wire 05 november 2009a

Thank you. Hello and welcome to Adventures in Modern Music on Resonance 104.4 FM.

This is The Wire's radio show. I'm going to be hosting the next hour and a half. My name is Anna Hilda Nessett. And this evening we've got a special. We are going to focus on music writing, which is obviously what The Wire does. In the studio, I will have with me David Stubbs. He is a long-standing music writer and any Wire writer will know his name. He's going to be in the studio. and Mark Fisher, the theorist, writer and lecturer, will be on the phone and together we're going to talk about the art and craft of music writing. But first, here is Sensational. Here we go.

Hit me. Let's go. I'll start it. My best friend, get shit and distribute it. You still use kicks and snares. I make my music with air. Make your ear ring when I be stylin'. Got my own count. Make beats that bounce. Blow an album. Catch it when they come around.

That sensational sound. That's how it went down. My money grip is flashy. Jim with me. Kids with me. I gotta groove that tune. I do what I do. Recruit that game with an answer. Jim with us and bliss we trust Cop the bass, buy the case Answer them bass That's the LP that's connected My flow is a gift Conscious shift to your spot Get in hot, the mix I'll pop and rock the spot Boom, bad shit I'll pop and rock the spot Boom, bad shit I'll pop and rock the spot Boom, bad shit Provide the crapper to your station I'm a war shit. My hit list came from blooded. That's that ultra shit.

When that damn bottle of aliens around. It's Sonic, I rip it. It's stylish. Bliss on it. Remind you of dope shit. Flip the script the way I do it. Sporadic emotion. Coasting from Hinton. Bringing you the Hinton. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. you

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. guitar solo

Thank you. We'll be right back.

Thank you. The End

I'm out. Thank you.

That was the new record by Radiant on Thrill Jockey. The track is called Kimura or Chimura. I'm not entirely sure how that's pronounced. As promised, this edition of Adventures in Modern Music is going to be all about music writing, which obviously I deal to on a daily basis with writers. And I sort of wanted to take the opportunity to chat a little bit with two of our writers,

David Stubbs and Mark Fisher. Mark, who is on the phone, and David, who is in the studio. And David, you are a long... Welcome, by the way. Hello. You are... Yeah, hi, Mark. I hope you can hear us properly. David, you're a long-standing music journalist. You have been... You started a fanzine called Monitor back in the day at Oxford together with Simon Reynolds. And later on, staff at Melody Maker, staff at NME, but later they're out freelancing for lots of different titles including of course The Wire and I wanted to ask you a little bit about the time

the sort of, if you feel that music criticism has changed the culture around it has changed over the time that you've been well, writing about music and also I wanted to ask you specifically a little bit about your kind of satirical column Talk, Talk, Talk which appeared in Melody Maker was it not? That's right, yes. What was Talk, Talk, Talk all about? I think it had a sort of caricature person called Derek Kent who might have been based on a certain music journalist. Well, Derek Kent, I mean it was right for the Melody Maker and he was a kind of sort of pastiche

of a sort of rather long and a certain and a letterist, an old journalist who hadn't really, you know, didn't really quite kind of, you know, probably working for the paper about sort of 1926 or whatever and was finding it rather hard to kind of keep up with modern trains. But I tended to... Oh, that sounds better. Sorry about that. Yes, he was somebody who had been working at the paper since about 1926, you know. Right, right. And he didn't really have very much idea of the way that music had developed, but he always made it a kind of point to interview female artists and usually got involved in rather kind of scandalous situations at the end of these interviews, yes.

In our kind of more PC-aware times, do these sort of situations occur, would you say, still? I don't know you might have been probably just as just as much perhaps as a younger writer I don't really know I mean that was just one of a variety of like characters and things I created I suppose the most famous thing I did was this kind of Mr. Agreeable who was he saw himself being called Mr. Abusing but then somebody complained to IPC and so he had to be reintroduced as Mr. Agreeable for a while and he actually said rather you know he kind of paid backhanded compliments to artists but then gradually sort of brought back the sort of the swearing into it. It was a very kind of sort of punkish column. It was very, very extraordinarily popular, really, actually, the whole thing. And so they was regarded fondly, you know.

David, why did they complain? Did they complain because it was called Mr. Abusing? They complained because of all the swearing in it. OK. It was a mother who caught her 13-year-old son reading it. I mean, it was all asterisks. For me, it was always important that it was asterisks, in a way. Was it? Sorry, it was asterisks from the beginning. Yeah. Right, yeah. But for me, the asterisks, actually, I preferred them on the page because it was almost like it was a kind of visual signifier of something like the equivalent of the punk thrash or something like that. It had a kind of abrasive-looking quality on the page. And you can sort of imagine the different swear words instead of just one. Yes, well, it's really hard to imagine them, really, yes. And do you think it's changed? Do you think writing for magazines have changed from the time back in the day?

