Who are the best music journalists currently/ever?

PiLhead

Well-known member
of current practitioners:

Clive Martin might be the best generator of sentences as sentences - and has an admirable commitment to going out in the field for his stories, getting in the thick of scenes

Mike Powell is elegant and does "personal" very well

conversely Anwyn Crawford does that slightly chilly impersonal authority thing very well, and is good at controlled anger

James Parker at Tiny Mix Tapes (a lot of the TMT writers do amazing things with language but don't exactly excel at communication, but i can generally understand what James is saying - which is not the same as agreeing with it)

Nick Sylvester has done some great stuff, seems to be retired now

Meaghan Garvey at Pitchfork seems very smart and perceptive

You gotta give it up for Adam Harper at least on the level of total mastery of the field he's chosen and connecting the micro-underground to other art forms. He has taken the genreological taxonomic side of post-90s electronic criticism about as far as possible or desirable. But although his 'thing' can seem a bit dry, he can also describe music in a really hallucinatory way (oddly perhaps given that he seems to have a distaste for that banging hedonistic side of club music)
http://www.electronicbeats.net/adam-harper-recommends-arcas-xen/


I do find with current music writing that a lot of it is almost too knotty with thought and also densely laden with the facty fruits of research... what's missing too often is the visceral element, the physical power of music, its ability to dominate and mess around your emotions... and also going out into the world and observing how people behave and the ways they use music

so there's too much criticism and not enough reporting
 

rubberdingyrapids

Well-known member
I do find with current music writing that a lot of it is almost too knotty with thought and also densely laden with the facty fruits of research... what's missing too often is the visceral element, the physical power of music, its ability to dominate and mess around your emotions... and also going out into the world and observing how people behave and the ways they use music

i find this too.
a lot of writers seem quite fixed on sounding clever or want to sound a bit high brow. like they all secretly want to get a job at a broadsheet. the 'pop' (for lack of a better word - i dont necessarily mean smash hits) mentality has gone. which is good as before it was easy to say people werent taking music seriously. a lot of people like to say how pre-net 1990s/2000s music mags were often shit for writing, but a lot of mags were at least more 'fun' to read. or maybe its just that the immediacy of music writing has gone now that everyone can hear the music for themselves, and the net allows every album to get a 1000 word review, as opposed to something more concise, pithy, and a length more appropriate to the quality/content. everything is taken very seriously, when perhaps... it doesnt need to be.
 
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Leo

Well-known member
not in praise of a particular writer, but thought i'd share a great first line that appears in a singles review today on resident advisor:

"In the holiday resort that is dance music, Filter Dread is a German tourist: he got his beach towel onto a good deckchair early and he's not moving till its time to go home."
 

luka

Well-known member
Clive Martin might be the best generator of sentences as sentences - and has an admirable commitment to going out in the field for his stories, getting in the thick of scenes

cant take him seriously, such a drip
 

rubberdingyrapids

Well-known member

Enough with retrospective panels about music journalism (I could stop right there) led by middle-aged white men (and again) who crusade against online music writing (in the form of a sole scape-goated young writer) despite clearly not having read any.

“Where are all the professional music journalists going to come from now?” There’s no such qualification (and never was, other than misplaced ego), to the form’s great benefit.

Enough with the falsehood that in the good ol’ days, opportunity to get read and paid and forge relationships with editors was open to all as opposed to today’s so-called unpaid, untethered digital wasteland. Literally a few dozen people had the privilege of passing through those storied music magazine newsrooms, and they were 95% the same kind of person, to the form’s great detriment.

If you still use “Buzzfeed” as a pejorative, you’re betraying both your prejudices, fear and ignorance. See also: “where are all the political bands?”

Enough with conferences that focus on music journalism’s past, and how much better it was. Enough with giving the old British rock writer hegemony the platforms to dominate these events. If the future doesn’t fit your programme – and in a way that’s not doomsdaying – scrap it.

Realise that the next wave of great music writers a) probably won’t just write about music, b) probably couldn’t care less about becoming part of the legacy you’ve appointed yourselves, because they have their own smarter, more inclusive, more astute, more representative things going on.

Enough with the idea that online music writing is confusing and lacks consensus. What is it that you’re looking for? Hand-holding? Some kind of consumer guide? Did you used to buy all the music papers? No? Exactly. Curate your own damn experience. Read challenges to your existence. Death to the idea of there being a few totemic gatekeepers dictating the dialogue.

~~~

Saying all that, tbh I’m delighted that these old men fear the internet as it more swiftly determines their impending obsolescence.

All of this underlines just how badly we need an EMP equivalent here. Who’s in?

a year old but still, lol
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Quite a good thread this, found it by mistake and bumping it in case there are any additions.

Also possibly the first thread in which I expressed my outright love of Luka.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
My favorite music books are:

Ask
Mystery Train
Blissed Out
Energy Flash
More Brilliant Than The Sun


I haven't read the new Penman book, but Vital Signs was weirdly hit and miss.
 

droid

Well-known member
Ocean of sound is easily in the top ten. Rereading it atm.
 
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jenks

thread death
Ocean of sound is easily in the top ten. Rereading it atm.

I remember reading it and it opening up a whole bunch of sounds i just hadn't been aware of - in many ways it changed the way i listened and for that i will always be grateful. i also love the compilation cd that he made at the time as a kind of companion piece to the book.

I saw him give a talk in the Lux cinema when Exotica came out - i managed to fall asleep at one stage but do remember he went on a lot about Joseph Conrad.
 

luka

Well-known member
I know for a fact there's nothing out there that comes close to what I can read you dickheads come up with here on a daily basis. That's how low the standards have become.
 

nomos

Administrator
Dave Tompkins. I like writers with busy imaginations who build new things with with ideas they find in music. Eshun and k-punk did this too. Tompkins is sillier. His account of visiting Rammellzee's apartment in How to Wreck a Nice Beach was especially good. That book should get more attention.

36628908_10156743561080166_4609783000022908928_o.jpg

I found Toop's Rap Attack as a teenager and I've been going back to it since.
 
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