As veteran musicians headline Glastonbury this weekend, does the best writing about rock music also hail from a different era? Is anybody today as good as Greil Marcus or Lester Bangs? Having spent 20 years as a pop journalist, John Harris asks whether music writing has lost its way
This month, Faber - in partnership with the indepedent record label Domino - publishes the frst instalment of a twice-yearly music publication, Loops, an “exciting new journal dedicated to engaging, intelligent and diverse writing about music”. It looks elegantly off-kilter and perhaps a little too self-conscious - like the kind of publication you’d pick up at an art gallery. Over its 200-odd pages, writers from the literary world collide with those who have made their name in rock journalism.
The content ranges from an unpublished remembrance of Nick Drake by the renowned music writer Nick Kent, though a Simon Armitage poem that mentions the Manic Street Preachers and Red Hot Chili Peppers, to a good piece by the American writer Amanda Petrusich about the passionate subculture that surrounds antique 78s. Over time, Loops may find favour with people who want a kind of long-form commentary that they cannot find on the news-stand, though its pronounced emphasis on the past says a lot about where rock, and the culture that surrounds it, has ended up.
Consider this weekend’s Glastonbury festival. At one time, the police weren’t allowed on-site, there was a solitary big stage and you got the sense of going somewhere a few light years from the cultural mainstream. Now it is a national event on a par with Wimbledon and the Cup Final. Again, the past is present and correct: among this year’s attractions are such reconvened national treasures as the Specials and Blur, along with the 60s monarchs Crosby, Stills and Nash - without Neil Young, though he’s also playing - and good old Status Quo. “Glasto” is now everybody’s property, holding out the promise of fun for all the family. You can slum it and position yourself at the cutting edge, or take the kids and a picnic.
So it is with music writing, and the fact that more refined (and older) voices seem to be growing ever louder. Harper Perennial is about to publish an engaging new collection, Heavy Rotation, in which such esteemed writers as Colm Tóibín and Pankaj Mishra write about the albums that “changed their lives” (Joni Mitchell’s Blue and Abba’s Super Trouper respectively). In recent memory, Jay McInerney has (rather fawningly) interviewed the Strokes; ditto, though with less impressive results, Douglas Coupland and Morrissey.
Whereas music writing was once the province of a few hundred thousand fans and a handful of writers, usually in specialised magazines, it’s now in the bookshop, the red-top and “quality” press, the blogosphere and beyond. The result too often suggests a very modern combination of abundance and short weight. To put it another way: how is it that writing about music now is everywhere, and yet seems to be nowhere at all?
In 1989, Harvard University Press published Lipstick Traces, the second book by the American writer and critic Greil Marcus. It was a dazzling creation, mapping out an untold “secret history” which connected the Sex Pistols, the Dadaists, the Parisian événements of 1968, that legendary subversive clique the Situationist International and an Anabaptist revolt in 16th-century Germany, led by a notorious libertine named John of Leyden. Among the book’s most ardent fans, it sparked real epiphanies, as indicated by a quote on the paperback version from an unnamed student at the University of Chicago: “When I finished Lipstick Traces, I wanted to dye my hair all the colours on the jacket.”
The book is about to reach its 20th anniversary, and will be honoured in November with an expanded edition, work on which has only filled its author with a new enthusiasm for the story he told. “I’d been intrigued by the way that punk had always reminded me of May ‘68,” he says now. “I didn’t know why - maybe it had to do with the rhetoric, or the graphics, or maybe the way the songs seemed to be a match for the poetic slogans that were graffitied on walls in Paris. It was just an itch.” To the horror of his initial publisher, the result was a heroic detour - what was initially conceived as “a book about punk” became “500 pages with some stuff about punk at the beginning, and stuff about punk at the end, and a middle 400 pages about avant-garde artists and would-be revolutionaries and medieval heretics.”
In that sense, to cite Lipstick Traces as an example of music writing may seem misplaced. Then again, given its author’s early years as a writer and editor on Rolling Stone magazine, and the book’s foundation in the serious rock journalism that Marcus partly pioneered, it stands as a singularly idiosyncratic product of a genre-cum-tradition rooted in the business of writing about musicians and the whirl of ideas that once surrounded them. After all, when music writing pulled away from showbiz froth to become more substantial, part of the point was to have the ambition to draw lines from bands to art movements and obscure bits of history. Besides, even if most of Lipstick Traces is about something else, when Marcus turns his attention to rock’s noise and spectacle - and punk in particular - he manages some of the finest music writing ever to make it on to the page.
