Frank Owen - Pop Journalism overview - Melody Maker - May 24th 1986

   

Frank Owen

Pop Journalism: Write or Wrong?

Melody Maker, May 24th 1986

So you want to be a pop journalist? Free records, free tickets, the occasional trip abroad and the chance to tell your favourite rock star what was wrong with his last album. But you don't want to be a hack, I hear you say. Neither do you want to be a media brat or vacuous lifestyle sociologist sussing out every pose. You want to shine but you also want credibility. A difficult one that.

In the absence of a strong street style like punk you're not going to make your reputation jumping on to the latest bandwagon. Pop music these days is a culture of fragments and you're going to have to reflect that in your writing. You're also going to have to come to terms with the fact that pop as counter-culture, as radical disruption, is long since dead.

Unlike the editor of the NME who still believes in the rebellious spirit of the paper, and unlike the bimbo from MTV who, on the BBC's recent history of the pop video, proclaimed that "MTV was for the rebels", pop is now fake resistance and there are few sights more pathetic than a pop writer selling you some dodgy new band under the guise that they're going to bring about the downfall of Western capitalism as we know it.

I know what you want to be. You want to be what Jon Savage calls "a post-modern pop journalist".

HOW TO BE A POSTMODERN POP JOURNALIST

ONE OF THE most interesting commentators on pop writing is Jon Savage, a one-time writer for this paper and now a regular contributor to The Face and New Society. Though there's been a massive increase in the sheer volume of pop writing (about a third of the magazines in your local newsagent will be advertising some sort of pop tie-in), Savage believes that most of it is merely a consumer guide to attract a certain market. This lack of critical perspective afflicts even the likes of The Guardian and The Observer whose increases in pop coverage have been brought about by the realisation that pop is no longer kids' music and is the perfect vehicle for catching that 25-35 audience. Savage feels that the inkie pop papers fare little better.

"You can't write good stuff if you're on a weekly deadline," he said. "Journalists who have to meet weekly deadlines soon get into the burnout syndrome. In my experience, a monthly deadline is ideal. The other problem on the weekly papers is the ego syndrome — the rock journalist as star. Writers should take great care not to become stars.

"I started writing about pop music firstly because of punk but mainly because I always wanted to be a writer. That's very important. I didn't want to be a publicist, I didn't want to form a record company, I didn't want to be a rock star, I wanted to write. I'm very serious about writing."

Savage believes in a postmodern approach to pop writing — a writing across disciplines that refuses musical authenticity and the attempt by the old pop writing to identify this with political radicalism. But, having got rid of the old politics of pop writing with its bogus dualism between rootsy "real" music and synthetic "unreal" music, Savage believes that the postmodern approach has failed to develop a new politics, often descending into incoherent solipsism. The blame for this he rests squarely on the shoulders of Paul Morley and his "I, Rebel Executive" posturing.

"I have liked Morley's writing in the past. But his problem nowadays is that his credibility as an independent observer — which every good writer should have — is severely undermined by the nature of his involvement with ZTT. Of course we've all got our hands dirty to some extent but not to the extent that he has. To me, his influence is one of the reasons why rock writing is so bad. He should go away for a couple of years."

THE LAST PUNK IN TOWN

CLEVER SIMON Reynolds in the next edition of Monitor (a fanzine with a severe case of discourse fever) writes an excellent article on the recent punk retrospectives commenting that "far from being 'like punk never happened', our music scene is massively overdetermined by punk... It seems to me that the music scene is still fatally hung up on punk and, at this moment, every possible construction of those events... is being lived out, carried on, by someone."

None more so than Paul Morley. At a recent Eugenie Arrowsmith bash that Ten Records threw atop the Kensington Roof Gardens, Morley commented after viewing the assembled hordes of liggers, music industry sycophants and has-been punk stars (John Lydon was there), "I'm the only real punk here".

After having his fingers burnt with FGTH ("slags", as he refers to them now), Morley is back with the NME and is about to release a collection of his interviews under the auspices of Faber And Faber called Ask — The Chatter Of Pop. Whether you love or loathe his writing, there's no denying that Morley is one of the most imitated writers around. Though some would say that his posing as the only journalist left writing with any credibility — "The Last Punk In Town" — is becoming increasingly tedious. Mind you, he can still talk a good interview. Here he is slagging off the new generation of "boy journalists" and their bogus authenticity.

