Manifesto

1. This is a writers’ website.
2. We oppose the infiltration of money into culture. This website will not accept any form of advertising or revenue
3. We believe in the power of music and the power of ideas. We will not provide daily, or even weekly, updates on new releases, chart movements, what’s hot and what’s not. Ideas will be raised, discussed, accepted or rejected as and when they occur
4. We welcome all intelligent opinions on the modern era that challenge and/or expand our knowledge of music and are happy to post any submitted writing that fulfils that criteria
5. We believe independent is better than corporate

We do not believe in a linear history of rock and pop music, or the idea of progress followed by decline. The best music has not been made already. There was no ‘golden age’ of music to mourn. Art reflects its time, and survives or fails to have relevance for reasons that change with time. The tag of ‘post modern’ allows today’s music media off the hook too easily. A blind alley if ever there was one, ‘post modern’ is used in the main to merely justify an approach to music and culture by which music criticism acts as a consumer guide rather than actually telling you anything about music. The music media have become a corporate media for a corporate age. The increasingly small number of dominant music companies are bigger and further removed from their audience than at any time since the dawn of recording but in greater control of the tools of audience persuasion than ever. In the same way car manufacturers divide the market into different target audiences so do music magazines and radio stations. From 'oldies' magazines Uncut and Mojo and Classic Rock, which serve up hoary tales of bands and drugs/girls/outrageous behaviour in what amounts to this generation’s equivalent of war memoirs, to young trendies such as NME. Ditto TV, radio, you name it, markets, markets, markets. A cynical approach to music produces cynical thinking on music. Irony tells us nothing about the band but everything about the critic.

Just because music is not taken to be important does not mean important music is not being made. Just because revolution is not in the air does not mean that revolutions are not happening in music. We would rather listen to Pulp’s Common People than The Kinks’ Sunny Afternoon, LCD Soundsystem’s North American Scum than Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On. Today’s music is no more derivative than it was in the 1960s or the 1930s or the 1870s. The Arctic Monkeys no more steal from other music in 2006 than The Beatles did in 1963, or The Specials did in 1980. We promise not to write a single article about any acts or albums of the ‘classic rock era’ of the 1960s and 1970s. They have become a millstone not to how music is made today but to how it is reported. We will mention those eras, if at all, only where it helps us understand the here and now. By the here and now we do not mean assessments of an act’s chart potential or how cool their shirts are but the meaning of music - the lyrics, instrumentation, the sleeves, ideas - more than anything the ideas. As French writer George Bataille refused to accept fashionable notions of the difference between ‘high’ art and ‘low’ in Documents, his magazine of 1929-30, Modern Music Review will not judge music by the number of CDs sold, downloads attracted or column inches garnered.

Great music is being made each year, increasingly through the smaller independent labels rather than the big players. This trend is to be encouraged. A committee may be able to produce a great car but it rarely produces great music. Most great labels in history, from Chess to Atlantic to Island to Creation to Warp were the result of one person’s passion, one person’s hunch. Great music comes from anywhere and everywhere but truly independent thought requires an element of independence in action, whether on a big or small record label.

Modern Music Review recognise no boundaries to the appreciation and analysis of music and will be bound by no categories, sectors or target audiences. We will rehabilitate, where appropriate, those who languish in the shadows and condemn anyone basking undeservedly in the warmth of the spotlight. Ours is not an alternative version of the past , it is an alternative view of the present as it is going on right now under our noses. Modern Music Review takes the act of writing about music as seriously as a musician takes the act of making music.

Graham Chalmers

© Modern Music Review (2008)