A passage from the book’s first chapter proves it. It’s about the Sex Pistols’ last concert, at the Winterland ballroom in San Francisco on 14 January 1978, the last engagement on a tour that had found them confronting outraged crowds in the American South, and tumbling towards their demise. As Marcus sees it, the occasion was “as close to judgment day as any staged event ever got”, which is the kind of hyperbole in which he often trades, though when he describes the scene, the cheque is cashed. You could be reading fiction, but it doesn’t matter. “With the Sex Pistols on stage,” he writes,
everything changed. Slumping like Quasimodo under heavy air, Johnny Rotten cut through the curiosity of the crowd with a twist of his neck. He hung on to the microphone stand like a man caught in a wind tunnel: ice, paper cups, coins, books, hats, and shoes, flew by him as if sucked up by a vacuum … Sid Vicious was there to bait the crowd; two fans climbed on to the stage and bloodied his nose. A representation of a representation, even streaked with his own gore, his arm bandaged with a self-inflicted gouging, he was, in a strange way, hardly there at all: this was actually not happening … Paul Cook was hidden behind his drums. Steve Jones sounded like he was playing a guitar factory, not a guitar; it was inconceivable that there were only three instruments on stage. The stage was full of ghosts; song by song, Johnny Rotten ground his teeth down to points.
My 20-year-old copy of Lipstick Traces is the one book I would save from my proverbial burning house. When I bought it, I was a 19-year-old undergraduate who contributed weekly concert reviews to the British music weekly Sounds, and far too fond of frittering away my money on books about music. Though they weren’t nearly as crowded, the “pop/rock” sections of bookshops looked much the same as they do now: crammed with pulp and hacked-out biography, but also dotted with works of real brilliance. I got hold of as many of them as I could: Marcus’s masterful treatise on archetypally American music, Mystery Train; the Irish wunderkind Nik Cohn’s trailblazing and impressionistic rock history Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom, published in 1969 and written when he was just 22; Stanley Booth’s crisp yet romantic The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones; Jon Savage’s history of punk, England’s Dreaming; and Philip Norman’s Beatles biography Shout!, less than great on the music, but just about perfect on the drama and pathos of their career.
By the time I had reached my mid-20s, Ian McDonald had filled the hole Norman had left with 1994’s Revolution in the Head, a near flawless song-by-song study of the Beatles’ oeuvre that gave all the clichés about their genius the ring of truth. The same year, Peter Guralnick published Last Train to Memphis, the first of an epic two-volume biography of Elvis (the sequel, Careless Love, would follow in 1999). A little further downmarket lurked a paperback that had long been enthusiastically passed between hard-bitten rock readers: The Diary of a Rock’n'Roll Star by Ian Hunter, lead singer with Mott the Hoople. His tale of a 1972 American tour - full of comedy, backhanded romance and the implication of inevitable failure - still stands as the best book written by a British rock musician.
In their wildly different ways, all of these books have the right stuff - but then again, to think about music writing exclusively in terms of books is perhaps to miss the point. The form was born in mimeographs, newspapers and magazines. As with the music itself, a lot of the best music writing has implicitly recognised its built-in obsolescence, and was never written with any eye to longevity. To understand its short-lived glory, it’s probably better to read the memoirs and occasional biographies of writers than their journalism.
The history of rock writing begins around 1966 when, with what was once mere “pop” being taken seriously, the American writer Paul Williams published a journal-cum-fanzine titled Crawdaddy, which aimed to bring to rock music the kind of cerebral writing long devoted to folk and jazz. Other currents were swirling around the more educated bits of the US counterculture, among them the expressive precedents set by the Beats and the possibilities suggested by New Journalism.
And so a new idea spread: as Marcus puts it, the notion of writing about music “passionately … as if it was the most important thing in the world, as if the stakes were high, as if everything mattered. There were no rules. There was nobody there to tell you, ‘This is silly, this doesn’t make sense, this is too long, why are you connecting this with that?’ There was no procedure. There was no such term as ‘rock criticism’, really. No one knew what they were doing.”
Initially based in San Francisco, Rolling Stone magazine was founded in 1967, and has endured. In 1969, a gang of competing misfits based in Detroit launched the very different Creem, which breathed its last in the early 1990s, and has never received its just historical deserts. Possessed of a humour and irreverence of a piece with the best music it covered, Creem’s reputation rests partly on its most legendary alumnus: Lester Bangs, whose name is still a byword for rock writing at its most unrestrained and passionate.