"This endless search for authenticity is like a perverted campaign for real ale. The boy journalists have to cling to the notion that pop is rebellious and a confrontation against mediocrity. The new pop writers are a series of boy Arthur Neguses who constantly search for an echo of Pete Shelley or the Velvet Underground. That's why the market for the inkies is shrinking.

"The inkies are completely out of date and that's why they are attempting to become multimedia magazines, incorporating sport, to stave off their inevitable fate. But even when they cover sport they, by and large, look for authenticity, so they choose Pat Nevin because he likes U2.

"The industry doesn't care about the black and white papers any more because those papers know nothing about the pop process. The black and white papers know nothing about how the phenomenon of A-Ha is constructed, for example. They think they're above all that. It's like when I had Kim Wilde on the front cover of the NME, there were all these people running around and saying 'How dare this happen! This is the end of the NME'.

"For me, pop music is a glamorous confusion of self-consciousnesses and you can write interestingly about it. The critical perspective should be absolutely glamorous."

If Morley is unimpressed by the New Authentics, he's also critical of the style-over-content school of pop journalism represented by the likes of Peter York and Robert Elms. In the face of these writers' consumerist frivolity, Morley intends to instigate a campaign for "the return of seriousness".

"I'm a very serious person," he says. But if neither Peter York nor Stephen Wells are suitable models for the pop writing of the future, what should young writers be writing about. Monitor suggests that writers should be addressing the materiality of music, "writing that attends to the surfaces of sound, the madness of rhythm, the allure of spectacle, the possibility of surprise."

Less fancifully, I would suggest that we need to insert the body back into music — the skin-thrilling effectivity of a piece of pop, the bass-body interface, the way a certain piece of music can literally change the way you walk through the world.

Morley again: "All those things you're talking about like the sensuality of language and the body, I was at the forefront of doing that. But can you make it accessible in the face of the ubiquitous chatter of pop? That's the problem.

"The best theoreticians of the 20th Century, from Walter Benjamin to Roland Barthes, were entertainers. But perhaps more importantly than the materiality of pop, is initiating a discussion on the history of how we got to this point so that we are able to have this conversation. That's what should be discussed in the music papers every week."

What about the criticism that Morley is unable to have a proper critical perspective because his presence looms so large in the interviews he does — the ego syndrome again? What about the i-D philosophy of the hardly mediated interview? You'd hardly expect Morley to support that and he doesn't.

"It's a nice idea in theory but if Dylan Jones (assistant editor of i-D) really wanted that idea to work he wouldn't put his name at the bottom."

A DIFFERENT KIND OF JOURNALISM

PEOPLE OFTEN slag off i-D for being trendy. This is rather like accusing the sky of being blue. Of course i-D is trendy but it's not the sort of obnoxious "someone, somewhere is having a better time than you" trendiness of some of its glossier rivals who are engaged in the sordid business of substituting envy for desire. Dylan Jones believes this is due to the fact that i-D has a very different set of journalistic ethics than its rivals.

"In general, the i-D philosophy behind the writing is to express ideas without editorial opinion — our interviews are meant to be probing and investigative without being sycophantic or vitriolic. The question and answer interviews are done in such a way so as to expose as much as possible about the interviewee, and not the interviewer... and to be pertinent, unlike the Ritz style which can be entirely conversational.

"If we don't like something, then we don't mention it, because we want to be positive. If it's no good then why should we tell our readers about it, when there are so many things out there worth talking about? We don't condemn anyone... we haven't got the room in a monthly magazine anyway. Objective criticism yes, slagging no."

While I would question the possibility of objectivity in these relativist times, it is refreshing to read a magazine that has none of the thorough-going misanthropy that writers on the inkies often indulge themselves with. But perhaps more importantly i-D is one of the few magazines that's willing to give space to things that fall outside the press release circuit. The sheer eccentricity of some of its coverage (half-completed books, bands that are not only unsigned but probably haven't even had a rehearsal yet, etc.) is what saves i-D from the creeping South Molton-streetitis that afflicts all of its cousins.

PLANET POP

IF WE'RE TALKING about postmodern pop journalism, then we've got to mention the maverick talents of the extraordinary husband and wife team of Fred and Judy Vermorel, the writers behind the book Starlust and ace theorists of what they call "Ubiquitous Pop". In case you hadn't noticed, pop music is everywhere. From Wogan to Women's Own, from Labour Party political broadcasts to Absolute Beginners, from the TV Times to beer adverts — seen the Heineken advert's appropriation of the Einsturzende Neubauten school of metal-banging yet?

