|
||||
|
An open letter to Loops from Modern Music Review It was a thrilling moment when I finally got Loops in my hands in my local HMV amid the expensive computer games and cut-price CDs. Bold design, bold writing, this magazine/book stamped with those two hallmarks of quality - the best publishing house (Faber and Faber) and the best independent record label (Domino). On its own terms, this super-sized Granta magazine, this McSweeney's for true music fans lives up to all the hype. As if born fully-formed, it has the assurance and depth of its indulgent purples and fuscia pinks, the imagination of its retro-futuristic chain motifs. Loops’ adventurous approach to writing about music is something I have been working on for the past year, too, at www.modernmusicreview.com It’s a relief to discover I’m not in this desert on my own. Though you can always rely on Simon Reynolds, Nick Kent and Jon Savage for articles worth reading, it’s a pleasure to see that issue one contains surprises round every corner. The Wild Beasts’ poetic manifesto is as brashly esoteric and fiercely whimsical as the embarrassing night a few years back we booked them to play a small bar in Harrogate, only for the owner’s drunken brother to heckle Hayden Thorpe’s glorious, non-conformist falsetto. There’s a nimbleness of thinking in Geeta Dyal’s witty analysis of Brian Eno’s music by way of culinary metaphors that suggests her forthcoming biography of the ambient pioneer will be more lively than David Sheppard’s recent On A Faraway Beach which contained all the right research and while fighting shy of any decent conclusions. It’s also very hard not to be impressed by Sam Davies’s piece. Anyone with the chutzpah and skill to declare rap stars ‘camp’ with only the arcane musings of the late, great Susan Sontag as back-up is clearly a bit ‘street‘ himself. In taking the plunge into the sprawling 224-page mass of first person musings and long-form rambles, a bubble of doubt does rise to the surface, however. Loops seems to know what it doesn’t want to be - another consumer guide for this consumer era. The question is whether providing what Simon Reynolds calls a creative “haven” for good writing is a good enough answer in these fractured times of blogs, niches, genres and sub-genres? Three things worry me about
Loops at this early stage. Firstly, the incredibly wide-ranging nature
of its intelligence threatens to leave it literally scatter-brained.
Though modernmusicreview.com still has some way to go to meet the high modernmusicreview,com is not interested in raking over the ashes of Nick Drake or Punk; we are not haunted by the ghosts of The Beatles and the Stones, the Pistols and the Clash. We do not mourn the past. As our manifesto, says: "Our’s 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” We neither want to be hipsters of the absolutely new, nor are we looking for “Moondog’s inheritor”, to pick up on a few points from to Hari Kunzru’s excellent Twice upon a Time (Listening to New York). Current acts such as Guillemots (or White Denim or Animal Collective or Phoenix or TV On The Radio, you fill in the rest) are not a great because they are anyone’s inheritors, they are great full stop and deserve to be treated as such. Thirdly, as imaginative and well-written as every article in Loops is, the one thing a little thin on the ground is passion. Almost too generous and liberal for its own good, Loops feels like a very interesting jigsaw puzzle whose pieces have been put back together completely at random. If Loops is to be more than a starting point, if it is to secure for itself anything but a marginal place in music culture, it needs to identify what really matters on the fast-moving conveyer belt of modern life and tackle it not only with irony and wit but with heart. Is Patrick Wolf and important artist or not? Are the Kings of Leon just a bunch of sexist southerners? Are Radiohead as artistically infallible as everyone seems to think? Why have the Arctic Monkeys grown their hair so inappropriately long? One of the few articles which manages to pull this off in Loops is Richard Milward’s rollicking good read Drugby Union, though, typically, even this is about Spacemen 3, a band he admits had already formed before he was born. modernmusicreview.com does not believe the best music has already been made. We do not believe in a linear history of rock and pop music, or the idea of progress followed by decline. So what is the way ahead for Loops or, for that matter, any music publication worth its salt in these fluid times? Should we get bogged down in blogs like Maggoty Lamb’s A year in the Death of the British Music Press which shows, unwittingly, how a running commentary can end up explaining everything and still lead to nowhere. Or there’s the Loops approach - seize the high ground, keep your distance by dint of only appearing twice a year. The danger here is a lack of
focus, leading us back to the starting point again. What is lacking is
something which captures the Zeitgeist. The latter, as the Britpop
acts of the 1990s discovered to their cost, doesn’t tend to stand still.
Oasis, Blur, Pulp... one band of the moment having risen to the top,
delayed releasing their follow-up albums at their commercial peak by two or
sometimes three, years By definition they stopped being “band of the moment”
and the Britpop movement, the Britpop moment, was gone, for good or ill,
probably for good. There may be just one way to stop Loops becoming
what John Harris described a few weeks ago in The Guardian Review as “a
metaphorical glass case?" It may be a scary thought, financially, but think about it - why leave the field to the NME every Wednesday or The Guardian every Friday? Do it, try it, take the plunge, we dare you - make the meanderingly brilliant Loops a weekly. Graham Chalmers Modern Music Review (2009) |
||||
|
© Modern Music Review (2009) |
||||