Media Slag
December 2006
A monthly rant on the tepid traits and tawdry interactions of the media machine. This month Thomas H Green rips into ageing music journalists like himself.
Let me start by saying I’m 39 years old. Such a statement is blasphemy in music journo circles. Music journos are afraid of their age. You can make jokes about anything in their company but start jesting that they don’t understand a song because they’re too old and they look very uncomfortable. The reason for this is that commenting on music, once undoubtedly their hobby, has become their income, a situation best summed up by a quote from Martin Schmidt of Matmos: “If you make a living from your art, that starts to poison it. You can’t help thinking, ‘How can I change this art to make a better living?’ The obvious answer is that you make it more palatable to more people.” This perceptive analysis affects both music writers and those they write about. However, whereas we constantly view musicians and watch them age, so that the process of pretending to be younger, should they choose to do so, is visually mediated, music journos are able to hide their age. We read them as they desperately rationalise their situation as still hip, touting statements of the “Gardening is the new rock’n’roll” variety. At the more subtle end of the scale there are multiple journos whose kids are screaming in the next room and really can’t be bothered to listen to an album by a wildly innovative Japanese noise band, when there’s the latest Damien Rice to declare amenable.
At the moment, a lot of the music press are in their 30s. We’re in a peculiar situation because the NME opinion dominates UK music culture and, although NME journos tend to be younger, in their early twenties, they side with the aged oldies in a conservative guitar-centric hegemony.
There is another aspect to all this that’s seldom acknowledged, most especially by the terrified 43 year old broadsheet staff pop writer. This is that the brain changes as humans age. Where once new information was embraced as useful, exciting and invigorating, over time mental routines develop – it’s how we organize ourselves. Even without our culpability, our brain has a tendency to find new information more threatening as we grow older. We’ve developed a balance and such things threaten to upset it. A music journo’s job is to fight this tendency with all his or her passion, but the amount of them that do so is minimal.
Music that comes along and sounds completely alien, say Aphex Twin’s ‘Windowlicker’, is to be embraced. We may not even understand it at first, let alone especially like it, but it’s unhinged, different, exciting and, with repeated listening, we find out whether it’s any good or not. I found the same with The Klaxons. The kids at their gigs understood The Klaxons frenetic avant-punk racket immediately but once you’ve been into music as long as most journos, you’ve heard most things and are likely to miss that which sounds fresh to younger ears. Even the Pistols, to a sussed 40 year old in 1977 might have generated thoughts such as, “Primitive glam guitar meets-Stooges attitude.” Techno, similarly, could just have been regarded as an extension of Kraftwerk and Cabaret Voltaire.
The Klaxons burst onto my ears and caused my brain to muse, “Buzzgun-indie-meets-Psychik TV-with-Eno-trimmings,” but I realised I was just being old. Essentially, they’re a blast but it remains to be seen how much staying power they have. It’s fun to enjoy it rather than stand outside with ones critical guard on full shields. It’s invigorating to take a few big gulps of whatever’s going down, letting ones more brutal and experienced critical faculties remain relaxed. In fact, it’s the only way to enjoy vibrant new music that will undoubtedly be derivative of music one already likes.
I hope next year’s boom in bandtronic ‘nu-rave’ sci-fi music, from Kitsune to Relish to Klaxons to Enter Shikari, blows sky high. It’s easy to say that it mostly just sounds like indie-meets-punk-funk-with-electronic-trimmings but who wants to hear that? Isn’t it time for another kicking out of the jams? Get your gob round some laughing gas, start a band that sounds like a 1991 hardcore anthem being murdered by a bunch of fourteen year olds who can’t play guitar, and laugh at the old folks in the music press who don’t understand it.
Thank you for writing this. It is sometimes a challenge to stay up with my posting. Seeing a site that puts off such a unique vibe is very motivating.