I like Ian Penman a lot

exactly >:(

they shd pay ilx to fact-check and style-police their articles

I'm not saying Schütte is careless about basic acts of scholarship and factchecking, but when David Stubbs interviewed him at the book release, they tried to make quite a feature of "this is the first book about Kraftwerk written by a *German*!!!" which rendered me almost apoplectic in the front row, immediately raising the point, "Actually, it is at least the THIRD, the first two German books about Kraftwerk were written by gentlemen named Herr Flür and Herr Bartos!!!" at which point I got shushed and they stopped taking questions from the floor.

Schütte's point, that he is trying to make in the book, is that he is *trying* to recontextualise Kraftwerk within the German Art-and-Pop-Art culture of the 70s, which is fair enough, a noble game. Kraftwerk were extremely underappreciated in their native land for the bulk of their success, most journalism - and scholarship - on them is in English, often written by English and American writers who were weirdly fetishishist about their Germanness - often in hugely negative ways. (He discussed at length, the Lester Bangs interview where Bangs repeatedly baited them, trying to get Hütter, who was waxing enthusiastic about technology, to use the phrase "final solution" haha, gotcha, Germans are all nazis, but fortunately Hütter was actually clever enough to recognise what was happening, and pulled back sharply from the conversation.) Hence why Schütte was trying to place them within the context of German art, the famous art school at Düsseldorf feat. Beuys, the Bechers etc - and would portray Kraftwerk's relationship with African-American music as being one-way, rather than the mutal appreciation it actually was.

I'm not sure I'd even know *how* to write a letter to the LRB, where would I find their address? Do they even have email? Also, can I be bothered to chase down the origin of that quote (Schütte's book, annoyingly, has no index). My memory is, it was a joke that Schneider made (ironic, given it was Schneider's girlfriends who turned up in the credits most often) - but whether he made the joke to a journalist, or indeed to Rebecca Allen, or if it was something that Flür repeated in his book (Given Flür's antics, it wouldn't be a surprise if they didn't allow *his* girlfriends) would provide a lot of context about what was actually intended.

Doing proper "dig out the books" fact-checking is not fun when you're not getting paid for it!

But I certainly support LRB giving all their dosh to Mark S to write something proper.

the email address for letters is lett✧✧✧@l✧✧.c✧.u✧

i feel that all you have to do is say
(a) but girlsfriends DID visit (list of names appended) and
(b) also contributed to the project (example of credits)
(c) the source of this was almost certainly a joke to a journalist (probably florian's joke)
(d) ironic considering whose girlfriends are most often credited etc

and then be catty abt some of the failings you've already listed, given the potential strengths

it's not a footnotey place (the letterspage least of all)

Thanks for the tips - but that's an awful lot of wingdings, Mark please could you email me the address? (if you've forgotten my email, the webmail for ILX does currently work for this account)

lol sorry i forgot that would happen

sent via ilxmail

Cheers! I received it - and also the old email you have for me is still correct. ta x

xx cool

Haven't read the Penman/Kraftwerk piece yet, but I wonder if his scepticism is in some ways a response to Paul Morley's effusiveness in a recentish tv documentary on Kraftwerk ("more influential than the Beatles" etc) - Penman & Morley being something like the Hutter and Schneider of English rockwrite for readers of a certain age.

I can't believe he's not Hutter. apologies, threadbanned myself.

It’s this passing of the baton [to black dance producers], as much as any merit their own music may possess, on which Kraftwerk’s inviolable reputation now rests.

Eeeeeeyikes

re context of German culture: the earliest Ralf-Florian music I've come across on YouTube, incl. Organisation's Tone Float, the first two Kraftwerk albums (also the third, [possibly reissued as] Ralf and Florian, which I heard and loved in the late-ish 70s), also some very early live sets, incl on TV, are v. different than later, yet unmistakably them, with this exuberant, confident, already expert (in terms of they know what they think and feel and how to make up *this*) response to jazz, r&b, rock: of thee tymes-to-times, '69-70 and steps beyond----and I wonder: how they were received, by colleagues, crits, the kids, man!? Play that flute, Florian.

Like if they were welcomed as part of the scene(s), then I wanna go there, at least in more music and histories---point me toward the gateway, please.

i know but everybody had such bad hair/outfits

Another mistake in that Kraftwerk piece:

"If Kraftwerk’s inarguable four album apex – from Autobahn (1974) to Computer World (1981) – does stand up, one of the reasons is that its unique sound hasn’t noticeably aged."

