In-Depth
Know Your Writes – How Music Writers Inspire Us To Listen


During a prickly 1977 interview with a Toronto Star staff reporter Bruce Kirkland, the late Frank Zappa aired his views on music critics, candidly stating: “Most rock journalism is people who can’t write interviewing people who can’t talk for people who can’t read.”
Zappa’s harsh quote later polarised opinion when it appeared in Rolling Stone’s syndicated ‘Loose Change’ column, but then the wider public’s view of rock music writers and their abilities has vacillated for decades now. Some still believe music writing to be a romantic vocation where fortunate writers are blessed with unqualified access to rock stars and their inner circles, yet most seasoned-writers would say it’s anything but glamorous.
Nonetheless, an inherent desire to write words on music seemingly overrides either personal gain or sometimes even an individual’s health. This apparently uncontrollable urge has persuaded successive generations of writers to pick up a pen and, if anything, the arrival of the internet has encouraged a far greater legion of wannabe authors to share opinions online. So the million-dollar question remains: what is this indefinable force that drives us to write about music in the first place?
While music journalism can be biased, disposable or (at worst) sink into self-indulgent waffle, as a genre it’s served as a fertile breeding ground for spawning incisive, informed writers, many of whom have gone on to write books which have not only changed the way we hear music but have helped us make sense of popular music’s importance in the wider cultural milieu.
As with rock history itself, though, there are myths about music-writing that still need to be debunked. For example, while it’s generally accepted that 20th-century rock journalism only got into its stride after the breakthrough of The Beatles, forward-thinking, intellectually slanted music-writing arguably has its roots in 19th-century classical-music criticism. Indeed, some highly rated writers, such as The Times’ James William Davison and French Romantic composer Hector Berlioz (who doubled as a freelance critic for the Parisian press), wielded influence on the page as early as the 1840s.
Though America’s Billboard magazine was founded as early as 1894 – initially building its reputation by covering circuses, fairs and burlesque shows – modern music criticism found itself a more tangible foothold when Whisky Galore author and co-founder of the Scottish Nationalist Party, Compton Mackenzie, founded Gramophone magazine in 1923. Though still devoted to classical music, this pragmatic monthly quickly embraced the idea of reviewing records, simply because a profusion of titles were starting to be released, and it made sense for reviewers to give guidance and make recommendations for the consumer.
In New York, in 1939, Berliner Alfred Lion founded arguably jazz’s most influential imprint, Blue Note, and its pioneering 75-year history is vividly recalled throughout Richard Havers’ Uncompromising Expression, which was issued in 2014 with a 5CD companion box set. Iconic jazz trumpeter and bandleader Miles Davis recorded for Blue Note during his hard bop period of the early-to-mid-50s, and he’s the subject of another transcendent jazz-related book, the aptly titled The Definitive Biography, written by Ian Carr, the late Scottish jazz musician and also co-author of the essential genre compendium, The Rough Guide To Jazz.
Coining the term, however, was merely the tip of the iceberg for Wexler. His highly accessible Rhythm & Blues: A Life In American Music (co-written with Aretha Franklin/BB King biographer David Ritz) is an in-depth account of an astonishing 60-year career which included him landing a partnership with Atlantic Records and producing acclaimed albums such as Dusty Springfield’s Dusty In Memphis and Bob Dylan’s controversial “born again” LP Slow Train Coming.
Oliver came out of a school of writing that was behind the innovative, and still unsurpassed, Jazz Book Club. It was founded in 1956, with the first book for the imprint, written by musicologist Alan Lomax and entitled Mister Jelly Roll. During its decade-long existence it published books on both jazz and blues (back then people saw little difference in the two genres), including Louis Armstrong’s biography, Satchmo, and the brilliant Negro Music In White America, by LeRoi Jones… it’s a must-read.
Controversy and salacious details have, of course, always sold books as well as newspapers, so while Amazonian rainforests have since been sacrificed in the retelling of both these legendary bands’ histories, perhaps it’s no surprise that two of the most resonant books about The Beatles and the Stones relate to their respective managers. The urbane, enigmatic and intensely private Brian Epstein is the subject of one-time Melody Maker editor-in-chief Ray Coleman’s poignant but gripping The Man Who Made The Beatles, while the sights, sounds and smells of pre-“swinging” London are all richly recalled in erstwhile Rolling Stones svengali Andrew Loog Oldham’s memoir Stoned.
One or two music critics dropped hints that they harboured greater literary aspirations during the Merseybeat boom and the subsequent British Invasion. William Mann’s pioneering review of The Beatles’ Royal Command performance, for example, appeared in British broadsheet The Times in December 1963, and it used language (including descriptive metaphors such as “pandiatonic clusters” and “flat submediant key switches”) which suggested the writer thought of the music in terms of high art with a lasting significance, rather than merely disposable pop.
