Entertainment For Lively Minds
A question for Hepworth, Ellen and music journalists in general
The basic question is - how do you keep going in an industry where - despite your obvious enthusiasm for the end product (ie music) - you keep coming up against the same old PR, the same old answers to the same old questions from the same old people. And are still often enthusiastic despite perceived and understandable cynicism.
Obviously The Word is one answer to this - you have created a magazine/podcast/way of life which embraces not only music but books, film, TV etc.
But ultimately you guys are consumers, reacting to what is put out there by people who create the stuff you comment on.
I wonder if you ever feel either of these
1. Throw in the towel, I've seen or heard it all, I've got enough to last the rest of my life
2. Fuck it why doesn't SOMEONE do THIS (insert brilliant idea for music/TV/book project - OK I'll do it!
Just curious
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This is far too big a subject
Mark and I are very enthusiastic about lots of things, many of them musical. The problem is that if your enthusiasm doesn't happen to match what everybody else is getting enthusiastic about at the very moment it's getting enthusiastic about it, you're perceived as being cynical. I certainly don't buy the idea that a new life-changing act arrives every week.
I found out yesterday The Grauniad go for a band of the day.
http://twitter.com/guardianmusic which makes it all a bit pointless.
(That said, their music coverage is rather good in my eyes.)
The problem with "I've had enough, I'm off..."
... is the typical midlife crisis issue of "where to and with what?" ... if mumsy and dadsy have furnished you with a trust fund, if you won the lottery, if if if then you can stop work and live off the interest as a kind of Victorian-style gentleman dilettante ... but the average person in their 40s and 50s might be able to "liquidate all their assets" (ie sell their house, empty their ISA) and sit on a beach for a few years ("I'm off"), but that still leaves the issue of how to earn a living after the money's run out and how to fund retirement...
i would imagine that running a mag/podcast/way of life, meeting interesting people, asking them impertinent questions and listening to fraser's latest holiday stories is far preferable to stacking shelves in B&Q or whipping up skinny-mocha-doodahs in Starbucks - so why not keep going? sometimes you might think "oh god, Radio 4 want to ask me if Lady Gaga is culturally significant" but other times you get to hang out in Abbey Road talking (entertaining) bollocks ...
(hmm, this has been a thinly veiled pep talk for myself)
Going off on one
For some reason - perhaps this was quoted on this very blog recently, I'm not sure - I'm put in mind of that street philosopher, Homer Simpson.
"You people have stood in my way long enough. I'm going to clown college!"
I was listening to Radio 4 in the car
and Frederick Raphael quoted a Turkish proverb that I think is relevant to this discussion.
"When you finish building a house, death moves in"
What keeps you going at 20 is different at 40 and indeed at 60 but the key is to have something(s) to keep you going. For some people (and it used to be me at 30) it is cynicism that keeps you going. I came to realise that it was actually putting me in a small and insignificant box and that it was an attitude of last resort that was a downward spiral. Where do you go from cynicism?
So work stopped being a '9 to 5' and instead became a project, a building block to other, better things. Similarly music made today was no longer "not as good as music made 'in my day'" but a different country that I could either re-explore and open up to or just ignore and allow myself to become a parochial inhabitant of a jukebox from 1976.
No doubt Messrs Hepworth and Ellen are well aware that the majority of us that subscribe to Word envy their working environment for the access and freedom it gives to pursue as a career those pleasures that form a significant part of our personal life and cultural outlook on life.
With regard to PR and music I think the fundamental change has been in the idea that music was primarily sold for people to be able to listen to it whereas now it is primarily sold for people to be able to consume it. Therein lies the difference.
Please explain
Sorry Ahh_bisto I'm with you for almost all the above but I'm not sure I understand what you mean in your last paragraph. I think I know what your getting at but could please further explain the differnce between 'able to listen' and 'able to consume'.
Listening to
music is a form of engagement that is unique; music is there to be listened to and from that process you and I create the engagement with the product. In other words the product is there to serve the artist and the listener. The product is created to bring the artist and the listener together to optimise the unique form of engagement that is listening.
Nowadays music is productised to be consumed, to be deployed according to the homogenised edicts of consumerism rather than to assuage the need to engage with music through the unique faculty of listening to it. It often feels like a product first with the idea of listening to it an after-thought: those that sell it don't care if you listen to it or delete it, just make sure it's sold.