They put out five studio albums between 1974-1981, not four. I mean, these errors aren't life or death, but there are quite a lot of them in this one.

The one that annoyed me most was the suggestion that the neon signs appeared when they expanded to four members and started looking 'spiffy.'

Neon signs were already in place by the album cover of Ralf und Florian (at the very latest) so...

It's just that the endless number of small but easily avoidable errors do point to the fact that he knows very little about the band - and that his piece wasn't edited or even factchecked in any way, which is a problem.

LRB said they were 'considering' publishing my letter, which they probably say to everyone.

...I don't actually have a subscription, so if anyone sees a letter from KDT, please let me know!

the letters page is free to read I believe
https://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n18/letters

So he's not mad about their music, he doesn't seem to know that much about them . . . so why was he chosen to write something about them at all?

I say this as someone who never saw Penman's 1970s/1980s stuff but has enjoyed most of the things he's written for the LRB in recent years.

I actually felt in some sympathy with IP about Kraftwerk's reputation being out of proportion to their music or achievement -- yet I thought his review was also terrible in many ways.

The irrelevant reference to GRAVITY'S RAINBOW, frantically signalling that he's read it but failing to show any connexion between it and Kraftwerk, is trumped by the dire last couple of columns in which he makes snide offhand remarks about EU politics he knows little about, in a context that has almost nothing to do with the book or the band.

sadly he's now the LRB's designated expert on *all* music-centred pop culture

i mean it used to be eagleton: it's a step up from him bcz IP does actually know quite a lot about some music

Give the LRB rock critic gig to Perry Anderson you cowards.

Give the LRB rock critic gig to Perry Anderson you cowards.

I suppose we should be grateful they haven't given it to Runciman.

it's kind of a triumph they've opened the door this far tbh -- it comes at a cost, it's not remotely aimed abt super-knowledgeable music-board nerds and there's a risk the correction will just mean the shutting of the door

I'm a pretty casual kraftwerk fan and not at all a music nerd thank you and I spotted several

Mark S: what music did Terry Eagleton review for the LRB?

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v21/n06/terry-eagleton/allergic-to-depths

^^^a review of richard davenport-hines's gothic: four hundred years of excess, horror, evil and ruin: i have not read this book (it may well be bad) but other reviews correctly mention goth-the-music as a key vector in the story it tells, of the return of the gothic. TE doesn't.

also, early on, he writers this: "an english film, made in 1962, was responsible for five thousand fainting cases in cinemas, 75 per cent of them male"

if this film exists he should name it! at the time (pre-internet) i strongly doubted its existence (outside dodgy marketing claims), and researched and could find no candidate, and considered writing a letter and actually jotted notes towards one which i probably still have lol

anyway the pattern is identical: TE is assumed to be an authority in this territory, and is allowed to make sweeping claims abt a pop-cultural (music-related) item and no one fact-checks or pushes back

Does the existence of this review suggest that TE was, before Penman, the LRB's "designated expert on *all* music-centred pop culture" ?

ADDING (bcz my blood is now up):
there ARE some notoriously gory hammer draculas which are possible candidates once you overlook the incorrect date: i suspect this is a botched description, complete with bogus marketing bullshit abt male cinema-goers fainting en masse, of terence fisher's 1958 dracula, or of one of its successors (none made in 1962: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammer_Film_Productions#Dracula_2)

so: date wrong, no title, highly unlikely reception-theory anecdote guilelessly regaled, important music-related pop-cultural connection simply flubbed and no one involved knew or even noticed

(in the interests of fact-checking myself, 1999 is not strictly speaking "pre-internet" but it is pre the use of google as a quick fact-checking tool and also pre the kinds of sites that gather such information in easy-read fashion)

xp: i don't think they had anything so focused back then, or imagined they needed it -- "all this stuff is the same and factual accuracy doesn't matter" is how i break it down to an extent

LRB first mentions suggests that Jeremy Hardy was the first person to review a book about pop (CSM's Hendrix book 'Crosstown Traffic'), but that the most frequent pop contributor has been... Dave Haslam. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

haslam did land that gig, yes, but i always felt he was pitching stuff to them rather than vice versa -- i haven't spotted his name for an age tho

I'm afraid it was Jeremy Harding.