Bangs, who began as a Rolling Stone reviewer, was a tragic hero: no elegantly wasted rock Byron, but a podgy, nerdy-looking man, who would die aged 33, as a result of an overdose of Valium and the painkiller Darvon (his recreational substance of choice was a snooze-inducing cough medicine called Romilar). His work is often awash with the colloquial jive-talk that was fashionable during his 70s heyday, and is not always writing of literary brilliance, but given what he brought to his time, that’s our problem, not his.
In Cameron Crowe’s autobiographical film Almost Famous, the tale of his progress as a teenaged Rolling Stone writer, Bangs is played by Philip Seymour Hoffman as an avuncular figure whose advice about how to approach the music industry cuts straight to the quick: “These people are not your friends.” That portrait chimes with the memories of the British writer Nick Kent, who was tutored by Bangs in the early 1970s, having flown to Detroit, and made his way to Creem’s base of operations. “At that time, he was like this kind of mother-hen figure for young journalists,” Kent says. “They’d send him their copy, and he’d give them advice.” He sums up Bangs’s approach to music as a matter of trying to divine its moral centre, or the lack of one: “When you listen to this record, what are these people trying to sell you? It’s not enough just to like the chord progression on a couple of tracks and the cowbell sound. You got to get beneath the surface: if these people turned up on your doorstep, would you invite them in? And if not, why are you listening to their music?”
Bangs also taught that rock music’s losers tend to be much more interesting than its winners. His prose style was soaked up from the Beats: “Sometimes the pills and drink got the better of him, and he lapsed into a clownishness,” Kent says, “but at its best, his writing had a real poetic flow. When it connected, it was beautiful.”
Though he often made plans for books, Bangs never wrote one (aside from a hack biography of Blondie) - but his two posthumous anthologies, Psychedelic Reactions and Carburetor Dung (edited by Marcus, his one-time mentor, and first published in 1987) and Mainlines, Blood Feasts and Bad Taste (2002), attest to his brilliance. Both are built on a realisation that not only eludes most music writers but is difficult to capture in print: pop music is usually cheap and even absurd, but the best of it achieves a preciousness - the quality of being “righteous”, as Bangs called it - that transcends all that.
What really got Bangs going was the prospect of that quality’s disappearance. As a mark of his fierce moral sense, the latter volume includes a razored attack on Bob Dylan for his 1976 song “Joey”, a hagiographical portrait of the New York mafia boss Joey Gallo, which Bangs damned as a piece of “repellent romanticist bullshit”. Similarly, in Psychotic Reactions, there is an evocative chronicle of his time on tour with the Clash - a masterclass in on-the-road reportage - in which he watches, horrified, as the band’s down-with-the-kids ethos is rendered meaningless by one of their roadies humiliating and beating up a fan. “Lester wrote with satire, with parody, with invective and with love,” Marcus says. “But I don’t think his best pieces were, ‘Oh this is great, this has realised all my hopes’. I think his most effective writing was written out of disappointment: a sense of either betrayal, or possible betrayal.”
Perhaps Bangs’s greatest gift was the ability to slice through cant and sentimentality - and to understand the harm that nostalgia could do to rock. He died in 1982, but he foresaw ourdewy-eyed obsession with the 1960s, and understood what it would mean. It’s all there in his quickly written take on the hysteria surrounding the murder of that decade’s most-mourned son, published in the Los Angeles Times under the headline “Thinking the Unthinkable About John Lennon”:
I don’t know which is more pathetic, the people of my generation who refuse to let their 1960s adolescence die a natural death, or the younger ones who will snatch and gobble any shred, any scrap that someone declared dead over 10 years ago. Perhaps the younger ones are sadder, because at least my peers may have some nostalgic memory of the long-cold embers they’re kneeling to blow upon, whereas the kids who have to make do with things like the [Broadway] Beatlemania show are being sold a bill of goods … Did you watch the TV specials on Tuesday night? Did you see all those people standing in the street in front of the Dakota apartment where Lennon lived singing Hey Jude? What do you think the real - cynical, sneeringly sarcastic, witheringly witty and iconoclastic - John Lennon would have said about that?
It may have been Americans who minted rock writing as a new idiom, but it was Britain that gave rise to a large-scale weekly music press. Thanks to such titles as International Times, Oz and Frendz, the UK managed its own version of “underground” publishing, but it was through two already established weekly papers that British music writers found their voice. Melody Maker dated back to 1926; the New Musical Express - the NME - started life in 1952. As pop gave way to rock, they were joined by Sounds, and by the early 1970s - well before newspapers or TV gave rock much coverage - these three magazines formed a much-coveted line of communication that ran between London and box-bedroom dreamers in the shires and suburbs. To break the monotony of the teen/student week, all three reached the shops on Wednesday mornings.
