So recently there was the passing of arts + culture magazines The Face and 4Columns (both of which I had written for)
And then came the announcement of the acquisition / gutting of a bunch of music magazines by some horrible company – among them Alternative Press (which I once wrote for, a long time ago) and Goldmine
That was followed by a lament about the eroding future of music journalism as a full-time career from Jill Mapes at Hearing Things... a piece much commented on elsewhere
So all this got me thinking in a downbeat sort of way about all the
English-language popular music publications that expired during my professional life - i.e
1986 onwards.
I decided to make a list of the deceased (some theories
of list-making say it’s a way of warding off the spectre of death!).
In what follows, I've been fairly thorough - but rather negligent when it comes to the specialist end of things (country, soul, reggae, jazz etc … I’ve also left out all the completely technical/musicians/recording type mags... and the music-biz trade papers… I'm strictly thinking about places that do criticism and interviews (Not that those are totally absent from the aforementioned categories but it's not their main thing). Actually another category left out is scholarly journals and academic publications.
When it comes to the hazy dividing line between magazine and
fanzine (or website versus collective blog)…. Well, I’ve been hazy about it:
going really with the appearance of professionalism, regularity of output, and
the possibility that some kind of payment to writers might be going on (even if
not the case). Sort of, if it feels like a magazine, then it's a magazine.
But I've also let in quite a few publications that are not primarily music but had dedicated music sections or regular music criticism: Village Voice (however I’ve not listed all the alternative weeklies elsewhere in the USA), certain general interest magazines; the UK style bibles; some art magazines. However I haven't bothered to include national or city newspapers that have substantial, persistent, often high quality music coverage - New York Times, The Guardian, The Observer, Wall Street Journal, etc. It's just too big a can of worms, really.
My purview is pretty much limited to the U.K. and U.S.A., so in terms of the Anglophonosphere I’m doubtless missing Canadian, Australian and New Zealand magazines of note.
I suppose if any kind of instinct has governed this, it’s
that I’ve gone here with magazines that I could
A/ conceivably have picked up and read
B/ conceivably found myself writing for in some
circumstance.
Now there’s one or two magazines I distinctly remember but I simply cannot summon their name and attempts to Google creatively have come up with nothing… it’s really nagging at me! So I invite you tell me the ones I’ve missed, indicating whether they are still with us or not.
Also tell me if I have misfiled a publication, i.e. it's not dead but actually still around or it's not around, actually dead. (Before you get agitated though, I should say there is a separate section for Historic Titles - magazines that lived and died before I could have conceivably contributed to them).
Oh yes - I have also indicated the ones I have written for with an asterisk
Update - “Added:” indicates where I have added a title suggested by someone in comments.
MUSIC MAGAZINES NO LONGER WITH US
Melody Maker *
The Word *
Muzik *
Request *
Pulse! *
Lime Lizard
The Lizard *
Blender *
City Limits *
Details *
Red Bull Music Academy / Daily Note *
20/20 *
Loops *
Pitchfork Review *
Volume *
Stylus *
eMusic *
Observer Music Monthly *
Arena*
The Face *
4Columns *
ZigZag
Smash Hits
Sounds
Record Mirror
Jockey Slut
Q
Select
Vox
Number One
Underground
Raw
Terrorizer
Blitz
New Sounds, New Styles
Collusion
Careless Talk Costs Lives
URB
Option
Puncture
Flipside
Plan B
ZG
Monitor
Ray Gun
Terrorizer
Arthur
Grand Royal
Ego Trip
Forced Exposure
The Rocket
The Herb Garden
Dummy
Deuce
Mondo 2000
Signal to Noise
Strange Things
Vague
Jamming
XLR8R
Heavy Metal (for Lou Stathis's rok column)
added: The Stool Pigeon
added: Motorbooty
added; Reflex
added: Rage
added: Indie-cator
added: The Bob
added: Punk Planet
added: Your Flesh
added: Bucketfull of Brains
added: Mess+Noise (Australia)
Then to cheer us all up, I have listed publications that are still with us – starting with a couple of subcategories: the died but resurrected and those of uncertain ontological status (existing in some kind of hibernating or vestigial purely archival mode with some faint talk of reactivation)
RESURRECTED
Creem
UNCERTAIN ONTOLOGICAL STATUS
Village Voice *
Alternative Press *
Goldmine
BrooklynVegan
Tiny Mix Tapes
International Times
MUSIC MAGAZINES STILL WITH US
Pitchfork *
The Wire *
Mojo *
Uncut *
Spin *
The Quietus *
Rolling Stone *
Tidal *
iD *
New Statesman *
NPR music *
FACT *
Disco Pogo *
Frieze *
Time Out *
Artforum *
Electronic Beats *
Resident Advisor *
Slate *
Salon *
NME
Vibe *
Clash
Drowned in Sound
Vice / Noisey *
The Stranger
Hearing Things
Mixmag
DJ
The Source
Decibel
Record Collector
Electronic Sound
The Fader
Hot Press
Kerrang!