Well, certainly, when I first started reading music press and when I started writing for it, I took as the norm what I now look back as two years of extraordinary liberty, really, for the music press, the very late 70s and early 80s in NME, and the sort of late 80s, the early 90s at Melody Maker. I mean, the culture at both of those times, in both those places, was quite extraordinary. The liberties that people were able to take. have really, I mean, those avenues of liberty have been sealed. How do you mean what kind of liberty? Well, I mean, I suppose in the case of like NME, it was the writing of people like Paul Morley and Ian Penman and, you know, the kind of sort of excursions into sort of theory, the way that they were able to kind of approach interviews,

do reviews, things like that. It was much, much more of an editorial freehand. And it was a similar thing in the late 80s with Melody Maker, people like myself and Simon Reynolds or whatever, were able to kind of I mean, there was a whole bunch of us and we really came in and we turned that magazine, you know, we turned the paper kind of upside down really. Prior to our coming along I think they were kind of rather desperately trying to shake off its image as a kind of sort of slightly exchange and marty kind of crusty old sort of jazz proggy kind of like Music Weekly. But then they were trying to sort of turn it into some sort of inky smash shit, a desperately stupid idea, but, you know, and sales were kind of getting low, but then a bunch of varieties came along, and really we were just kind of given a free hand at

Carte Blanche, I mean, there was very, I mean, compared with nowadays, in terms of the kind of bands, so much stuff was kind of just pretty much waved through, really, our stuff was scarcely edited in lots of ways, I mean, obviously edited for areas, it wasn't really edited for tone and content and things like that. And it was a period in which we were able to kind of run amok, really. And the word counts you could have. Oh, the word counts, thousands and thousands of words. There was another thing. It was also kind of flexible in another curious way. I mean, I'm talking about later, we were still working with typewriters. We were still working with old-fashioned typesetters and things like that, and literally cutting and pasting on board and things like that. And the curious thing was that you were able to get things done a lot more close to the wire.

So say I was in Glastonbury or something like that, I could be writing a review of Glastonbury on a Monday. And what would go in there would be on a Tuesday. Now, the weird thing is that when all the new technology came in that's supposed to kind of make everything kind of more instant and quicker, deadlines suddenly became earlier and earlier. I mean, deadlines, I mean, I used to deliver that talk, talk, talk, talk, I did it on a Friday. and it would appear the next Tuesday. But the more that new technology came in, they pushed the deadlines forward further and further. This is a curious paradox that, you know, to the extent they actually had to deliver it eventually, the Friday before, sort of like, you know, 10 days in advance as opposed to three days in advance. And I suppose the parallel with that is the idea of,

that sort of came in parallel I think with things like music becoming more kind of inflexible really so again it was one of these gradual liberties denied I guess also maybe you had the idea at least from I wasn't around reading Enemy or Melody Maker at that point, not in the 80s I guess I'm too young for it plus I was living in Norway where they weren't available but the kind of stories that I hear the editor Chris Bonn he was involved with both as well as a long-standing music writer and he sort of told me recently the story about Nick Kent sitting in the break room

and he was tearing out bread from the middle of a loaf and dipping it in a tin of yoghurt all day and sort of, it sounded like, you know, it's almost these kind of... Oh, it was extraordinary, yes. It was divorce, people taking drugs in the office and chopping out lines on the top of their typewriters and all kinds of things. I mean, it was actually slightly less of that as I came in, but certainly, I mean, it was a very, very kind of anarchic office atmosphere. It was like turning up for a sitcom every day, something like that. It really didn't feel like a place of work. And, you know, quite often I went through a stage where, you know, sometimes you sort of like churn out 3,000 words a cop in the morning, you know, bring it in for like the midday deadline or whatever, and obviously pre-email. And you just get in there in time, sort of cold sweats and whatever,

you know, 5 to 12, and then come midday, sort of like sun's over the yard arm, and then they want to punch you a pint. And have the rest of the day taken care of, you know. So basically things have turned more conservative, and tighter word counts. I mean, you go in there now, It's more like going to the back office of the NatWest Bank or something like that. Yeah, so people take a much more professional approach. Another thing that's changed is that in terms of the suits, as it were, there was one guy who was the suit, and he kind of liaised between the editorial and marketing and the people upstairs or whatever, and most of the time he just looked around and he says, well, he seems to know what you're doing, carry on. But now where there was one person there, there's now probably 10, 15, an entire department of people in suits.

These individuals. And they have much more of a kind of overseeing role in terms of editorial. And this is obviously something that the science of marketing over the last 20 years has become more and more sophisticated and insidious. Sure. Mark, did you used to read Enemy and Melody Maker? Absolutely, yeah. It was one of the most formative experiences of my life, for sure. and really one of the biggest educations, I think, reading The Enemy first and then The Melody Maker. When David and Simon and Paul Oldfield sort of took it over, David's just described. Do you have a kind of writing epiphany, a kind of a piece or something that you specifically remember,

something that sort of almost was a kind of epiphany for you in terms of writing? A single piece is more being thrown into the culture of the enemy, really. And the unforgiving nature of it, really. The fact that it would have made no concessions to you as a reader, that you sort of had to struggle to understand it, that there would be lots of references to things that you hadn't heard of that they wouldn't necessarily explain. really being thrown into that and deciding to sink or swim, really. And then I decided to try and swim with it. And after a while of doing that, you gradually get used to particular writers, I suppose,

and their style. But I guess one of the interesting things about The Enemy at that time was that I'd practically read all of it, really. even the writers that I really didn't like at all and the music that they championed that I would never listen to I'd still read it all because there did seem to be some sort of contested space even though certain writers were associated with certain music there's still a sense that there was some sort of public space to be fought over and that it mattered and I do think that

has never been recaptured really I think there's been consistently good music writing since that period but never that sense of a single space where it's happening and a kind of a space where people are struggling to establish a sort of ground. But I do think, like David, really, that for me that was how the music press was and one therefore had very high expectations. It's only later on that you realise

that it was an exceptional period. perhaps it was only livable that period afterwards by imagining that I guess around the mid 80s when the enemies started to fall off you could think of it as just a temporary blip and things would return to how they were and then of course there was a resurgence of Melody Maker so that kept it going for a while but in fact it was as David said really those periods were exceptions and it's been clear it's become increasingly clear how exceptional they were really