I appreciate that music has always been sold in some product form (from sheet music to download) but in the last couple of decades music has been commodified to a point where the artistry and the listening experience have been subjugated to the demands of marketeers who could probably apply the same business rules for shifting units to selling a burger, a fizzy drink or a car.
Thanks.
I see what you mean in theory. But music is not a product unless it's listened to. Music cannot exist unless it's listened to surely.
Unfortunately anything being sold is about shifting units at the right price.
Sure there is a lot of marketing of certain types of music these days and sometimes I hate it. Why should you get preferential booking for gig's because you have a particular brand of mobile? The bands do the deals we have to put up with it or not attend.
On the other side we have the advantage of things like Spotify where most of us pay nothing(other than listening to the advertising)for a very wide selection of music. There are advantages in some of the new business models(I hope Spotify can survive).
I do agree with your original reply just didn't quite get the last bit.
You said
"I see what you mean in theory. But music is not a product unless it's listened to. Music cannot exist unless it's listened to surely."
That's the crux of my point. The product was there to serve the listening experience and therefore it was bought and sold on that basis: music was bought and sold to be listened to.
Today though music is there to serve the product (whatever form it takes) because music is increasingly compartmentalised in consumerist terms (as you illustrated with the brand of mobile). Music is the leverage by which the product is sold.
How many people buy the new Lady Gaga single based on an appreciation of her music and how many buy it because it's a brand that they must be seen to be consuming?
It's like these compilation CDs for classical music all of which seem to be about engendering the idea that classical music is something purely to "chill out" to, that engaging with or listening to classical music can only be experienced on the basis that you are trying to "switch off".
Having spent some time reviewing music for a website I know that if I was a full-time music journalist I'd be tearing my hair out at receiving another batch of compilation CDs that were for "women", "mums", "dinner parties", "landfill indie boys" etc.
Sorry Bisto
I see what you mean now. I must have had a fuzzy head earlier( nothing ot do with last nights St Patrick day drinkies - I'm sure!).
I had to ask as I knew I was missing the point somewhere. Glad I did now as I fully understand your point of view.
No problem lunaman
I was struggling to make my reasoning comprehensible so it may well read differently to what I think I was saying!
Unlike you I've been stone cold sober for the past few days so there's no excuse. ;)
Keep Going
I am not a music journalist but...
People who work for themselves will tell you that once you are moving you need to keep pedalling but regularly check the direction you are heading.
I go through times when I dry up with regard to new music but then something always comes along to excite me; I just need to keep an open mind.
Old is the new new
Why does music have to be 'new' to excite or to even be 'new'?
Danny Baker said a year or so ago that he was listening to 'new' music when he had just got a Charlie Parker record, an artist he had simply never listened to before.
I confidently expect the next five 'new' things I listen to will come from 1956, 1967, 1958, 1966 and 1964 respectively.
The last five hundred have!
If you know the wine comes from a good year why would you buy one from a bad year?
Hear hear
I agree. Too much "new music" is presented as if its newness is what makes it worthwhile. And in a year's time it won't be new anymore.
"New Music"
is a good example of the commodification of music. New music is often presented as a means of rejecting music that has gone before, an opportunity for the buyer to be part of a supposedly unique experience that any previous music has been unable to satisfy because it's been compromised by familiarity. And how do they - "they" being the marketeers - justify such a claim for uniqueness? By the simple fact that you've not heard this music before, a profoundly stupid basis upon which to assign merit as it presumes "new" must inherently mean "better".
New music is increasingly the epitomy of the cycle of consumerism. It used to be that you bought a washing machine with a view to making it last as long as possible but these days the production process is structured to forgo repairing that washing machine should it stop working. Instead we should go out and replace it with a new one and often the pricing structure of call out charges, parts and labour render the idea of having it repaired no longer cost effective. Why spend £300 getting it fixed when you can buy a new one for £400? Write it off as a depreciated asset.
With music it now feels like you're being channelled into committing only a limited amount of time to a piece of music or an artist and then you are expected to scrap them after 12 months in order to invest your listening time into someone else or some other style. Write off that older album or older act as a depreciated asset and plump up the balance sheet of your credibility with the latest "new" music.
Arse.