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Example research essay topic: Write Adventures In The Music Adventures In The Music Press Gorman's - 714 words

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Lets talk about me As a public announcement that the heyday of the music press was officially over, Cameron Crowes movie Almost Famous couldnt be bettered. Its story of a teenage journalist on his first assignment for Rolling Stone cloaked the music press and early- 1970 s rock music in rose-tinted blandness. Its coy hints about sex and drugs were carefully airbrushed. Perhaps worst of all was its depiction of rock writer Lester Bangs. The real-life Bangs (now deceased) was a loud, scruffy, dysfunctional basket case, but Crowe turned him into a self-righteous dullard, dispensing trite homilies like Grandma Walton.

It was a glaring demonstration of how what once was radical is now regurgitated as parody. The fast life and long-drawn-out death of music journalism is the chief preoccupation of Paul Gorman's new book, In Their Own Write: Adventures in the Music Press. Its a transcribed oral history of the British and American music papers, starting with reminiscences from the late 1950 s, luxuriating in the golden years from the late 1960 s to the mid- 1970 s, then wading through punk, the new romantics and the drudgery of the 1980 s before fizzling out after Britpop. The entire saga, from indies and fanzines to glossies, style rags and lad mags, is told through quotations from music journalists past and present.

The sound of axes being ground and old scores being settled dominates. For instance, while some deify the likes of Great Marcus or Bangs, Mick Farmer dismisses Marcus as a pompous academic. Tony Parsons reckons Bangs was just a big fat American with a moustache. Gorman's decision to let the interviewees tell the story of the music press proved more problematic than he had imagined. I didnt want to get in the way of these extremely opinionated people, because the people who were prominent in the music press know their subject and know how to express themselves very well, he says. Sometimes all you had to do was juxtapose Tony Parsons and Julie Burchill thats easy but it was more difficult trying to work Garry Bushell against &# 91; reggae fan&# 93; Vivien Goldman and set him in the context of the times.

And avoid libel suits. Gorman's word-of-mouth saga works on several levels personal, musical and cultural. The worst traits of the music press are harshly exposed, notably its white-boy clubbishness and pervasive sexism (there are some hair-raising stories from Caroline Coon about the horrors of being a rocknroll girl in this bloke centric world). And the thundering egotism of many of the leading protagonists explains vividly why the music papers made compulsive reading, and why they were doomed to extinction.

Richard Meltzer tells us how I along with two or three others essentially invented the rock-write genre, and Charles Shall Murray reminds us: The piece I wrote about the New York scene in November 1975 turned out to be very influential. Its indicative of the exaggerated and glorified world-view of the music press that virtually none of Gorman's interviewees displays any insight into how the music business works, other than the occasional routine dismissal of it as the source of all evil. No, they talk about themselves, admits Gorman. Theyre all totally self-obsessed. Anybody feeling inspired by the tales of rocks during-do in Gorman's pages might like to go exploring in rocksbackpages. com, a subscription-based web archive of benchmark music-press articles and historic interviews.

In the same way that new bands routinely hark back to Jimi Hendrix or the Velvet Underground, the halcyon days of the rock press are taking on a retrospective grandeur. But is it only old music hacks who are going to be interested in reading all this stuff? My view is that people are quite interested to find out where Danny Baker came from, or Tony Parsons, or Cameron Crowe, says Gorman. Or Garry Bushell. I can sit there with my niece and say, You see that bloke on the TV? He used to promote right-wing bands in Sounds.

But it is a bit of a valedictory to that golden age, which is why the last three or four chapters just speed past: I just lost interest. Everyone did. &# 183; In Their Own Write: Adventures in the Music Press is published by Sanctuary at? 12. 99.


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