The Style of Music Journalism

 

I’m reading a book by Carl Wilson, Let’s Talk about Love. Wilson is a music journalist, and it’s a long time since I’ve read any music journalism. I vaguely remember seeing articles in New Musical Express, during the 1970s when I was a student, and perhaps I was more tolerant at that time, but today this writing strikes me as very peculiar. As for the argument of the book, that is for a later post, but here I will try to clarify the main features of the music journalism style. You could say that much of the NME journalism could be excused as the result of enthusiastic youthful ardour by the writers, but Wilson was 40 when he published Let's Talk about Love. 

Mixing things up

Wilson constructs sentences by combining formal and informal, academic and popular discourse. This technique is certainly arresting: I stop reading with every example. I can’t decide if the technique is thereby successful or simply confusing: 

“This epidemic of second thought made critical scorn generally seem a tad shady.” [p15]

 Perhaps it is simply that Wilson confuses us with his baroque melange of metaphors:

 “Once pop criticism had a track record lengthy enough to be full of wrong turns, neither popular nor critical consensus seemed like a reliable guide.” [p15]

Using a phrase “track record” in the context of pop music seems likely to confuse. And a long track record isn’t necessarily full of wrong turns – it might just be long. 

Mixed metaphors

“After the tumult of the early 1990s, when ‘underground’ music was seized on by the mainstream and just as quickly thrown overboard” [p15]

“For four years her legions have tithed their salaries to fly to Los Angeles for her nightly revue” [p18]

Mixed metaphors are not confined to Wilson's writing. There are plenty of other examples, such as a review of the Wilson book by another (former) music journalist, David Zahl, who writes: 

Having authoritative taste in cutting edge music is a particularly cruel mistress, especially in an age when technology has put so many extra players on the field. 

Sentences that defy expectations

One of the challenges that AI teams are working on is to parse an English sentence correctly – to understand its meaning. Most English sentences are quite straightforward, but I feel sorry for the AI experts to have to deal with such illogical constructions as these: 

“The epiphany was ethical, but it led to musical enjoyment”.

That word “but” worries me. Are ethical actions not enjoyable? Does enjoyment have anything to do with ethics? 

References for the favoured few

A further confusion is references to popular culture where it is assumed that the reader knows what Wilson is talking about. For example: “[I had] gotten married (to a woman with a severe Gummo fixation)”. Do we know what Gummo is? It’s a cult film about teenage boys. As Wilson himself points out, pop music criticism often “hinges on turning your readership into an incrowd [with] the power to exclude”. [p16]

Perhaps the real challenge when writing about popular music is that the subject matter can be so banal, that the journalists feel they have to embellish their text to provide more interest. Perhaps you might say I am being unfair to Wilson, as his book makes a serious point - but that is for the next post.