One reason I get a little impatient with the "now we make amends for the crimes of rockism" type work that's been going on this past decade or so, particularly in America - writers and publications virtuously giving attention to genres of music formerly neglected and demeaned - is that I grew up on a publication that did this kind of thing back in the early '80s. All these moves of taking teenybopper pop seriously, arguing the case for the manufactured and the slick.... it wasn't quite routine, but it was normal. Of course there's great things coming out the pop assembly line.... of course the M.O.R. and the A.O.R. can contain moments of piercing genius.... of course there's no area that you a priori rule out of contention or attention.
Case in point, this great report by Barney Hoskyns - who typically raved about everything from The Birthday Party and The Fall to Carol Jiani and the S.O.S. Band - but here writes sympathetically about the huge cult adoration of Barry Manilow, as manifested at a mega-concert at Blenheim Palace.
This story appeared on the news pages of NME - you opened the paper that week and this was the first thing you saw, nestling amid items on forthcoming albums and tour announcements. The UK weekly music papers (and this goes back to the 1970s and earlier, as I found when reading Melody Maker et al for the glam rock book) covered everything that was newsworthy and, in terms of reviews and interviews, did a sweep across the entire spectrum of popular music (and quite a lot of unpopular music too). Comprehensiveness was baked-in, taken for granted, axiomatic, virtually automatic. Simply the job that was there to be done.
(This actually carried on into the late '80s and early '90s, despite the increasing specialization in the music media and fragmentation of the music scene... in defiance of entropy, a keeping faith with the original conception of what a weekly music paper should be doing)
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