Magnet
Metal Hammer
Shindig!
Wax Poetics
XXL
XLR8
Bandcamp
Straight No Chaser
Aquarium Drunkard
Big Takeover
Billboard
Complex
Louder Than War
No Depression
GQ style *
Oxford American
Paste
Revolver
Rock Sound
Stereogum
Dazed & Confused *
No Bells
Toneglow
Moonbuilding
Tape Op
Prog
The Skinny
Vive le Rock
Artrocker
Nylon
added: MaximumRocknRoll
added: Ugly Things
Added: Chickfactor
Added: Echoes
Added: Dusted
Added; Far Out Magazine
Added: Pop Matters
I was pleasantly surprised how many there are still with us…
HISTORIC TITLES
Crawdaddy
Let It Rock
Cream (UK)
Disc & Music Echo
Rave
Cheetah
Phonograph Review
Street Life
Fusion
Oz
Friends/Frendz
Who Put the Bomp
Slash
New York Rocker
Rock Scene
Punk
Synapse
Audion
Changes
Scene
added: Circus
Of course this is just the English language… one thing I have found in my travels is that every country seems to have its own equivalents to Greil Marcus or Nick Kent…. or indeed much younger examples.
Estonia… Argentina… Germany… Italy… France…
Portugal… Scandinavia… Spain… Poland... pretty much everywhere I've been, there's a bunch of people, at
varying ages, who are operating at a high
discursive level, and generally are aware of what’s going in the English
music writing world. It’s an embarrassingly one-way transmission– they read us,
but we can’t read them, and it does makes you feel like a hegemon. They have their own local equivalents of NME and Rolling Stone (in some cases an actual version of Rolling Stone - like Rolling Stone Italia) and Pitchfork. Like Spex in Germany. In other
cases, the serious criticism is going on in newspapers or arts magazines.
It is encouraging that people are still putting out print magazines, that there are clusterings of energy around webzines… I hope it carries on…
(I can tell you, though, from my experience spending regular time in the company of young music lovers, a/k/a students, that the reading of criticism is a vanishing pursuit. There is a combo of shattered attention spans and a reflexive distrust of expertise... I would say that for many of the young they would rather take seriously the opinion of some completely random person on Reddit or wherever, than an accredited authority figure )
But music criticism, music journalism - there's still some demand out there for it.
Perhaps the action has shifted to books now - there seems to be an ongoing explosion of serious music books, and thank God for that (although I have also heard that it's a bubble caused by a demographic reaching a certain age and wanting to deepen the passions of their adolescence / youth... and that when this demographic dies out, or its brains turn to mush, this too will pass). Still, for now at least, it is a thriving area, as much as any area of non-fiction could be said to be thriving. People want to do it, some people still want to read it.
Music books are great... I love to read them, Lord knows I love to write 'em. If it wasn't so exhausting, and practical logistics weren't involved, I would have churned out twice as many by now.
But there is something about the ephemerality of music journalism that produces a lighter kind of writing, or at least, one that is nimbler, fleet of foot, less hung up on evidence or research, and above all with less eye on posterity….
And curiously this makes it actually more worthy of posterity, or at least being de-ephemeralized.
Which is the point of this blog – to take little bursts of mental energy, spurts of language frolic, mischief, thinking aloud… things that have been lost in the Heraclitan river of newsprint… now and again blogprint or netprint… but mostly ink-on-paper... and pull them back out of oblivion
Rock’s Back Pages* is doing that – God’s own work! – but in
not as individually curated a way, by which I mean that sometimes I talk back to these
pieces, or try to connect them to current concerns.
* I was recently in the offices of RBP to be on their podcast, and it's a music-mag nut's paradise in there. The walls are covered with neatly organized compartments for vintage music papers, they also have an impressive library of rock books. There were quite a few periodicals I'd never seen or heard of decorating the walls, including a Monitor quite different from the Monitor I was involved with...
