1) We'll never see his like again.
2) We would like to see his like again but we won't.
3) Fuck, we miss those days of the taste-maker critic and isn't the NME (etc) a weaker publication for the passing of them?
Obviously we're talking a certain demographic here - specifically the people who grew up reading Steven Wells - but there's a hell of a consensus going down here. Not one of the hundreds of comments and blogs I've read in the 24 hours since Steven Wells' death has indicated that this perceived change in critical approach might be in any way considered a positive. And yet, considering the occupation of many of those posting (fellow critics working within a taste-maker-free environment), surely they must? Surely, they must.
Because it's not the taste-maker critics who decide whether or how people want their tastes made. God knows who it is.
ReplyDeleteWhat we're experiencing in the genuine sadness about Swells is a bunch of taste-makers making taste at each other.
It isn't as though the internet has brought about a lack of recommendations, is it? Neither is it so corporate a place that it only feeds back the recommendations a reader will want (what's that called - a taste spiral?), try as the bots might.
ReplyDeleteMaybe with things being more fragmented there aren't so many sacred cows to be entertainingly shot down in front of the people who worship them. Maybe that matters.
I"m 33, so getting old enough to whinge. I think the grief over Swells is partly because he epitomised the position that music writing was more than conducting arse-kissing interviews of the kind which died out in news journalism many years ago ('do you have anything else to share with the nation, Minister?') and plugging the latest crap. For Swells and a lot of NME writers, their job was to have opinions and express them well. Swells hated all the bands I liked, but he was compulsive reading, and he made me re-examine my tastes: sometimes I'd change them, sometimes I'd make more effort to defend them. NME then wasn't always a sausage machine…
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