What's the opposite of subversion?

[alexsarll]

Although these days he's more frequently seen in his guise of mediocre political journalist, John Harris doesn't want us forgetting that he started out as a mediocre music journalist. Apparently he edited "the now-defunct Select, a title that floated on the tide of Britpop and sank when it receded". Which is interesting, because I remember Select as being at its best just before Britpop, dealing with the bands who wouldn't quite fit into the grand narrative to come. And what does this rewriting of the past remind us of? That's right - Harris is a retromancer. Bemoaning how obsessed we all are with the past, he then goes on to rehearse the familiar old stories about how Lester Bangs and Nick Kent are the best music journalists ever (for the record - Kent was OK, but Bangs hated Roxy Music and as such, is never going to have anything to tell me. Or consider the Bangs quote Harris uses, of the mawkishness around John Lennon's death, Bangs wondering what "'the real - cynical, sneeringly sarcastic, witheringly witty and iconoclastic - John Lennon" would make of it all. If that's the real Lennon, who was responsible for 'Imagine' and 'All You Need Is Love'? Tosser). Obviously print dates are such that the article couldn't respond to the death of Steven Wells (for me, the saddest of last week's demises, even ahead of Sky Saxon). But consider all the other omissions. An article about the state of music writing which fails even once to mention Paul Morley is de facto worthless right there. But nor does it find space to mention any of the contributors to Melody Maker's nineties golden age. It bigs up a Mott the Hoople autobiography as "the best book written by a British rock musician" - well, I've not read it but if it's as good as Marianne Faithfull's first memoir, I'll be amazed. And recent years saw classics by Alex James and Luke Haines. Do they get a mention? They do not. The frequently-insufferable Pitchfork is cited as a good example of modern music writing; the consistently brilliant Popjustice is as absent as its predecessor, Smash Hits. I'm a fan of music journalism, and I don't recognise the field Harris is talking about.

Friday: Poptimism is less Jacko-heavy than expected, which is good given I only ever liked a handful of his songs. I inadvertently get far drunker than intended. Saturday: friends are drinking in my 'downstairs garden', and it would be rude not to join them en route to getting the paper, right? We end up cackling incoherently about eggs and realise that yes, we are no longer above this, we are drinking in the daytime in Wetherspoon's and we belong there. Although there is a break for Finnish bowling (actually just throwing a stick at some other sticks) and apocalyptic tempest, I proceed to get far too drunk, again. Sunday: Tubewalk day. I plan not to drink, but forget the sheer soul-shredding horror of the Edgware Road, End up drinking, on and off, for something like ten hours.
Today I really am not drinking.
(It's weird, though, almost as soon as you're off the road itself, the area is lovely, all odd little bookshops interspersed with I Saw You Coming-type establishments. Whereas on the road, you get girls proving if ever proof were needed that Rihanna's look only works on Rihanna. Also: the pub in Paddington station? It worries me. They have lightbulbs which are melting the picture frames beneath them, not to mention the clientele)

In other news:
http://www.explosionsandboobs.com

Comments

[burkesworks.livejournal.com]

Ian Hunter's Diary Of A Rock'n'Roll Star is by no means bad, and it's fair to say it was the best book ever written (as opposed to ghosted) by a British rock musician for a good many years, not that there was a lot of competition on the ground. That on board, it's a book that does exactly what it says in the title; had Ian been 35 years younger he could conceivably have blogged everything within the pages.

Since then there'll have been many that left old Ian's effort in the dust; with all due respect to the man I find it hard to believe that Ian Hunter would ever write a novel as good as, say, Nick Cave's Faulkner/Flannery O'Connor pastiche And The Ass Saw The Angel (yes, he's Australian but that's close enough for jazz). Haven't read Luke Haines's book but wouldn't mind, the man's far more literate in a David Peace sort of way than most pop/rock stars around today.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

The Haines book does suffer from bad editing, especially when it comes to names, but mostly that just accentuates the marvellous dismissiveness.

And the Ass saw the Angel is indeed a thing of brilliance; this Autumn we should finally have his second novel, The Death of Bunny Munro, although this one is set on our South Coast rather than in the deep South.

There's a thought - how about all the writers who are also occasional rock musicians? Michael Moorcock, for instance? I hadn't even registered that Harris was so stupid as to say 'book' rather than 'autobiography', so laying himself open to even more counterclaims.

[burkesworks.livejournal.com]

Michael Moorcock wrote a heck of a lot of Hawkwind's best tracks, and one or two for Blue Oyster Cult, but never actually performed that much; the only Hawkwind tours where he actually played on stage full-time were the Warrior On The Edge Of Time Tour in '75 and the Black Sword tour in early '86. He did fill in for Robert Calvert on a few other '70s dates when Bob was either unavailable or had enjoyed a particularly good lunch. Let's not forget though that Moorcock had already written two Elrics and two Jerry Cornelius novels and Behold The Man before he hooked up with Hawkwind.