What about you David? What made you want to set up Monitor from the start? We set it up in about 1984 and I think we were beginning to sense that that kind of early era of like that era of NME, which was like during the post-punk era from say 79, 82, 83, was just beginning to kind of taper off. And I think a lot of those kind of key writers by then either were kind of peripheral on the paper. And it was drifting into a kind of... There was this sort of, I mean, phrases like socialism, you know, were being kind of coy. And, you know, music was kind of getting rather kind of earnest. And there was a certain slightly sort of... There was a sort of dialectical exhaustion. and it felt like there needed to be a kind of

I mean, you know, because what we were doing at Melody Maker was in a sense kind of very, in lots of respects kind of antithetical to sort of what had been, you know things that had been championed at NME and I mean, but again it was, both for us I think it was contingent on the quality of the music at the time so I think that it's no coincidence that, you know the late 70s, early 80s I think the writing in a sense was able to thrive on what was a really, really good music scene. I don't think it actually created that kind of music scene. I think that the whole sort of resurgence of Melody Maker in the late 80s was dependent on the resurgence of music, especially rock music from about 1987 onwards. It needed that. It needed that tie to kind of bear the writing. We weren't capable of just creating scenes just throughout kind of...

We weren't capable of imagining creating scenes. The music had to be there in the first place. And so I think that Monitor occurred in a kind of midpoint between NME and then Resurgence of Melody Maker, I think we were kind of critiquing, you know, sort of, especially NME. We were probably sort of looking at NME at night, looking at the way that this kind of, there was this sort of white soul kind of worthy orthodoxy had seemed to have kind of taken over the magazine. And it was a bit slower. We were really kind of, actually at that moment, we were just kind of casting around for something new that hadn't quite really happened yet. And it only did start happening, even though Simon joined in about 1985, I joined in 1996. I think it was only in 1987 when groups like Butthole Servers, Young Gods, and various people like ARK, and all these kind of groups came along, these kind of resurgent guitar groups. And that gave us a kind of impetus to...

To write. But was there a piece of music writing that particularly influenced you, or maybe a book that came out that you were particularly keen on, or anything like that? No, again, there wasn't any one particular kind of piece. It was much more kind of cumulative, a bit like that, as I was saying. I think it was much more cumulative. in general, certain writers, like the Moreland Penn, certain little phrases. I always liked the way that sort of, especially like Paul Moreland had this wonderful way of turning orthodoxies upside down. Just little phrases. He'd talk about hard groups like Depeche Mode. And if you were kind of like, you knew what he meant. You knew what he was trying to do there. He was trying to sort of re-evaluate the notion of hardness in music in a kind of very clever sort of way. And he'd talk about a sort of tight fit B-side being better than Led Zeppelin III or something like that.

And he was just doing these little provocative kind of things. I also like to, though, I haven't said that, I mean, about writers like Danny Baker who did this wonderfully funny piece about going to interview Michael Jackson. And so for me, I mean, like, you know, the comedy was also kind of very important thing, a kind of gusto, invective as well. And the idea of, like, not just sort of... I mean, I think mostly what music generally is the most useful thing to do is champion things and extol things. But the kind of invective, the kind of blasting away of the kind of rubbish and the nonsense is also a wonderful part of the whole brio experience. Obviously today we've got the internet and it plugs us directly into the music straight away if we want to hear it. We can at least hear a snippet of it legally and if not perhaps

find more or a stream online and anybody can get release information. Those are the two two things that were very important factors for people, release what was coming out, what was happening, and a description or an idea whether the things that were coming out were any good or not. And in that, those things are kind of catered for already online. Maybe I should ask you, Mark, what sort of role do you think music journalists now have? Well, I think that liberates really the music writer from, in a way, a lot of the dull tasks of sort of reviewing, really. I guess that period that we've talked about in The Enemy and Melody Maker was much more about extrapolations,

sort of extravagant hypotheses, extensions around the music, than it was about a sort of simple description of the music. and I would hope that if sort of music writing rather than perhaps music journalism and perhaps there is a distinction that's worth sort of talking about if music writing is to sort of survive and prosper I would hope it would have to sort of start to develop those kind of traits again because it's obviously purely, as you said, really totally redundant to simply be engaging in description when it's so easy for people to just hear things. Music writers have got to do more than that.

