'One of life's great gurus.' Julian Cope.
Start of another occasional series. During the week a piece of news came through, marginal of course, as there are a lot more important things happening right now. But I found it rather sad anyway. The news was that Q Magazine was going to fold after almost 35 years on Newsagent's racks. Another victim, though an indirect one, of Covid 19.
I was never a huge fan, and rarely bought it, but Q's death is symptomatic of something that has been happening in Rock Music for the last thirty years or more. The slow death of a culture. It joins a long list of once venerable titles from NME, Melody Maker, Creem, Sounds, Smash Hits and numerous lesser titles that have been seen off over the decades by changes in consumer taste and the absorbtion of music into the mainstream entertainment market.
It wasn't always thus. There was a time, particularly from the mid-Sixties to the early Eighties when many of the best writers naturally gravitated instinctively to writing about music because it was genuinely at the heart of counter culture and was saying something thrilling and important about the changing world.
Probably the big daddy of this school of thought was Lester Bangs. Genuinely revered by his contemporaries and probably feared by musicians, largely because he always wrote as if this stuff actually mattered. It still does of course. However, there are fewer and fewer magazines or newspapers who write about it as if it does and many of those that do, Pitchfork or Quietus for example, do so in such a pious and humourless way that it all makes it seem rather bloodless to me.
Bangs was never bloodless. Sometimes perhaps he wrote himself into a corner but you could never doubt for a moment that he genuinely cared. That he was sweat, blood and talent. Psychotic Reactions & Carburetor Dung, the collection of much of his best stuff is probably the place to start.
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