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?"
