepingly dismissive or the gushing.
Quotidian arts criticism, if we can call it that, is not a measured discourse, a fair-minded discourse, a subtle discourse, a discourse of restraint and nuance. You call it like you see it, how you feel it.
Well, I think music paper writing - for better and worse - was far closer to that than, say, to London Review of Books. (Which can be cutting, anyway, in its own refined, belle-lettrist way).
Anyway, these thoughts reminded me of some old music paper clips I'd come across recently.
One of the most insult-filled pages in a typical rock weekly issue was the Singles Column - generally, after about the sixth or seventh single (and possibly earlier, if the reviewer was unlucky with that week's harvest) the writing gets steadily more abusive.
Probably the meanest things I've ever written have been in the second half of the singles page.
That's partly because you get quite irritable and cranky the deeper you get into the all-night ordeal of doing the singles - exasperation and impatience levels rise steadily as Thursday night turns into Friday morning.
But mostly it's because it's just staggering how much shite music.... no-reason-to-exist music.... actively aurally offensive music, gets released. You actually do wish at this point to discourage musicians from continuing to pump noxiousness into the atmosphere.
But these particular clips are different - it's pop musicians who've been invited to do the singles reviewing this week!
And despite having been on the receiving end of critical obloquy themselves, despite the fact that they will probably run into some of the artists they slag off in the dressing room area of Top of the Pops, ... these pop star reviewers - Midge Ure, George Michael & Andrew Ridgely, Green Gartside - are harshly dismissive about nearly all of the week's crop.
Hark at Green's comments about one of Haircut 100 needing dental treatment!
This reminds me of another occasion - an interview, I think - where Green made fun of Martin Fry's acne. Something along the lines of "where would Martin be without Trevor Horn and a stick of Valderma?"
Some great stuff here. It makes me wonder how much work the transcribing journalists and editors had to do to sharpen the reviewers' opinions into punchy verdicts.
ReplyDeleteMore than the cruelty, though, what strikes me is how sharp their judgments are, both aesthetically and commercially. All of them understand the art form and marketplace they are working in, and are able to articulate strong opinions, both positive and negative. I mean, if you were managing Haircut 100, you probably would tell Les to get his teeth fixed!
That is surely the other side of what some people see as cruelty: passionate enthusiasm for one thing necessarily implies distaste for something else. It's easiest to be even-tempered when you are even-handed, and you don't really care much either way.
This is true far beyond the UK music press. You can find plenty of examples of absolutely brutal language being used by enthusiasts for Modernist literature or theoretical physics.
George Michael was pretty sharp - I remember one of those Jukebox Jury type programs on TV, he and Morrissey were among the guests and George had more perceptive and interesting things to say about the singles than Moz.
DeleteBut yeah you do suspect it's been sharpened and focused by whoever transcribed it and wrote it up.
Yes, the polarized viewpoint thing - this is shit / this is God - comes from caring a lot.
DeleteBut also from adolescence.
I wouldn't write the sort of savage put-downs I wrote in Singles pages nowadays, partly because it feels like putting unnecessary noxiousness into the air, and partly because mediocre or actively awful music isn't really high up on the ladder of crimes.
But rather than see that as the wisdom and empathy that comes with age, it might actually be stolidity setting in - less capacity to get worked up one way or the other.
That George Michael/Morrissey clip from 8 Days A Week is one of the great YT gems. Not only did Michael come off as more knowledgeable and open-minded than Morrissey, at one point he surprisingly announced he liked Joy Division, and not only Joy Division, but side two of "Closer", which is about as un-Wham as one can imagine. It almost made me re-think what I knew about George Michael, that maybe I should have listened without prejudice after all. Almost.
Deletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vj3HOklzUTo
One of my favorite brutal singles-page reviews is for Depeche Mode's "Just Can't Get Enough": "I can, you will."
I like a lot of George Michael's music, and I definitely think you can hear his love of Joy Division at times.
DeletePraying For Time, the first single from Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1, is a great gloomy power balled, coming from somewhere half-way between side 2 of Closer and side 1 of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.
A lot of the recent backlash against negative criticism is probably coming from people who grew up in the early days of YouTube (and much more extreme online media.) I never saw any of these videos at the time, but it was full of guys screaming their heads off as though singing "Bad Romance" was a step away from murder.
ReplyDeleteRegarding the point about having to be thick-skinned to be a public figure, I also think you have to be pretty shameless. I'm always amazed by how people like Piers Morgan, George Galloway, Katie Hopkins etc. keep going despite having not only been humiliated, but having humiliated themselves. That reflective/self-conscious aspect that is so limiting for most people just doesn't seem to be there.
ReplyDeleteWith the cruelty aspect, the problem with being rhetorically combative isn't so much the intensity, but that it tends to be so time and energy consuming. I'm perfectly capable of being the foulest person on the internet, but I tend to be conflict-averse not because I can't do conflict, but because when you get into a spat it just goes on and on and on. There's that magnetic/locked-in/overly-invested component that tends to spill over into the rest of your life.
I think the internet thing is rather different because it's not asymmetric - the insulted can insult back.
Deletebut yeah to the larger point about the interminableness of online spats.... through my fractious to put it mildly family background, I learned early that you can never a win an argument... But then I forgot that valuable lesson and certainly have been in protracted back-and-forths on blogs and internet boards over the years... and relearned it again. People never relinquish their initial position. No formulation of words is going to persuade them. It just doesn't happen - I don't think I've ever, ever seen anyone say, after X number of rounds, "oh, you're right actually. I completely change my view on this". People just dig in. It either gets increasingly unpleasant or it winds up with a "well, we'll have to agree to disagree on that one."
The worst thing is when you "win", when you post the final comment because the other person has called it a day. It just means that you have been the most obnoxious twat.
DeleteThis is all true. Although just occasionally, people don't concede in the moment, but then you hear them later and they have come round to your point of view, or at least moved closer to it.
DeleteIn music, though, I am not sure how it happens. This might seem like a naive question, but I am genuinely unsure: how do people actually get into arguments - I mean, proper arguments that feel worth pursuing - about music? It can't just be "this band is good" / "oh no they're not". Can it?
To extend that thought: when you think about the great rifts in music discourse, they tend to be pretty one-sided. I am sure some Duran Duran fans wrote in to complain about Green saying Save A Prayer was "totally bereft of any redeeming qualities. But when, say, MM in its declining years went on the attack against UK Garage, I am sure the UK Garage scene didn't notice at all.
DeleteWhen Punk happened, I don't remember any passionate defences of Prog and mainstream Rock generally. Fans either adjusted to the new dispensation, or ignored it. The emblematic reaction: Whispering Bob Harris scoffing "mock rock" at the New York Dolls, and moving swiftly on to The Band.