Yeah, it's a critical engagement with... Yeah, I mean, I think the question is not so much what does it sound like or what is it, as obviously part of it, but why does it matter? Which is a crucial critical question, really. Or not, yeah. Does it matter is the first question? And if it does, why? And clearly, you know, you can't get that just from description. So do you foresee even mainstream print journalism becoming more perhaps critical in order to kind of hold on to their readers or critically engaged, I should say? or do you

that would be the hope but somehow I can't really see it myself it's a thin hope really but I think in a way mainstream journalism is fulfilling another function really I guess the thing that really annoys me about it is something that wasn't in place in that music writing which first sort of seduced me, really, which was, it's that kind of mateyness, really, that you find in a lot of mainstream press. Sure. Where, you know, everything's familiar, we know what the world's like, and, you know, it's like people, it's rubbish, you know, people in a pub having a little chat to each other.

Whereas, you know, what I liked about someone like Ian Penman was kind of a cold and alien quality. It was clearly writing. It wasn't someone just talking to you in that sort of sociable manner. And since I think there's a lot of demand for that kind of sociability of writing, and there's a big market for it, so I don't know. I think there's other things that will go on that will allow that to sort of continue, really. What about you, David? Yes, it's interesting that Mark talks about publishedness. I know that I mentioned a pub earlier on, and I suspect that Ian Penman actually enjoyed a punch himself.

But, I mean, what Mark says, having said that, I agree with what Mark says. I think we try to engage in publishedness of a higher order. But, yeah, just in terms of the idea of what Mark says, something that occurs today, that it ought actually to be a kind of a liberation of the music press if all of these kind of sort of bread-and-butter functions are being performed on the internet, because it's easy to find out what something sounds like, get all that basic information. But, I mean, it doesn't... I mean, in some sort of mainstream music press, it still isn't necessarily like that. There's still, despite all of that, there are kind of much tighter, smaller kind of word counts. Everything's much kind of... Everything's kind of capsule reviews and things like that. Quite often, it was required to provide, you know, a lot of basic information rather than go from one.

You can't assume, take anything for granted in terms of what the reader will know about such and such a piece of music. I mean, in a sense, the idea that just because everything's available on the internet means... I mean, I think there definitely very much is still a role for music journalism because really there is so much stuff there out in MySpace, Spotify, either here and there or whatever, and especially with the lack of any kind of visual component now that everything, you know, with things shrunk down to MP3 or whatever, that there needs to be a kind of, some needs to sort of develop a kind of conceptual framework, you know, to kind of prioritise things, to explain things, to put things, you know, to sort of create a sense of a broader picture. And it is creating a sense of a broader picture. Sometimes you can actually create a sort of rhetorical framework. And provide a context for the music. I mean, in a sense, what, something like,

I mean, something like Simon Reynolds or whatever, I mean, the music, as I said before, the music has to be, I think it does depend on the music being good to work off that. I don't think you can just invent music writing out of absolutely nothing. If the music's mediocre, then you've really got nothing to work with. However, what you can do, and I think what's not the same, is it creates this magnificent extravagant surplus of meaning in the way that he writes, which I think is a kind of, you know, it's an absolutely wonderful, you know, it's basically a wonderful thing. And it's certainly still, even if you're not creating a surplus of meaning, there's certainly, I think, there's still a role for music press, music magazines to, yeah, to simply create a context, a conceptual framework. What does this all mean? What are the things to listen to? Why is that? So it isn't just a kind of... Snippets of information you get.

Or like I say, it's just streams of noise coming at you and contextualised with no visual. OK, we're going to come back to our discussion. First, we're going to hear Nils Öklan, one track called Mönster on his new ECM album. Amen. Amen.

so Amen.

. . . Yeah, melancholic interlude there. That was violinist Nils Öklan. He is a Norwegian Harding fiddle player. That was from his new album Monograph, or upcoming, I should say, album on ECM Records. The track was called Mönster.

It is Norwegian for pattern. Coming back to our discussion with Mark Fisher and David Stubbs, who I have in the studio and on the phone line. We're talking about the state of music journalism. And Mark, people will also know you not only as a Wire contributor, also very much as a blogger. You have a blog called K-Punk. I've always wanted to ask you, what does K-Punk mean? It goes back to the 90s when I was in the Cybernetic Cultural Research Unit. And we were trying to find a replacement really for the cyber prefix, which was getting really

boring. And in Greek, the original Greek of cyber is spelled with a K. So it was really to do that as like cyberpunk with K. And then obviously K is able to determine lots of other meanings, Kafka, Kurt, and K to his memory. It's just a lot packed into the letter K, really. Yeah, I remember interviewing Steve Goodman, Code 9, asking about K, and he wouldn't say why he liked it so much. But it must be some similar reasons. I think it's probably something to do with those things. I see. I mean, blogs, you have a website, David, but not an active blog as such.

No, I think I do, what I've found now is I tend to sort of write now across, I tend to write across sort of message boards and things like that. I think my kind of online energy tends to get diffused that way. What sort of message boards? What, like Facebook? Well, Facebook, you know, and there's a football, when Saturday comes and just things like that. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I tend to sort of do it that way. And how come, Mark, you chose to set up a blog? At the time when I did it, I didn't really have much of a plan, really. And I'd only recently found out what blogs were.

How do you mean? Well, it's only just before that I had a blog, I guess a few months, that I even knew what a blog was. Someone asked me, Mark, why don't you have one of these blogs? I thought, what's a blog? I've never even heard of it. And then I sort of gradually became aware of the sort of blog network, particularly surrounding Simon Reynolds site, I guess. And then I thought, okay, might as well have one, really. And I guess part of the reason I was doing it was in recovery from doing a doctorate, really, which caused severe psychic trauma. And I was very depressed about writing of any kind, really.

