Review of : Marc Woodworth and Ally-Jane Grossan
(Eds), HOW TO WRITE ABOUT MUSIC ,
Excerpts from the 33 1/3 series, magazines, books and blogs with
advice from industry-leading writers, Bloomsbury Academic, New York and
London, 2015, 414 pages.
Not a book
you get bored with.
Review by John Mullen, Université Paris Est Creteil
Marc Woodworth and Ally-Jane Grossan (Eds), HOW TO WRITE ABOUT MUSIC , Excerpts from
the 33 1/3 series, magazines, books and blogs with advice from
industry-leading writers, Bloomsbury Academic, New York and London, 2015,
414 pages.
Not a book you get bored with, though you might feel
irritated almost as often as enlightened. This volume is made up of a large
number of short writings on Western popular music, (mostly canonical but
sometimes underground), along with endless advice from writers on what to do if
you want your writing for fans to be published and paid for. It has been put
together by the editors of the 33 1/3 series, an endeavour now counting a
hundred books, each analysing one music album from recent decades.
The book has three different aspects. Firstly, it is
indisputably itself a rock object. Filled with short and pithy productions with
soundbites[1] and neologisms galore, it
is often unbearably hip. Right from the foreword, packed with exclamation
marks, you know what you are in for. It has all the rock attitudes: sentimentality
(“our beloved 33 1/3 series”, write “for love or not at all”); hyperbole (this
series has “revolutionized contemporary rock criticism”); melodrama (“great
albums still completely fuck my whole life up”; you should write about music
“in exactly the same way that you would write a suicide note”); and contradiction
(advice from “people who themselves avoided all the advice anyone ever gave
them”). The music writers are interviewed as if they were themselves minor rock
stars (“How did you land your job?” “How is music writing different?” “Where do
you find inspiration?” “Who is your dream interview subject?” “Which three
songs, two objects and one novel would you take on a desert island?”) One
writer “would so love to take Oscar Wilde out to karaoke”, innit?
Secondly, this is a manual for would-be writers on
rock and pop music, featuring a few hundred short paragraphs of advice from a
few dozen authors (“expert advice from our writers”). Although the back cover
exclaims that the tome is “crammed full of stellar advice”, the tips given are
of extremely uneven quality. Some are embarrassingly obvious (for an album
review “begin by listening to the disc in question several times”; for the
artist interview “don’t read from your notes too much” and in general “Use
Google to check your facts”, and “don’t trust Wikipedia as your sole source”).
Some are just not interesting (“What was your biggest mistake?” “I totally
trashed an album in my college newspaper that later became one of my favorites”;
“How has the field of music-writing changed ?” “It’s better in some ways and
worse in others - very difficult to say”). One section is actually labelled “offbeat
advice” although its contents is sometimes less than wacky (“I always file on
time”; “I try to have a clear picture in mind of who reads what I wrote”). In
the last pages, one of the star writers seems to undermine the whole exercise:
“I think that reading other music writing is often a trap”.
As well as the tips from “industry-leading writers”[2] the reader is provided
with a series of “writing prompts” – practice exercises for budding writers
(Write an album review about a group you know nothing about; go to a concert
and write about it to deadline, write a 2 000 word essay that explores
your connection to a single song). Useful for college courses on music writing
(I’m assuming such courses exist). Clearly, the editors felt there were a lot
of people who would buy a book aimed at helping them to get published. Some of
the advice may serve its purpose, this is difficult to judge.
Finally and mostly, the volume is an anthology of 48
pieces of writing on a vast variety of Western popular music of recent decades
(with one or two older themes). Different kinds of articles each get a chapter:
album reviews, concert reviews, artist interviews, personal essays, artist
profiles, scene analyses, musical analyses, “cultural criticism”, and
experimental writing (including novelettes based on music albums, and an
extract from a graphic novel about Black Flag).
As a whistle-stop tour around today’s journalistic
writing on popular music, the book stands up very well. You can read chirpy
concert reviews written as if we were all young (“She’s like Chris Ware, except
not, except totally.”). The style is
sometimes enjoyably creative (“So much sass! Pickup trucks! Dads who are gonna
beat up ex-boyfriends! I’LL TAKE IT.”) True, there is also analysis you might
find more pompous than illuminating (“Sociology … is an obvious functional
drag, particularly when it subverts the move qua move by means of opaque
non-magical causality.”) But much of the writing is good. There is an
insightful piece on Enya, and a thoughtful piece on computers and music. The best contributions are those
which deal with how the creation of a sense of mythology through music works in
Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven”, with the emotional power of drumming and
in particular that of The Who’s drummer, Keith Moon, with the “mumfordization
of pop”, with Radiohead’s image and music and with dance clubs in Kosovo. An
article on how The Beatles chose instruments for “Strawberry Fields Forever”
gives a fascinating glimpse of the different factors involved. The application
of music theory to Kate Perry’s “Teenage Dream” is very convincing. And one of
my favourite pieces speaks against the rock consensus in defence of sentimental
music.
Several articles go into on what particular albums meant to particular
young people (the writers) at a particular time. This category varies from the
touching to the pretentious. But all in all, there is
much which is worth reading if, as I have said, accompanied by an editorial
tone which is unbearably hip and with practically no analysis of what hip is and why it is. One occasionally gets an image of the music writer as
someone who wants to be ever so rock n roll, yet still be at home for the kids
every evening, rather than in a rickety old tour bus hundreds of miles away.
The book
gives opinion and analysis from 41 men and 4 women (and the 4 women write less
than the average male contributor). A less generous or more feminist reviewer
than myself might be tempted to suggest the book be re-titled “How men have
written about popular music”. This points up a major flaw, since in all the
plethoric advice about how to write about music, the question of what to do if
you’re a woman writer is not mentioned. This is all the more surprising as one
of the editors has previously written a book on women singer-songwriters, so
must presumably have a feel for gender issues in the business.[3]
There is plenty
to please and educate in here. Many people who read this review are used to
writing about music in a less hip manner, since there are in reality many ways
of carrying out such a task, but it does us no harm to see how the other half
lives.
John Mullen
This review is a draft version
of a piece which was written for IASPM Journal.
[1] “Keep your
overhead low and your expectations lower”; “He plays [drums] like D H Lawrence
writes”; “Music writing is the crack cocaine of non-fiction writing”; “You
could say Punk rock is anger’s schmaltz.”
[2] For
an analysis of the industrialization of popular music criticism, and a general
view of changes in content due to this industrialization, see Thomas Connor and Steve Jones, “Art to Commerce: the Trajectory of Popular
Music Criticism” in IASPM@journal, vol 4 N° 2, 2014, available online
www.iaspmjournal.net
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