Julie Burchill had loudly left the NME for greener pastures by around 1981 - but she could be coaxed back for the occasional assassination.
Here, in a single issue, May 28 1993 - and in fact, as printed, on a single page - she sticks the shiv into two punky old fools she must have rubbed shoulders with down the Roxy many a time: Malcolm McLaren and Siouxsie Sioux.
Although for a long while a grieving punk epigone herself, insisting that nothing could ever compare to Sex Pistols, by around '83 JB had moved firmly into the acceptance stage of mourning and espoused the view that a properly adult usage of pop would be as an aural after-dinner mint, things like Sade that served as background sounds for grown-up conversation, or sex.
(via NME 1980s)
There's a lot to be said (and already has been) about the Inkies' ritual of building up a band or artist only to tear them down with a vengeance. Personally it reminds me of the "killing of the divine king" ritual as described by James Frazer's The Golden Bough: in order for a king / (demi)god to remain vigorous and fertile he must be killed and reborn on a cyclical basis. The same used to be true for pop stardom.
ReplyDeleteOf course this ritual of the Inkies was puerile and nothing if not self-serving, in that it was a low-hanging fruit method of guaranteeing eyeballs. It certainly created some excitement. And excitement is something that is sorely missing from the contemporary music press with its po-faced academia-speak. Its unwillingness to offend makes the music press resemble a children's party where everyone goes home with a prize, rendering the overall field flat and grey.
I agree about the flat and grey thing, and the thing of giving every one a prize - it's not just children's birthday parties, at schools increasingly you are not meant to criticize students but only say supportive and encouraging things.
ReplyDeleteBut I'm not sure if I believe in this supposed "They Build Up Just to Knock Em Down" syndrome. Having been an insider on the music press, it didn't work like that really. With the weeklies, there were a lot of issues per year - 51- and a lot of pages to fill, and with a rising or big band, usually a lot of opportunities to review them. Concerts, singles, that year's album. So sooner or later, just to avoid repetitiousness, you'd want to have a contrary view. Let someone who hates the band or thinks they are overrated, loose on them. And music paper writers didn't move in lockstep - nor was there a magazine policy on a group that was decided excecutively and handed down from on high. People disagreed.
Also, a lot of group do fuck up by the second album, or the third. They are due a drubbing. That could come from someone who thought they were always shit. Or a former supporter who would have to write a disappointed, "can do better" review. But it was really more entertaining for an attack dog to be let loose. The destruction mode, the anti-consensus view, tends to be more exciting to read.
More evidence that Burchill really was a great pop critic. Obviously history is littered with people with great taste and acute aesthetic sensibilities but without the slightest amount of good sense or judgment in any other area. But if you were looking for an example from the recent past, Burchill would be high on your list.
ReplyDeleteI don’t think anyone ever suggested giving Lester Bangs a politics column in the New York Times, but I suspect the results would not have been pretty.
DeleteActually, that said, Bangs could probably have got away with it, although not many other rock critics could. He might not have done an obviously much worse job than some of the current incumbents on those pages, anyway.