Is that because you had to keep to the strict academic style? Yeah, partly that, yeah. And that sense that you can't really say anything unless you've read 100 books on it. And so you could almost trick yourself. You know, you think, oh, well, it's only a blog post. It doesn't have to be fully referenced and all that. It doesn't have to be that serious. But then that was sort of way back into writing, really, for me. And then it took on its own velocity and its own kind of format for that, really. and I could start to see the potential of blogs, partly in a way to reconstitute that space that had existed in the music press in the 70s and 80s.

Certainly my whole life has been influenced by that. The reason I'd done a doctorate at all, the reason I was interested in theory, French philosophy, was largely because of seeing it in the music press. And actually you get that initial kind of crushing disappointment actually in some ways when you saw the theory in its own right as it were. So the context of the music press. Without the music. Without the music and also without the way that the theories were sort of mobilized and deployed in the music press. I find a pure abstract philosophical thought a bit difficult to deal with on its own. I can only deal with it when it's applied, really.

It's an interesting juxtaposition there between theory and music writing, because music writing also has a great deal of enthusiasm behind it. has a great deal of you're sort of enthusing over a record or you want to convey what that says to you, but you also have this critical, theoretical context that you put it in. I think Simon Reynolds wrote about that relatively recently, I think in Freeze magazine. That's right, yeah. I thought that Simon captured really the appeal of theory really, which some of the objectives to theory in relation to music writing or theory in general, I think, have a certain model of thought as kind of laborious, sort of slow, difficult.

But, you know, Simon's writing about theory in that piece as an intoxicant, really. And I think that is how I would see theory. It's, you know, music is an intoxicant, a drug. Theory is a drug, which in many ways allows you to appreciate the music in a different way, rather than being something that is sclerotically imposed on the music from outside. I think there's a strong relation between theory and enthusiasm when a theory is interesting. It's not as if theory is opposed to that.

it's probably worth bringing in the famous quote from Elvis Costello at this point about writing about music is like dancing to architects. Yeah, is that actually credited to him? I thought that it was disputed. Okay, well, whoever said that. I think there might be a whole website. Some of them say it's Frank Zappa, it's more of a popular book. I think that there's a whole website actually dedicated to finding out who sent that. I think thinking about that recently, what sort of interested me was the idea in a way that dancing to music makes any more sense than writing about it. And it seems to me really in lots of ways writing about music is in just the same relation.

Rather, writing is just in just the same relation to music as dancing is. it's you know it's a kind of it's an immediate um it's not necessarily immediate because i mean dance isn't necessarily media either i mean dance you know has its rules its structures but at the same time you know it's not the same as music i think what's behind the elvis costello quote if it is him or whoever said it yeah was that that idea in some sense that you know dance is a natural response to music whereas writing is an unnatural response are both equally artificial in a way, but artificial in an interesting way because they're different sort of theories that are cutting across each other. And, you know, just as dancing can intensify your relation to music,

so can writing about it. Yeah, for sure. And with blogs, I mean, I don't know if you visit blogs, David, I kind of, I feel sometimes a little bit overwhelmed obviously I deal with writers generally, regularly on a daily basis and the office and the wire and a lot of them have blogs and it's just even trying to read them all every day is sort of impossible time wise, I don't even understand how it's possible to even, you know, to actually write on a day, that I don't understand Well I absolutely know if you're writing already or whatever, yeah then to sort of like put in all that extra energy, obviously the great thing about a blog is that you've got infinite space. And I think all magazines,

I don't think it's necessarily a kind of commercial imperative that's created things like word counts and title word counts and capsule reviews. I think it's the sheer amount of stuff out there that's actually good stuff as well, really good stuff. It's more than the market can bear. And I think the amount of stuff out there that you have one has to kind of process and deal with, I think has been one of the factors that's created these kind of much tighter word counts. But absolutely. I mean, just to go back to what Mark was saying, it's fascinating. I mean, I hate people who say writing about music, like dancing, about architecture. And for me, it's, again, it goes to this inherent suspicion of the relation between music and writing, and writing having this desiccating effect on the music, blah, blah, blah. But there was also this thing about, you know, to the extent that music is all about the music. And I always say when people have this kind of idea that music is all about the music. And I think a lot of bands that are coming to me now,

or indie bands, are able to tend to talk purely in terms of everything that ultimately is about the music. I mean, the antithesis to me of that is actually Simon Price, who wrote the book about Manning Street Preachers and he called it Everything. And that was one thing, the Manning Street Preachers, whatever you think of them, that's actually the least interesting thing about them is their music. But they're a starting point for sort of discursive adventures in all kinds of directions. One of the things I think is happening in the blog world with some of the Mark writes, it isn't just writing about music. I mean, it's kind of adventures in all kinds of other directions, you know, across other disciplines, other areas, you know, things like that. I mean, and the NME, again, in the early 80s, perhaps more so than the Melody Maker in the late 80s, you know, it imported the attitude that it brought to the music press into kind of other areas. It made, you know, it made kind of everything seem exciting.

