Who Are The Worst Pop Journalists?

No other band has had quite 7-dwarves-ish type names.

(Also, the editor of Salon's books section, which is pop culture if not pop music, anyway I forget her name, but I despise her from start to finish. She's pure knee-jerk hipster reaction.)

But I loathe Kathryn Flett. Don't think she writes about music much tho. Luckily

I'll tell you who's really shit, though - Johnny Rogan. Not strictly a journalist, but a shockingly inept writer nonetheless. Much of that Smiths book is toe-curling, and I just read his Wham! biog, which is snide and really, really excruciatingly written. On "Wham! Rap": "Even more irritating was the glee with which the rapper derided his flabbergasted antagonist, whose point of view remained unuttered." Lads throwing water around at The Final concert are variously described as "repugnantly oafish...salivating animals...bestial water-spitting louts..." existing in "the stench- filled sandpit of infantile degeneracy." But if you really want a laugh, read his slim volume on Van Morrison, which ranks alongside Tony Blackburn's autobiography "The Living Legend" as one of the most unintentionally hilarious books ever.

I love that! Tom, I don't know if FT is still looking for a catchphrase but if so I think you'd have a winner with that.

I hadn't even thought of Rogan, but looking back now I remember thinking how shockingly poor the Severed Alliance was. A good writer, no, even an average writer could have gotten a lot more out of the material he had. But he drew the most uninteresting conclusions in the most uninteresting way. But it was funny the way he was affronted by Morrissey's views on religion.

I associate Miranda Sawyer with Select when it was good, with the result that although I can't remember anything she wrote I see this attack on her as an attack on something I like. Bad.

I find it hard to think of music journos I really loathe, though I would be hard-pressed to remember any I particularly like either. Very few of them have writing styles distinctive enough. Back in my hey-day of Melody Maker reading (some vague point in the very early '90s) all the writers merged into each other for me, as with the exception of Everett True (a bad writer) they all seemed to have the same enjoyably pseudy outlook on everything.

I thought you said he WASN'T rock'n'roll! Get yer story straight!

The NME does have a couple of rather entertaining journos - I've always got a soft spot for Victoria Segal's reviews. Plus I could always pick a Johnny Cigarettes piece in the first two lines. Whatever happened to Mr. Cigarettes?

...............then think lower

At Christmas, record buying is at its height while records are at their worst. The top thirty is glutted with fortysomething family faves and re-releases, the album charts bloated with 'best ofs'. It's the least reliable of times to monitor the zeitgeist. But the presence of Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit in the singles chart is an indicator of what was really going on this year and a harbinger of what's to come in '92. The fact that Nirvana's untamed, raging punk anthem could get to number seven, while its equally hardcore parent album Nevermind was recently the fourth-best selling album in America, signals a sea change in rock that's been brewing all year: the resurgence of alternative music.

Perhaps the three-month-long annexation of the Number One slot by Bryan Adams's Everything I Do was the last gasp of mainstream pop, of songs that milkmen can whistle. For all year, the charts have been ravaged by an onslaught of hardcore techno and acid house tracks, endlessly spewed out by rave culture, while noisy indie groups have been nibbling away at the edges of the Top Thirty. There were hits for groups like Curve, Ride, Blur, Pixies, Manic Street Preachers, and near-misses of Primal Scream, Chapterhouse, Slowdive, Teenage Fanclub, Lush, St Etienne and more.

1991 was also the year that REM, long-time rulers of college rock, finally crossed over. Their single, Losing My religion and album Out Of Time went top five in America. Thrash metal pioneers Metallica's eponymous album went straight in at Number One on both sides of the Atlantic. In the USA, the mobile rock festival Lollapalooza brought the disparate alternative audience to consciousness of its latent power. A bill of top alternative bands (Nine Inch Nails, Siouxsie, Living Colour, Butthole Surfers, headlined by Jane's addiction (the festival's instigator), drew a combined audience of over half a million kids at 26 shows across America. After its success there are plans for future Lollapaloozas, including a European version.

As underground music has gone overground, there's also been a subliminal pressure on mainstream artists to quit playing safe. Both Prince and Michael Jackson's new albums were recorded with one ear cocked to the harder dance sounds coming out of club culture, and incorporating elements from rap, house and swingbeat with debatable success. U2's Achtung Baby is harder and more experimental than any of their previous albums: according to producer Brian Eno the group were listening to indie avan t-gardists like My Bloody Valentine and The Young Gods while they were recording. David Bowie's Tin Machine is a (sorry) attempt to cop some of the abrasiveness of groups like Pixies and Sonic Youth. After the longest period of mainstream blandness in living memory (a sort of never-ending 1975) it seems that the goalposts have shifted.