Crawdaddy!’s founder, a Swarthmore College freshman named Paul Williams, envisaged his new magazine as a publication where “young people could share with each other the powerful, life-changing experiences we were having listening to new music in the mid-60s”. The critics have since repeatedly praised Williams’ vision, with The New York Times later describing Crawdaddy! as “the first magazine to take rock and roll seriously”; Williams’ landmark magazine soon became the training ground for many well-known rock writers such as Jon Landau, Richard Meltzer and future Blue Öyster Cult/The Clash producer Sandy Pearlman.
Another Rolling Stone and New York Times contributor-turned-literary giant is Peter Guralnick, who has long been regarded as one of the foremost authorities on rock, blues and country music in America. Some of his insightful early articles on trailblazing blues artists such as Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters were collected in his first book, Feel Like Going Home (1971), but perhaps his most lasting contribution to the genre is his masterful and impeccably researched two-volume Elvis Presley biography, Last Train To Memphis (1994) and Careless Love (1999), which place The King’s story in a rise-and-fall arc encompassing over 1,300 pages in all. Guralnick’s latest book, published in 2015, Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock’n’Roll, is another masterpiece of scholarly research and vibrant writing.
Rock music-writing was very much in its ascendency in America in the late 60s, but during the 70s the UK rock press entered a golden age of its own. The NME, Melody Maker, Disc And Music Echo and Record Mirror had all enjoyed a spike in popularity during the late 60s, and, after Sounds was first published, in October 1970, British rock fans had five weeklies to choose from, before Disc ceased publication in 1972. In addition, the highly regarded monthly ZigZag (first published in April ’69) soon built a reputation for its thorough interviews, its diligently researched articles and initial editor Pete Frame’s groundbreaking, genealogical-style ‘Rock Family Trees’, which traced the events and personnel changes of artists ranging from The Byrds to John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. Frame’s first collection of Rock Family Trees was duly published in 1979, with a second volume following in 1983, and the two later appearing in a single book, The Complete Rock Family Trees, in 1993; since then there have been three other books in the series that, like their predecessors, are both beautiful to look at and fascinating to peruse.
Savage and Morley, especially, have become highly respected cultural commentators, and the former’s lauded England’s Dreaming has frequently been heralded as arguably the definitive history of Sex Pistols and the wider punk phenomenon.
Arguably the most influential of the NME’s cover-mounted cassette giveaways during the 80s was C86, celebrating the eclectic nature of the UK’s indie scene in (you guessed it) 1986. One of that influential artefact’s collators was NME contributor and all-round indie champion Neil Taylor, so it’s fitting he would later author Document & Eyewitness: A History Of Rough Trade, which engages on two levels. Firstly, it’s an informal biography of the influential UK label/record shop’s unlikely founder, the softly spoken, almost monkish Geoff Travis, but it’s also a painstaking history of his shop(s), label and distribution company, which has sponsored singular talents such as The Smiths, The Strokes and The Libertines since its inception in 1978.
As with Julian Cope (and, indeed, some of the most enduring rock writers), Peter Hook never received any formal journalistic training, but he’s an able raconteur and, as bassist with two seismic post-punk outfits, Joy Division and New Order, he has more than a few tales to tell. He admirably reveals all in the no-holds-barred The Haçienda: How Not To Run A Club: a hair-raising account of how the titular Mancunian super club owned by New Order and Factory Records became the Madchester scene’s mecca during the late 80s, but then disintegrated in a hailstorm of gangs, guns, drugs and corruption.
In the 90s, the way music fans consumed their criticism began to change. Both Sounds and Record Mirror ceased publication in 1991, and glossier titles such as Select, Mojo and the primarily metal-oriented Kerrang! (which first appeared as a Sounds supplement in 1981) made greater inroads into the UK market, albeit temporarily.
With the internet becoming a global reality on the cusp of the new millennium, many writers may have harboured concerns about the shape their collective future would take. Yet, while rock music weeklies are now largely a thing of the past, and online music bloggers have arguably become the norm, broadsheet coverage and the reassuring presence of established monthlies, including Rolling Stone, Mojo and Uncut, shows that print media is still very much a part of the fabric.
From the voracious reader’s point of view there’s since been a glut of quality to please their shelves (or download to Kindles), and it’s encouraging to think that some of the most authoritative words on music have been published since the dawn of the 21st Century.
From Guns N’ Roses to The Jam, Public Enemy to Sonic Youth, many musicians have celebrated – and targeted – rock writers in song.
Listen to our exclusively curated Words On Music playlist here.