It made politics seem exciting. It made the theory seem exciting. It made football seem exciting. You know, it imported in, you know, the magazine when Saturday comes was a derivation of the music press at that time. I think, you know, that was a kind of wonderful thing, and I think things have perhaps got a little bit more compartmentalised these days. And so would you think, Mark, that the blogs have changed print journalism? I don't really think so. Not that I can see, except by people like myself being able to move into it, I guess. But I think that they're doing different things in a way. It's partly because there's not the sort of pliancy, really, within the print world, where a lot of the things that are interesting and distinctive about blogs

could sort of emerge there, really. Partly the thing about the sort of rigid work count thing, that just puts a ceiling on it. And also, I think, the sort of demographic and niche problem, really. Some of the most interesting blogs, really, just create their own audience and create an audience that just doesn't exist for any print magazine. It's hard to replicate that in print magazines at the moment. But also, I mean, this is maybe not directly related to music journalism as such, but also the need today to somehow divulge absolutely everything that one does.

I went to the corner shop and, you know, got a pint of milk and that needs to be blogged or Facebooked or tweeted or, you know, somehow there's this constant need of tending your own personal space, of tending your own kind of representation of yourself online. and it's sort of it's incredibly distracting and I have to say also quite often really boring to have to kind of deal with all of that To me that's one end of the spectrum of self-indulgent is people who will kind of bother to Facebook that they've just won out and bought a pint of milk but then perhaps at the glorious end is the kind of blogging thing where perhaps in a kind of way contrary to what I was talking about earlier on about Hating Well It Together when it's just all about the music

I do also love about lots of the blogs that were in this kind of axis around people like sign-rails and martyrs, people actually be able to sort of take these wonderful kind of highly specific, obscure, morbidly, freakish fixations on one particular aspect of music and be able to kind of, you know, expound on that, you know, for thousands and thousands of words in a way they couldn't possibly do that in any of the music papers, however, you know, well-intentioned, you know, even at their feet, you know. Yeah, but when I started my blog, I mean, I had this phrase, a soup and sandwich blog, which was these sites that would just say, I had a super sandwich today. Who's that of interest to? I thought, well, I just don't want it to be anything like that. And in fact, I didn't want it to say much about me at all at that stage. And I really wanted to just be pursuing some sort of line,

to have some sort of consistent line and some sort of themes that it would develop. And then it became clear to me that, you know, I mean, a blog just is an empty space that you can put anything into. And the fact that people had used them as diaries, that was just one use of them. And it really was open to the blogger as to how they were going to use that space. And then it got used in much more interesting ways. And I think much more depersonalizing ways. I think that you're right. At that end of the internet, which has to do with constituting yourself as a person, sort of socializing,

is really the most tedious end of it. But there is another end, which is very depersonalizing. And that seems to me the most interesting end, really. Okay, we're going to take a short break again. And this is Bliss, sensational. Party and rock puts all bets on bliss.

Style is sensational. Remind me like an app. Hey, spot. It's stay hot. Sipping, bubbling. Steaming with the isms. The flow, cold spasm on beat. Always rhyme, unique. Stay in your lane. Coming in mine. That's a natural shine. Dancers. Party. People. Request it. Yeah, I kick off the roar. Try to interrupt shit. Like, ho, ho, at the door. I got back to please. Them to worry me. Understand the biz. Yeah, you got to holler Because I got the system high-powered This guy bounced way about a ton Similar shit like this all around My pro flow was rooted Sipping on some juice that came loose I got that flow for record mode Another hit in progress

Got it bumping like this for your ear Get it clear The quicker I bring it, the quicker I see it A flow like this Got it based on I should have dropped a fool like wind blow Endo My jazz is down Get your book now I'm the hooker Hooker Float Go like this, roll up. The show sold out. Chunk of Bliss, no doubt. It came from that world-telling round. We bouncing right now.

How we get down. Maxing right now on the sounds. Say, you know, I bring it. Get the buzz from it. My UK Connect, buzz it. Hit me on the dial bucket. Sporking up. This breeze is bliss, baby. Meditation in the spot. Real loud. Is it possible I'm whacked? Hold on. The flow get cooked, toast. All you see is smoke. That's how I shake it down. Bring it back, DJ. That shit will gliss. How to do this. I'm convinced the regression was triggered by an act of consciousness. When I was in the train, I entered another consciousness. I became another self, a more primitive self. A drug in some way triggered the externalization of that other more primitive self.

I'm asking you to make a small quantum jump with me to accept one deviant concept that our other states of consciousness are as real as our waking state and that that reality can be externalized Sensational there Sensational and Spectre together the album is called Acid Bass on word sound recordings and we're back with Mark Fisher and David Stubbs in the studio with me, Anna Hilden-Nessett. You're listening to The Wire's Adventures in Modern Music on Resonance 104.4 FM. We are having a special about music writing, music journalism. One thing I wanted to talk to you both about is a little bit the differences between art criticism

and music criticism. David, you have a book called Fear of Music out on Zero Books, which is a sort of discussion of the differences between how people perceive art and how people perceive music. And Mark, you also write for Freeze magazine. So I was just wondering a little bit what are the sort of differences that you've noticed, presumably when you were doing your book you were reading? well when I was doing the book I was making a contrast the subtitle is why people get Rothko but don't get Stockhouse and it's this sort of simple idea of why art has this kind of very popular

