Music Journalism

'Its adventurous structure alternates between melodically rich verses and powerful instrumental interludes, essentially passing the torch to Googe and drummer Colm Ó Cíosóig when she clears way for a spine-tingling solo of clanging distortion' (http://www.obscuresound.com/albums/my-bloody-valentine-mbv-2013/)

'Indeed, primitivism is a reoccurring theme for IBG, both in the sense that their music is an obvious devolution of the conventions of rock music and also simply because their songs are gargantuan epics which inspire images of rumbling volcanoes and thundering dinosaurs trudging across vast swathes of borderline ineffable terrain.' (http://pocketjury.net/2011/09/im-being-good-mountain-language/)

Before I start into a torrent of swearing, lets just discuss the state of music journalism at this moment (specifically the UK, but this is pretty universal I think). Magazines like NME and Kerrang continue to plough their furrow, but with dwindling sales and the ongoing switch to online it is difficult for these formerly ubiquitous publications to produce good quality reviews, articles and interviews and it is also increasingly difficult for them to made significant dents in record sales and downloads, wheras there was a time when a front page meant a dramatic rise in sales and a dedicated fanbase this is not necessarily the case anymore. The schism has continued, and can in alternative music terms be traced back to Everett True's move from NME to Melody Maker, whose subsequent demise led to NME's monopoly of the broadsheet music press, an untenable position as without competition quality declined. True's subsequent decreasingly excellent magazines Careless Talk Costs Lives and Plan B saw a dwindling readership further alienated by esoteric articles, obscurantism and just plain high-brow Nathan Barleyism. We are now faced with an array of poorly produced, largely locally produced glossies and papers like Stool-pigeon, Bristol's Crack magazing and Fear of Fiction, the dominance of shock mags like Vice and a bewildering cornucopia of online blogs and forum things like Drowned In Sound that now live on user generated content. There is apparently no professional 'alternative' music journalism. What we now have to put up with is apparently the above style of infantile hyperbole and extravagant metaphor alongside attempts to describe the music using a hopelessly inadequate vocabulary that as it speaks seems to fear alienating the reader before seeking out a turn of phrase that hopes to impress. What is even worse is when a blogger tries to give a track-by-track description of an album, after a paragraph or two introducing the biography of the band before finally summing up the album in a neat phrase. Please spare me. Not only do I not have time to be bothered to read such effable air, I am irritated that someone took the time to do so, and post it on their blog for all to read. The case study here is the recent release of My Bloody Valentine's third album 'mbv.' So keenly awaited was this that the moment the band streamed it on youtube (in low quality format) then blog reviews started appearing. The band's website is offering preorders of the LP, and state clearly that pains were taken to record, mix and master the album using analog technology. Therefore any non-analog reviews cannot be regarded as having listened to the album 'properly' in the first place, so it appears that the main motivation for putting a review up so soon is to get traffic visiting your blog. How can this kind of motivation be conducive to good writing. I'll admit my blog is not as thoroughly researched or edited as it could be but its point is to be spontaneous and free. Besides anyone who begins a sentence with 'Indeed' wants shooting. In the foot. So it'll take them ages to die of loss of blood. Assuming I don't resuscitate them to prolong their agony indefinitely.

See also: http://www.thestoolpigeon.co.uk/features/news/an-a-z-guide-to-music-journalist-bullshit.html

I wanted to get this rant out of the way so I can have a go a writing my own music blog, on my own terms - and I want to avoid all the bad elements I have described above. Thank-you.