All this is coming to a head as support swells within the record industry for the introduction of a chart for alternative music. The problem with the current indie chart is that because the criteria is whether a record is independently distributed it includes a lot of patently non-alternative acts (like Kylie Minogue). The proposed alternative chart would be determined according to genre, not means of distribution, and would include both indie groups and indie-sounding groups who happen to be signed to major labels. The biggest support for an alternative chart comes from major labels, keen to get more visibility for their alternative acts - who don't figure in the indie charts despite their popularity amongst indie consumers, but equally don't sell enough to impact on the pop chart. Many independent labels, however, feel they wouldn't be able to compete with the majors' marketing and distribution muscle, and are afraid their releases would get lower placings in the new chart, or be shunted into oblivion. Worried that they'll lose their only outlet to the public, these labels would prefer to keep the indie chart, despite all its flaws and anomolies.

The real problem with a genre-based chart would be defining 'alternative', a nebulous term at the best of times. This would be the responsibility of a body called Entertainment Research And Analysis, whose musicologists would admit records into the alternative chart when they felt it was appropriate. But there are many grey areas that defy easy codification. What would be the status of acts who are alternative in style, but long-established chart regulars (The Cure, Depeche Mode, Siouxsie, etc)? Would the alternative chart include the techno and house tracks released by indie labels that currently figure heavily in the indie chart? If it excluded these records as dance, how would it deal with indie bands who fused hi-tech dance with rock. The 'one instinctively knows what is alternative' approach depends ultimately on the cabal of experts being hip to the ever-shifting definitions and distractions of the volatile alternative scene.

Despite these quandries, there's a body of opinion that feels that an alternative chart can only give marginal music greater visibility. According to Adrian Wistreich (chairman of the Chart Supervisory Committee, which is currently debating the issue), an alternative chart would be far easier to sell to the media than the current indie chart. Probable licensers of an alternative chart include ITV's The Chart Show, and Radio One's evening slot with Mark Goodier. 'An alternative chart would be a punters' chart, reflecting taste. The current chart is an industry chart. Whether a record is owned by a major or an indie is irrelevant to most fans of this kind of music.'

The future of the British chart system looks set to follow the American model: there will always be a core, Top Of The Pops chart of all the best-selling records in every field, but there will also be more prominence for genre charts that pinpoint particular taste markets (alternative, dance, metal). The only worry is that the new alternative chart will mostly benefit the major labels, while further marginalising the maverick indies (who have traditionally taken risks and acted as unpaid talent scouts for the major labels).

Either way, the fact that there's such strong support for an alternative chart indicates that the major labels reckon there's money in more challenging music. The breakthrough of groups like REM, Nirvana, Jane's Addiction and Metallica suggests they're right. 1992 could be the year that the pop mainstream disappears, under the twin assault of hardcore techno dance and alternative rock.

Prize is a poke in the ribs.

Miranda Sawyer is however, poop. THE BESTEST, above everyone that j00 have mentioned is the person who writes the PITCHER CAPTIONS in Smash Hits. Arf!

Re: competition. mark s is right but can anyone be any righter?

Oh, and good call to Stevo on Paul Mathur, who by 1995 had possibly the worst taste on Melody Maker. Sadly I'm too young to remember him being as good as you mention.

And anyone who works at NME, obviously.

give or take a decade or so of music journalism behind her... hse is pretty bad though...

funny to see the hate poured on hilburn and powers, not so funny to have one replace the other : (

oh wow look at sterling going at juzwiak! how strange.

(so long ago, though)

http://www.fuse.tv/contributors/david-shapiro

not clicking on that but i am glad this is now the thread for updates on this guy

i don't think david shapiro would claim to be a "Pop Journalist"

Just read the new shindig's article on Strawberry Alarm Clock and have just been rereminded why I can't stand that writer. There is just way too much self-regarding noise in the piece.
Tend to find that any time I bother reading that guy. Used to annoy me that he'd get given items I wanted to find out about to review in various psych mags and I'd just be reminded that the guy was in love with himself instead of finding out about the product.

Thank me very much oh wait.

what an odd thread to read over a decade (!) on