very lucrative high end and it's equivalent in the sort of outgown music world doesn't seem to have the same sort of traction etc etc I did sort of have to venture into the kind of world of art criticism although I've kind of looked at galleries and things like that I actually felt guilty and very much like an outsider. One of the things to me about art criticism, I suppose, is that it's a bit like perhaps classical music, whatever, where you do feel that one ought to have some sort of academic sort of credential qualification. I always think that's certainly one difference. But music criticism, especially, I suppose, coming from pop and rock music, it's a kind of wonderful thing in a sense that... I mean, I'm interested perhaps, and especially in the book,

not so much in, I'm interested in the way that things take their place in the world, the way that things are consumed and music, pop music, rock music are very kind of public things, I mean you can you know for one thing especially, you know, that's one thing, you can I feel at liberty to be very kind of rude about these things because these things invade our lives you know, bad music invades our lives in a way that sort of bad things from other sort of media don't there are rubbish novels but they don't get broadcast over tannoy systems they don't affect it live, you can ignore them you don't have to watch certain TV programs it's very hard to avoid bad music and I feel that one is almost entitled as a music journalist to sort of take revenge as a result of that Right, right What about you Mark, do you have any

have you noticed any big difference in contributing to music magazines and to art magazines Well, most of the stuff I do in Freeze, or a lot of it, is about music anyway. I have not ended up writing a lot about art, so it's not a big shift in methodology for me doing it, to be honest. A bit like David, though, with art writing, one always feels often that one lacks the required knowledge to assess it in a way that...

So you sort of somehow need an art history degree? Yes. And often you will feel like a philistine I guess that's the interesting contrast between that and what I was describing about the NME earlier, even though it was in the 80s or whatever, even though it was completely demanding, and on the face of it, you know, unforgiving in its sort of pitch and register, I still didn't feel excluded by it. I still felt that I could sort of find my way through it. Whereas art writing I always feel demands a level of expertise that I don't feel

that I really have. Echoing David's thoughts I guess I suppose. Yeah. And just to Mark, you're involved in Zero Books. One of the editors there I believe. and you have upcoming at the ICA, you have a talk at the Calling Out of Context Festival happening towards the end of November, a sort of talk about deep listening and I was just wondering a little bit what does that mean?

It was partly about, in a way, a similar issue to what Dave was talking about, the fear of music. But really, for me, the comparison is more between music and cinema. And often, particularly in London, I've noticed, if you go to a gig, you'll find you're having to shush people or try and make people quiet. Some venues in London where they have to have signs saying, please be quiet when the band is playing. Well, I suppose it depends on what you're going to see. Yeah, I know. But that would almost never be the case, I would think, in cinema. Even if the film is often the case,

as mainstream Hollywood films today, it's a pretty poor asset. It just interested me why people are prepared to give 90 minutes of attention to pre-recorded film. We almost never give that attention to pre-recorded music. It's obviously the live concept. But it just interested me about what would it be like to listen to music, pre-recorded music, in the same way we watch the film, really. And partly that is to combat some of the things that you were just talking about before, which is the kind of constant fragmentation of attention, the constant distribution of attention in a kind of digital matrix,

which we're embedded in at all times. You don't have to be sitting in front of a computer, clearly. The fact you've got a mobile phone is enough to always divide one's attention. It seemed to me that it would be interesting to try and interrupt that now. I think that because of that constant pressure to be communicating, to be constituting oneself on the social networks, it seemed to me interesting to have an interruption of that which was collective but not social in a way which was listening to things together and partly this came out of something that I did with the

Otolith Group at the Gasworks Gallery where they played a sound piece that myself and a collaborator made for Resonance, actually, in 2005. And it was a really singular experience to be sitting in a room with people, listening to something that had been pre-recorded. I never quite experienced anything quite like that. And I really thought then, well, how could this be developed? How can we develop sort of collective listening practices, really? and obviously there's a strong relation between listening and music writing and trying to find a space for

listening trying to find new ways of responding to music and sound really that's partly going to be about What day is it? Now you're asking me You've got to have your plugs right now Hang on, I'll just get to the camera. I think the... It's on November the 15th. November the 15th, Mark Fisher at the ICA talking about deep listening, and I suppose it's not only about Pauline Oliveros either. It doesn't. But, and also, the two of you have a book on, well, Mark, you've edited a book on Michael Jackson, where you, David, have a piece.

Absolutely. Can you tell me a little bit, why did you want to edit a book about Michael Jackson? Well, I'd say the least, limited interest in Michael Jackson for the last 20 years, I suppose. But when he died, I sort of inevitably allowed myself to succumb to watching all the old tracks on music channels, etc., etc. And I was just struck by the contrast, really, between... A sort of fairly obvious contrast between how Michael Jackson was when he was young, when he was in his early 20s, and what he'd become at the end, really.