Behind the printed page lay a culture somewhere between Fleet Street and an undergraduate common room, full of people whose energy was heightened by an understanding that the fun couldn’t possibly last. The collected journalistic works of the NME’s Tony Parsons - the grandly titled Dispatches from the Frontline of Popular Culture, published in 1994 - trowels on the mythology, but gets to the heart of the young music writer’s essential condition: “We were callow and cruel and selling 250,000 copies a week. We were so successful that our owners left us alone to merrily run amok. And if you were lucky enough to work there, it commandeered your life . . . [but] it was never meant to last. Not one of my contemporaries ever considered making the music press a lifetime’s work. It was like doing your national service - a couple of years and you were out.”
Underlining what a clearing-house for young talent the weekly music press once was, the roll-call of its graduates also includes Julie Burchill, Tim Lott, Danny Baker, Stuart Maconie, Barbara Ellen and Richard Williams. Their career paths highlight a blurring between popular and serious culture in Britain in the 1980s and after - from the back of a tour bus to a seat on Newsnight Review inside a couple of years - that is crucial to the question of how music writing has changed.
Nick Kent arrived at the NME in 1972. He talks about his early love of such writers as Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe and Hunter S Thompson - and his belief in “a journalism of participation, as opposed to observation”. What he calls “the thing with the notebook” seemed clapped-out, and he felt a drive to get inside the music he wanted to write about. He succeeded, as anyone who has read his collection The Dark Stuff will know. Made up of original and reworked material, dating back to his time at NME and the Face, its style is unadorned, but it brims with insights.
Take his account of joining the Rolling Stones’ tour party, and watching Keith Richards and Mick Jagger’s behaviour at an aftershow soiree, where the display put on by two faux-lesbian erotic performers was interrupted by the accidental starting of a fire:
Jagger and Richards … were seated in two throne-like chairs right at the head of the party. But they weren’t moving a muscle. Instead, they continued to watch with cold, dead eyes as the flames increased until they finally began burning the women’s flesh. They leaped up, screaming hysterically. After what seemed like an eternity, someone proffered some water and the fire was extinguished. Then one of the women - naked and humiliated - turned and stalked right up to the two Stones. For a second it looked like she might hit one of them but instead she stood only a matter of inches away from both of them, and spat a series of vicious-sounding German curses directly in their faces. Yet there was no sign of shock … They just sat there, radiating this numb, burned-out cool, this ‘you can never reach me’ sense of otherness … It was like their souls had taken up permanent residence in the sentiments of the most sublimely loveless song ever written, immortalised by Peggy Lee, Leiber-Stoller’s “Is That All There Is?”
Here Kent taps into Lester Bangs’s belief in rock’s moral aspect: even if it is the most commodified art form in history, it remains democratic, open to all-comers, rooted in the experience of “the kids” - and delivered by musicians who, even in the vaguest terms, are usually at pains to give the impression that they care. If its practitioners embrace the opposite of generosity of spirit - cold arrogance, often bordering on cruelty - it all ends up somewhere very ill-advised indeed.
Kent, whose memoir Apathy for the Devil will be published next year, remained at the NME until the early 1980s. “I was never edited,” he marvels today. “There was no interference at all, and I was also getting paid.” Looking back, he takes umbrage at the arrival of Parsons, Burchill and so on, who would serve their time, and then branch out: as he sees it, this signalled a shift “away from people driven by a deep love of music towards more opportunistic agendas”.
“When I joined the NME,” he says, “I didn’t think, ‘If I play my cards right, three years down the line I’m going to become the wine correspondent of the Daily Telegraph’.” He also bemoans what happened to a lot of music writing during the 1980s: a swerve towards cultural-studies and cod-philosophy, resulting in endless references to Barthes and Baudrillard, and worse. On this, I can only agree: Marcus’s flights of intellectual fancy are worth following because the writing is so good, but too much of this stuff was clunky and laboured.
Between 1992 and 1995, I was a writer at the NME; from then until 2000, I worked first at the monthly Q, and then went on to edit the now-defunct Select, a title that floated on the tide of Britpop and sank when it receded. At the NME, the ghosts of Kent, Parsons and Burchill still haunted the office: we dutifully ran amok, and despite regular sales wobbles, clung to the idea that for as long as there was a weekly gig guide and news section, the readers would buy the paper despite our outbreaks of self-indulgence. What I remember most clearly is the ceaseless drive for novelty.
