The rock critic as artist
At heart, it's a ceaseless ambition to transcend and destroy the mundane, to move and connect on every level, to engender a belief that music can actually be of importance in people's lives
John Mulvey on Mogwai
It's the anally retentive High Fidelity factor. The narcissist addicted to the sound of his (or her) own voice. The lazy bastard pissing around at the bar. The tired stereotypes might be unavoidably accurate, but as serious music criticism dwindles to a single reliable weekly, NME, why are the journalists suddenly taking all the flak?
The current, virulent strain of anti-hack resentment is a significant one. While the provinces understandably form an early reliance on the NME - Julie Burchill's daydreaming rural youths, stuck miles away from Camden's indie utopia with a Tube map pinned to their wall - it's mystifying that the obscurist, collage mentality of the indie kid isn't enjoying a similar alliance with the last regular instalment of serious criticism. Despite maintaining a healthy scepticism (particularly obvious in Clinic's 'IPC Sub-Editors Dictate Our Youth'), the opponents of NME's aim to intellectualise the most minor of bands all too often comprise snotty indie kids sharing a dearth of ideas and ideals: those precious specimens boasting a superiority complex, retrospective mentality and, incredibly, refusal to recognise the existence of guitarless genius (hello, Oxide & Neutrino). These may well be the ignorants who strew sections of the music press over every JCR floor; perhaps a subconscious acknowledgement that rock criticism is so transient as to be essentially disposable, but, in all likelihood, a failure to realise that rock'n'roll's great dichotomy (and ensuing tension) stems from the ongoing battle between transience and memory, an idealistic dream immortalised in a disposable genre.
Yet the protopolitical standpoint itself is fundamentally flawed. Despite the journalist's constant propagation of rock'n'roll as a (potentially) political force, there's the necessary recognition that, where Popstars have virtually replaced pop stars, it ultimately lacks the capacity to change the world; the inevitable discrepancies between the personal and the political, the moments where Primal Scream's righteous rage is displaced by Coldplay's wide-eyed sigh, act as a constant reminder of its limitations. The underlying difficulty concerns the relative importance of the rock journalist; criticism inevitably takes a secondary, and arguably inferior role (evinced by the modish Moldy Peaches; "NYC's like a graveyard - all the corpses like the way I play guitar"); Idlewild expose the naivete of the position, "every word that you write...won't mean much as barricades". Accordingly, the critic is afforded ridiculous liberties (like avowing Radiohead were a steaming pile of unlistenable shite until they released Kid A...), but must also exercise self-regulation; the practised flirtation of a cute bassist might excuse a brief infatuation with King Adora, but the 'politicised' Stars In Their Eyes of frequenting Park End dressed as Britney Spears can only descend into excruciating, if unintentional, self-parody.
But it's this absolute belief in the (self-) importance of criticism as documentation, commemoration and vision which allows the critic to function as artist. Gifted Glaswegian instrumentalists Mogwai lend themselves to astonishingly beautiful prose ("and when, finally, annihilation comes, it is inevitable, comprehensive and utterly merciless...", John Mulvey), not only descriptively but in the very definition of artistic possibility; in Steven 'Swells' Wells' peerless deconstruction of pop-fops Belle & Sebastian, or Johnny Cigarettes' thesaurus-style demolition job on Stereolab, the critic not only acts as judge, but transcends the original subject. In establishing and maintaining the firm ideological position frequently neglected by bands themselves, interaction between critic and artist may catalyse art, from Idlewild's incorporation of fragments of reviews into their lyrics to defunct student band Somelady's vitriolic 'paean' to yours truly.
Rock'n'roll may be an intrinsically aesthetic art (the terrible calm in Richey Edwards' eyes as he displays a mutilated forearm to the camera, the rather more impromptu shots of Kurt Cobain's corpse), but when luminaries such as Germaine Greer state that music "speaks directly to an emotional response...it's just music," there's a fundamental failure to recognise that an artform's emotional impact affords it an innate political possibility. Discarding the ideological motivation inevitably results in a poverty of both art and criticism, from a thousand balladeering Westlifes purporting to replace Take That's veiled existentialist doubt to a failure to evaluate Britney's '...Baby One More Time' as (negative) sociological phenomenon in addition to fantastic pop stomp.
In an industry infested with arselickers and cheats, the music journalist (ideally) attempts to maintain a non-commercial vision, a vision surviving in the legend of Charles Shaar Murray, Nick Kent and the great Lester Bangs. Indeed, when creating a degree module in classical criticism recently, King's College London stated that the global politics and literary awareness of George Bernard Shaw's era are now found solely in pop criticism. Enduring proof that where there's a Swells, there's a Strokes. And so endeth, (indie) kids, the first lesson.
30th May 2002