And I really just wanted to... It seemed to me that he had died at a very punctual moment. He died at the time when, you know, just after the economy had crashed. And just after Obama had been elected, it seemed like a big threshold moment, really. Something had definitively ended. And, you know, I did a post on my blog, which got a quite good response. And I really wanted to build on that and, you know, get other writers involved, really as an alternative to what I thought was going to be the general response to his death, which would be, on the one hand, kind of scurrilous rumour-mongering,

on the other hand, kind of messianic tributes. And partly as a way of getting sort of long-form responses to things. What sort of things are in it? Well, I think probably The Jewel in the Crown is an 11,000-word piece by Ian Penman, which is I think a masterpiece. It's been on really top form and really I think the sort of lens where he's at his best. It's not just a reflection on Michael Jackson. It's a Jackson of the 20th century figure. It's also about children's literature. It's also about celebrity, drug addiction. There's a whole range of pieces from David's at the most sort of sceptical

end, I guess, about glad to be rid of him, really, to other people who are more celebratory and trying to recover some of the later period, which not many people are critically respectable, I'll put it that way. So, yeah, it's partly about really trying to get back, in some sense, sense that was there in the sort of music press that we were talking about at the start of the program really and trying to create a new space for that and I think what we're trying to do at Zero really comes out of that because both myself and Tara Goddard who's the sort of main Zero editor you know really formed by that by both of us are formed by that music press and we sort of

want to retain fidelity to the spirit of it really whether that's putting out philosophy books or putting out music books like this one, really. And are you, David, are you glad to be rid of that? I suppose with me, I mean, I don't think it's, I think with someone like Michael Jackson, I mean, I think it's absolutely impossible to take any kind of contrarian stand against something like Don't Stop Till You Get Enough or whatever. But I suppose that my, one of the things I wanted to bring across is I suppose my just general suspicion of the, I mean, Mark briefly alluded to the messianic aspect of the celebrity. I suppose I would argue that he was talented but not actually a genius and that there was always kind of people around him at key certain points. And when he was just himself alone, that's when he did all his worst stuff.

It was when there was no way that he was kind of accountable to what he was working with. I suppose I just have a general suspicion about kind of the monomania in pop and rock celebrity culture. I think the ridiculous absurd... The idea of the king and the queen. Or the Beatles even, or something like that. the absurd, I mean, great as the Beatles were, the absurd excessive attention that's paid and just intensifies with each passing year. I just think it's a depressing... You don't really get that in fiction, the king of books, the king of novels, the queen of art or something. Yeah, when people kind of result to these kind of genuflecting kind of terms, I always find that rather depressing. Yeah. We're going to hear now a track by Circulatione Totale Orchestra.

This is another Norwegian CD, this time on Rune Gramophone, coming out next month. It's a free jazz blowout on Rune Gramophone. The album is called Bandwidth. ¶¶

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Circulation Total Orchestra. I'm not entirely sure how to pronounce it. On Rune Gramofon, Norwegian record label. The orchestra there is led by Frode Gjerstad, who is a Norwegian free jazz saxophonist. Still have David Stubbs here in the studio and Mark Fisher on the line. We're going to finish up. I wanted to just ask, when is the Michael Jackson book on Zero coming out, Mark?

It's the end of this month. The end of this month. OK, we'll look out for that. And Ian Penman's long spiel on the King of Pop. and David you have pieces in a new book on Crack Rock, is that right? And that's on Black Dog Publishing so there's a sort of a Crack Rock interest with a book and the recent BBC BBC Channel 4 documentary which was interesting so we sort of started the programme just talking about music writing and the sort of old days of Enemy and Melody Maker. We've been talking about blogging and the impact of the internet on music criticism.

And in the beginning, Mark, you mentioned, well, you suggested that there might be a difference between music writing and music journalism. Sort of, would you like to expand on that? Yes, there wasn't a particularly profound distinction, really. I think music journalism has certain duties that music writing might not have. For instance, the same duties that any journalist would have, really, is sort of finding stuff out and relating it. It was on Marcello Carlin's blog that he made the distinction a few weeks ago. He was quite firmly saying that he was not a music journalist. He was a music writer. And that seems to be true in his case, where he's not doing much, if any, kind of original kind of interviewing or fact-finding.

He's just expounding on the music, really. And many people will be doing both things, and a lot of music writing would also include this journalistic side. but I guess it's just to emphasize the different kind of responsibilities I suppose a music writer doesn't necessarily have the same responsibilities as a sort of journalist Right, so the music journalist in your view is more of a kind of news hound facts hound and the writer is more the sort of theoretical side of things.

Well, I don't know if it's... Is that simplifying it? Well, no, not necessarily. It's just obviously lots of people who are music journalists also do those other things as well. But not all music journalists are music writers. It's more the other way around, in a way, that a lot of music writers don't necessarily have a journalistic side, because many journalists would have the music writer side, I suppose. Right. OK. All right, well, I'd like to say thank you, Mark, and thank you, David, for joining me in the studio and staying on the line for the whole time. I'm going to finish off this session of The Wire's Adventures in Modern Music. If you want to know any of the music that I've been playing,

there is a playlist or there will be a playlist online and also the whole show is archived there should you want to revisit and I'll leave you with Josephine Foster this is her album graphic as a star it's her album where she's put Emily Dickinson poetry to music and the track we're going to hear is called Trust in the Unexpected and it's an upcoming record on Fire Records. I hope you all have a nice evening and that's it from me, Anna Hildenassett. Thank you very much.

Thank you. To effort on divine Twas is our Lord Columbus When January withdrew

Before the apparition Baptized America This name afflicted Thomas When the ideas show T'was better than perceiving all Provided it needed To trust in the unexpected By this world's William Kidd Prost-wilded over very cold

His one-headed tears to fill