These days, mindful of an apparently shrinking readership for music magazines, and long since alerted to the importance of “branding”, the NME is a much more market-savvy publication, built around a fraction of the words it used to contain (it also has its own TV channel, and online radio station). That’s not to say that it doesn’t do its job very well: people of my generation are in no position to hold forth about the tastes of 21st-century adolescents, and I would imagine that if I were 15 again, and hopelessly hung up on music, my relationship with it would be exactly the one that took me to the newsagent’s every Wednesday morning. What’s missing, for better or worse, are the more writerly flourishes of yesteryear. Each week, it speeds through its 70 or so pages with barely a pause for thought - and, to be fair, it probably has to. Rock culture has turned even more impatient, promiscuous and scatterbrained. Apart from anything else, music is now free and easy to download. For many listeners songs simply shuffle away on iPod, liberated from any context.
There is interesting, expansive writing about music online - as proved by the US website Pitchfork, and a new generation of writers including the New Yorker’s Sasha Frere Jones and K-Punk (Mark Fisher). But if music writing is at least partly a descriptive enterprise, you begin to understand why it might be falling away: when the main event is only a click away, there isn’t always much point to rhapsodies or forensic critiques.
In the UK, moaning about the music press has been a Great British pastime for at least three decades: suffice to say that as befits an occasional music writer of a certain age, I write a little for Mojo and Q, and am a regular reader of their fellow monthlies the Word and Uncut, and though I understand the criticism thrown their way, much of it strikes me as the product of a whole range of misunderstandings. Compared with plenty of other modern media they have the underrated advantage of being written by people who know what they are talking about. There was never a truly golden age of rock publishing, and in terms of the quality of their writing, they are all more consistent than the music papers of the 1970s and 80s. Moreover, though we may miss prose as vibrant and irreverent as that written by such rare talents as Kent and Bangs, its shortage is not a matter of any editorial failures, but of huge shifts in the way rock music is produced, consumed and understood.
This is not just down to technological change. Rock’s once-frantic pace of development has long since slowed, partly thanks to the second-hand nostalgia that Bangs predicted: it’s now an old and self-referential form, seemingly fated to repeat itself. This change, I think, is one expression of the great cultural calming that began with the end of the cold war, when even the more interesting aspects of popular culture began to lose their insurrectionary charge. The days when music could completely embody the sociopolitical currents of its time - when, in essence, rock was popular culture - have gone, perhaps for ever. The breed of neurotic loudmouth that gave us not just Lennon, Bowie, Rotten et al, but the most notable writers at Creem and the NME, seems to be pretty much extinct.
Certainly, divining much of any interest in some of the most successful modern music or the lives of the people who make it may well be a mug’s game. In the absence of enough creative substance, you too often end up with writing that reflects the empty stuff of commerce. “Mostly,” says Marcus, “when you read about musicians, what’s being reviewed is their career, not their work: how is this record going to contribute to the building of their audience, or their ability to reclaim an audience that’s been lost?” Even when a suitably rich subject for music writing comes along, and a few writers scale the heights, the fact that just about every media outlet now wants a piece soon wrings the story dry, as proved by those high-profile unfortunates Pete Doherty and Amy Winehouse.
So it is that some - most, even - of today’s most accomplished writing about music necessarily relates to the past. During the last few years, for example, by far the most impressive music book has been Rip It Up and Start Again, by Reynolds, one of the few music writers whose background in the Barthes/Baudrillard school has reaped enviable rewards. A work of music history both forensic and enthusiastic, its mixture of intelligence and brio is perfectly matched to the genre whose story it tells: so-called “post-punk”, which drew to a close sometime in the mid-1980s. It had the same addictive effect on me as Lipstick Traces, and brought home a realisation: that though serious music writing was born well away from the bookshelf, that’s exactly where its future may lie.
This is the logic behind Loops, Heavy Rotation and the anthologies and journals that will follow them. But in presenting rock writing in such a high-end format, they point up what might have been lost: the fast-turning pop-cultural wheel, ink coming off on your fingers, the old idea of the righteous and precious existing in the midst of cheapness and absurdity. If, like an endangered species, music writing has to be prised away from all that, and kept in a metaphorical glass case, so be it - though that fate puts me in mind of what that ludicrous old creature Keith Richards habitually says when asked about the state of modern music: “I hear a lot of rock … what happened to the roll?”
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