Music journalism hasn’t died – it’s just changed channel

Frank Zappa’s comment on the music press is evergreen: “Most rock journalism is people who can’t write interviewing people who can’t talk for people who can’t read.”

What’s remarkable about the comment is not whether it’s true or not (your opinion is as valid as mine) but that when Zappa spoke to the Toronto Star reporter in 1977, he had no idea how much worse things were going to get.

This was ten years after the establishment of Jann Wenner’s Rolling Stone, nine ahead of the founding of David Hepworth and Mark Ellen’s Q magazine and it was around thirty years before record companies started offering media training for fledgling pop stars. Now we have Rolling Stone’s 2017 cover story on Kendrick Lamar where the rapper mentions a videographer present, putting paid to any pretence of intimacy. The September 2018 edition of Vogue was graced by Beyoncé on the cover (good) but the feature inside was a first-person piece, clearly dictated and edited to within an inch of its life by Team Beyoncé (less good).

Where once the minibar and life secrets were shared, when a journalist now braves some alone time with a living legend, the results can be glacial. See Van Morrison’s 18 minute encounter with The Guardian’s Laura Barton as the latest example.

You could conclude that music journalism is in the same shape as Elvis’s television set after it became acquainted with Elvis’s .357 magnum, or even Elvis himself. But what’s actually happened is that music journalism didn’t die, it just changed channel.

The interesting books of recent years, from Hepworth’s riffs on the limited shelf-life of the Rock Star (Uncommon People) and the year 1971 (Never A Dull Moment), Brooklyn writer Rob Sheffield’s idiosyncratic takes On Bowie and Dreaming The Beatles, Sylvia Patterson’s on-off relationship with the celebrity interview, 2016’s I’m Not With The Band, or Saint Etienne member Bob Stanley’s sprawling tome on British pop music Yeah Yeah Yeah are all wildly different. What each has in common is the author’s strong personality writ large over every page.

One of my favourite music books of this decade was Alan Light’s 2012 The Holy or the Broken. Light took more than 250 pages on one album track from a 1984 Leonard Cohen record which his US record company wouldn’t even release. This sounds unpromising, but the song Hallelujah would become a staple of reality shows and glossy dramas, beloved by everyone from Simon Cowell to Bob Dylan.

We can end up learning more about current and past artists not by the confessional interview, shunned by almost all the big stars but longer form music books.

Two examples from 2019 would grace the stocking of anyone still brave enough to profess an interest in rock journalism.

In Why Karen Carpenter Matters, cultural critic Karen Tongson references the band’s huge popularity in the place of her birth, the Philippines. Tongson was named after Karen by her mother, a singer who was said to sound like her. A return to Manila provides a revelation into just how omnipresent the Carpenters’ music remains in her mother country. Throughout, Tongson sketches out her personal perspective on why the Southern Californian siblings’ music retains its universal appeal, as well as its influence on her own life.

British writer Ian Penman’s It Gets Me Home This Curving Track is, at first glance, less personal – a collection of book reviews about artists including Charlie Parker, James Brown, John Fahey, Frank Sinatra, Prince and Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen. On closer inspection, the conceit is an excuse for the writer to dig into the id of various icons. Penman offers his theory that Prince’s Lovesexy was “a gospel album” as well as his last great one, he breaks down the concept of “straight hip” in Steely Dan records, why Lalo Schifrin worked with Clint Eastwood more than any other actor and pays tribute to the “subtly evolutionary” recording techniques employed by Bing Crosby.

In short, by getting inside Penman’s and Tongson’s heads, you are forced to think anew about great artist. This is rock journalism for people who can read – even if the artists are often decidedly unavailable for interview.