Jeremy Hardy might have been more entertaining.

That is one for "I always get those two confused" thread :0

Dave Haslam has now taken up the post of official Morrissey racism correspondent iirc.

I think it's being forgotten that JOHN LAHR has been writing lots of the LRB's music coverage in the last 5 years or so (I admit that years get hard to remember in LRB terms).

I once wrote a letter complaining about one of Lahr's reviews. On balance I'm glad it wasn't published.

It's possible that the history of LRB popular music coverage has been poor or lamentable. But Terry Eagleton would be bemused to hear that he had anything to do with it.

as ever his bemusement is my goal

A couple of Kraftwerk letters in the new issue, neither from Branwell, and a truly terrible, condescending and offensive review of Dylan Jones' New Romantics book by O'Hagan

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n19/andrew-o-hagan/i-m-being-a-singer

Can Mark S read the Dylan Jones book and write to the LRB in defence of it?

I'm sure the book is awful - Dylan Jones certainly is. But AO'H's review is even worse. New Romanticism was "the revenge of the poofs" apparently.

the only time i worked for DJ (c.1989) he accepted my pitch (good), was absolutely civil to work with (good), and failed to run my byline on the piece (bad ffs)

i own his book HAIRCULTS and have his OK-ish collection of music-writing on long er borrow from a ilxor who no longer posts (hence won't be reminded by this to grab it back)

I used to buy DJ's review copies/freebies (always an impressive haul) when I worked in a 2ndhand bookshop. Again, he was extremely pleasant to deal with, I'm sorry to say.

Doesn't sound good tbh. But I like films and comparing films. Which can get boring.

https://cinema-scope.com/books/the-self-in-shards-ian-penmans-fassbinder-thousands-of-mirrors/

The book market has been flooded with writerly autobiography for a while now...take a good few years for this fashion to pass.

Yes, doesn't sound great. I'll no doubt read it eventually.

book's out on fitzcarraldo in the UK but semiotext(e) in the US, which IP must be pleased about -- he might well be the portal thru which semiotext(e) arrived in the semi-popular domain in the uk

there's an interview-by-email abt it at the quietus

penman (like me tbh) is of a generation where bringing the writer into the body of the criticism was key to the project as an active political device: the name at the time for this was "the new journalism" and it was considered an assault on an earlier generation's claims to unbiddable cultural authority -- doubly so in music-writer terms when the revanchist editorial at Q magazine arrived to push back against it, a hostility to subjectivity (and "self-indulgence") that functioned primarily to establish the objective dadrock canon lol

as the board's leading dadrock melt (prefers film to TV) chairman alph cannot to be expected to grasp the politics here :p

Shame bcz that piece on Fassbinder in Vital Signs was a perfect introduction.

xp - sorry to break it to you mark but IP is writing about a guy who mostly made films. And he writes about books and films for the LRB!

This "new journalism" stuff is in the dust. The kids are voting for slow four hour films now as "best of all time".

New Journalism (a dull name I admit) was 1960s, though (Capote, Mailer), and Penman really started in the 1980s? -- so that must be quite a long tail of New Journalism by the time he arrives.

I don't know Fassbinder, but I reflect that IP has now written a book about German films and recently a long LRB essay about French poetry. I don't know how fluent he is, at this point, in either language. Does it matter? I think the short answer is yes. If I wrote a Fitzcarraldo book on French cinema I would expect to have to show them my credentials in the language, and I would probably take several months improving it (which would be good for me).

his best writing has always been abt TV (and fassbinder also made TV)

all polls are bad anyway, polls that don't include TV, youtube, vine & tiktok are mere reactionary sludge

xp to PF: the big "new journalism" compilation that ported the idea (as a named method and a shared stance) into the UK was published by picador in 1975; penman began writing in 1978 i think

so yes, while i think there *was* in a sense a long tail (the then not-unusual translatlantic delay in pop cultural matters), the upsurge of the approach in uk-based writing depended as much as anything on appropriate platforms not being available until the 70s (the alt-listings press and the rock press): the US in the 60s had an ecology of glossy monthlies and biweeklies, where the form was born -- the equivalent in the uk had long vanished (unsure why: need to explore this)