Of course if we were to take it to its extreme then there's always Laughing Lenny's Beautiful Losers, written long before he picked up a microphone; Cohen had been published for years and was well into his 30s before he ever saw the inside of a recording studio. There were a few novels written by those vaguely folky sorts at the fag-end of the beatnik era; Richard Fariña's Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me is worth alook if you like that sort of thing, Bob Dylan's Tarantula isn't.

King of the "occasional rock musicians" has to be Bill Burroughs, though; he collaborated with almost as many Big Rock Stars as Eno did during the '80s.

Can't think offhand of too many British writers turning their hand to music, much as one gets the feeling Iain Banks would like to.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Isn't there some nutter who, every year, tries to get Dylan the Nobel Prize for Literature on the basis of Tarantula?

It gets pretty nebulous sometimes, who's a writer-turned-musician and who's the reverse. Gerard Way was doodling comics long before he was in My Chemical Romance - it just happened that they'd become one of the world's biggest bands before he got round to finishing up and releasing his first work as a writer, which surprised a lot of people who don't like emo by being whimsical, fun and generally rather good.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

And I've only just remembered - Bill Drummond, either solo or with Mark Manning aka Zodiac Mindwarp. An astonishing writer, but I guess he was more dance than rock so not really Old Man Harris' sort of thing.

[puzzled-anwen.livejournal.com]

Does "the Ian Dury Songbook" count? *is having a bit of an Ian Dury obsession at the moment*

[mippy.livejournal.com]

An odd success with me was a book by a member of Chumbawamba - Footnote. I have no love for the band but it was very interesting reading.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Similarly, there are only two or three Motley Crue tracks I'd give house room, but their memoir The Dirt is hilariously horrible.

[mippy.livejournal.com]

I couldn't read The Dirt - hated Neil Strauss' prose style.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Really? He's as close as I've ever come to following a ghostwriter; I really enjoyed his Marilyn Manson book too.

[angelv.livejournal.com]

Guessing the link is nsfw (depending on where you work)?

Also what is "Marianne Faithfull's first memoir" please, there are lots of books by and about her to choose from on amazon so I'm confused...

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Just called Faithfull, has her wreathed in smoke on the cover. I believe (but could be wrong) that she has only written one other, fairly recently, which I have not read but looked a bit less good.

The pictures are no worse than eg the sort of thing you put on your advent calendar, but I figured that the URL was self-explanatory enough that warnings were probably superfluous.

[pippaalice.livejournal.com]

Rihanna's look does not even work on her. She is put in those clothes and clearly does not look comfortable in them.

So um...ner...

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

She does look a bit vat-grown, but trust me, it looks better on her than on a teenage girl with a GOOD GIRL GONE BAD sign about the size of a 7" twisting her top out of shape.

[the-roofdog.livejournal.com]

Superversion?

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Suggestions along these lines were made, but I reckon 'assimilation' is it.

[wardytron.livejournal.com]

The best ever music journalist was Tom Hibbert. All the others can be filed under "not as good as Tom Hibbert."

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Well, I just Googled him and found him attempting to convince Morrissey that he'd feel better for a burger. Passably entertaining, to be sure, but hardly the stuff of legend.

[mippy.livejournal.com]

I agree with all the sentiments endorsed above.

[moleintheground.livejournal.com]

I couldn't even start to read that toss about how there's no good music writers nowadays and why are there so many coulereds on the buses and where are my glasses, ooh, my back's sore today pissballs.

Music writing today, for me, is far better for the fact that it tends to contain a link to the thing in discussion or what the journo/blogger thinks might be a great alternative/accompaniment. I don't need someone who has the record two months before me telling me it's the greatest thing ever because he's chums with whoever made it. Nor do I need iconoclastic shouty words about stuff I love actually being rubbish, because, hey, it doesn't matter anymore. That boat has sailed.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

I was drunk when I read it, and scrawling annotations (mainly swears) across it, which I thought I should in some manner share with the world, hence the above.

I do find that blogs with the actual music on, I tend to skim the writing and just go to the music. So at present the one I most enjoy reading is, perhaps archaically, one with no actual music on it - http://radionixon.wordpress.com/
After all, when I do think 'that sounds like something I want to hear', it's very seldom that hard to find it.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Totally agreed about the article but Simon Reynolds (praised fulsomely for his worst book) was very much part of the MM golden age surely?

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

When I was reading it, he'd still turn up occasionally as a bit of an elder statesman, but didn't feel like core staff.
I've only read one of his books - The Sex Revolts - and it was such a bloody mess I've never wanted to read any of the others. Repetitive, confused and generally giving the impression that it was thrown together over a weekend.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

NB I nearly put in that you were one of the exceptions re: Pitchfork, but I stripped the rant of LJ tags in the interests of making it look less like 'my friends write about music better than this person I do not know'. They do, though.

[(Anonymous)]

$400 for 14 days means about 70% off of regular price.
やっぱり、世界的な不景気で経営が大変なのかも。

[(Anonymous)]

1/3の価格。
どうしよう。ここに泊る？

[(Anonymous)]

やっぱり、ルイスのお家に泊ってもいい？
隠れて出てこなかったら困る。