Pop saturation and the pop tie-in is the order of the day. Pop is the media air we breath. Pop is no longer an option but a massively expanded network of communication that everyone feels he or she must occupy a place in.

"These days, post-Band Aid, everyone has to run," say the Vermorels.

What they're running to (whether it's Norman Tebbit at the BPI Awards or Charles and Di at Live Aid) is the rhythm of what the Vermorels call "Planet Pop" — pop as a moral imperative, pop as bourgeois charity that reinforces the myth of universal brotherhood, 'We Are The World'. As Greil Marcus has remarked, you used to hear in pop music an eagerness to reach other people. In Planet Pop all you hear is the confidence that people will be reached.

But what of the role of writers in the seemless ubiquity of Planet Pop. According to Judy, writers nowadays are "freelance market consultants.

"Writers like Paul Morley have been fully integrated into a marketing function where they once used to have a critical function. Fred and I refer to this as consensus terrorism — the process whereby writers, artists, management, etc., work together as a team in order to conscript emotions as part of these huge worldwide marketing strategies."

In the face of this situation, a retreat to the margins and to avant-gardism is no solution. As Fred points out, all that hot and spicy rhetoric about challenge and provocation, tactics of shock, breaking down resistances, is merely more grist for the consumerist mill. Pop is the key medium for the dissemination of avant-garde attitudes to the masses, is the major process by which "avant-garde mythology becomes teenage rampage."

As Fred wrote last year in an article on The Face in Creative Camera: "First come the art ultra-mags. Like ZC, ostensibly about theoretical discourse and all that atonal jazz, but equally, and more importantly, ransacking specialist and scholarly journals and rarefied avant-gardism for desirable slogans, attitudes, associations, moods... all then filtered, cleaned up and rounded out (often by the same writers and illustrators) into art/fashion glossies like The Face and Blitz.

"At which point the ideas — gestures, pictures, stories, manifestos — are available to aspiring pop stars, boutique owners, A&R and ad men, pop managers, publicists, rock journalists... and the next stage is to try out these ideas on potential consumers through independent releases and interview features in the rock press.

"If the idea then takes, the majors then move in with production bucks and you will next see so-and-so's dissertation on sidelights in reification in the philosophy of Surrealism on Top Of The Pops."

If the margins aren't a refuge, neither is the flocking of journalists like Robert Elms and Paolo Hewitt to the Red Wedge cause going to change much.

Fred again: "The politics that people like Billy Bragg and Red Wedge are involved in is the politics of celebrity and they're trying to evade that point. When me and Judy were on The Tube with him we tried to engage him on that point. But he wasn't interested. He was there to sell the Labour Party and we were there to sell our book."

All that indignant fuss about Robert Elms operating an elitist door policy at a recent Red Wedge bash is pompous nonsense. Old Bobby may be a bit vacuous but he is sussed enough to know that the politics of fashionable youth subcultures is not about party politics but about exclusion — separating the hip from the unhip. Socialist fraternity and clubland culture are uneasy bedfellows at the best of times.

WE ARE THE MONITOR CREW

IN SEARCH OF a post-modern pop journalism, it would be unfair to finish without a brief look at the fanzine scene. Frankly, only two are worth any consideration, Vague and Monitor. It's no coincidence that neither of them actually look like fanzines. Monitor is the more interesting in this context being a magazine set up by a bunch of Oxbridge graduates with a strong interest in using sexy French theorists like Baudrillard and Foucault to talk about pop.

Monitor tends to read like it was written by a bunch of disillusioned NME readers. Mind you, disillusionment with the NME is not necessarily a bad thing. At its best Monitor occupies a fertile ground between journalism and that Left tradition of critical theory. A common occurrence in other countries but a difficult position to maintain in a country notoriously resistant to new fangled ideas from the Continent.

At its worst, it gives Steve Sutherland a headache and makes me wonder they allow the intellectual hardman posturing of Chris Scott to go unchallenged. But with great writers like our own Simon Reynolds and David Stubbs ("the Mick Jagger of post-rock incandescent/apocalyptic journalism") it's well worth the 60p they demand every three months.

Simon Frith has suggested that Monitor is struggling towards a new pop aesthetic. I hope so, we certainly need one.