Why would anyone want to write about music in New Zealand in 2023?

The author and his mates rehearsing the new set

I don’t think Simon Sweetman exaggerated much when he titled a poetry book “The Death of Music Journalism” recently. Despite the heroic endeavours of Graham Reid and the occasional flash of other music writing allowed in a newspaper supplement, there’s no longer a guarantee that your album will be reviewed locally, and there’s no longer a guarantee that you’ll be able to read what a local writer thinks about your favourite overseas artist’s new album either.  We have endured a further decline in that dreary state of affairs described, in 2010, by Kiran Dass in her essay for Landfall 219 The main problem with music writing in New Zealand is that it’s not considered a valid form.
“Our writers today end up writing about easily accessible music because they’re too lazy to get out there in the field and do their research to hunt for interesting music to write about…there’s no danger or excitement in rock writing anymore.”
For whatever reason, I’ve lately felt compelled to write about music, and write about it in the way that I think (or feel) about it, keeping in mind Kiran’s demands in that polemic - “there are no guilty pleasures”, so “if you think it’s good, tell us why”.

There are many plausible ways to interpret music and any one may suit some particular artist; Messrs Freud, Adler and Jung will do for some, for yet others one might call on the Existential Criticism developed by Colin Wilson in books like The Art of the Novel and Chords and Dischords (Purely Personal Opinions on Music). Defined as, the attempt to see creative work as a response to the problems of the artist’s life, to draw out the ways in which the response is successful or not, to point to the areas where the problems or solutions are universal and where they contribute to the listener’s realization or solution or indeed complication of their own problems. This seems especially relevant to those artforms derived from late-20^th century popular music, which was often the music of growing up, which is a process of realising, solving, and of course creating, problems, first depicted, in one great song cycle, by Chuck Berry as he invented guitar rock.

Thus, I’ve mainly enjoyed writing about music that addresses the largest issues – death and survival (e.g. P.H.F’s Purest Hell), good and evil (e.g. John Phillip’s Wolfking of LA), desire and exploitation (e.g. Lou Reed’s Coney Island Baby), Art itself (e.g. Slapp Happy’s Casablanca Moon), and so on, not excluding noise itself, and certainly not overlooking the prior material conditions of creativity – the need to make a living at one’s work (or not), and the differing effects of education, class, sex, employment, background etc on the product itself - and its reputation.

In the 21^st century, industry and academic involvement in the production of original popular music has proliferated, some might say metastasized, compared with earlier eras. In the jazz era, academics solely studied classical or folk musics and the popular music industry, being, at its most influential, a branch of organised crime that accompanied prostitution, gambling, alcohol, and drugs, took little care of its talent or their ideas. In the rock era, stars who had public school backgrounds or university degrees or whose careers were “manufactured” by Svengalis (themselves usually self-educated savants) were still in the uncomfortable position of having to prove their worth in a world created by self-educated lower-middle class and working-class youth. Today, those positions have largely been reversed.

Camille Paglia, writing back in the 90’s after the death of Kurt Cobain, demanded that future rock stars be formally trained in a partnership of academia and industry to survive the rigours of their craft – the results are in, and are not unmixed, so it’s worth asking, for example, how an artist like Lana Del Rey can keep perfecting her specific vision by working with the people who have made everyone else sound like everyone else.

If you’ve read Paul Morley’s book A Sound Mind: How I Fell in Love With Classical Music, and you should, here is my Goodreads review,

you’ll remember his view of the future of music (or its present, which is very much the same thing as its future to someone my age) on internet streaming services. Every platform has its own personality, but an algorithm, at present, can tell you, exhaustively, what other artists match the ones you like in genre, gender, region, and, indeed, age but these are also limitations, and the algorithms fed them might miss completely who that artist you like might have been influenced by or who might have been influenced by them, nor will it give you any sense of their music’s originality or authenticity. It’s still a critic’s job to supply those links and judgements – “Wagner is the Puccini of music”, that sort of thing.

There are also books and films about music, and they can provide a way into thinking about and understanding musicians outside of our pleasure zones. I may be unlikely to discuss a record by Blaze Foley, Townes van Zandt, or Mötley Crüe, but Blaze and The Dirt are definitely films worth discussing.
These are just some of the terms and conditions I’ll be looking at in analysing work both classic and new (or as-yet-unreleased), work both known and unknown. My focus will not be on New Zealand’s music, yet the existential fact of geographic location, word-of-mouth and cultural preference have meant that half of my “best albums of 2022” were from this country*, so there is that.

For you, gentle reader, Hypocrite Lecter, I make two commitments – to post content of satisfying but not excessive length at least once a week, and to avoid addressing you in this irritating fourth-wall-broken style that’s been baked into the platform as much as possible (we’ll see).

*P.H.F.’s Purest Hell,

Aldous Harding’s Warm Chris,

Frog Power’s Chicken Necks (for Rope)