Extract
Maggoty Lamb
A Year in the Death of the British Music Press
The ‘Inky Fingers’ blog appears twelve times a year on the website of the Observer Music Monthly, where it builds – month by month – into a complete anatomy of British pop criticism. But the intentions of pseudonymous author Maggoty Lamb go far beyond the merely commemorative. By subjecting the bedraggled remnants of the once mighty UK music press (alongside its broadsheet, glossy tabloid and online inheritors) to the sternest of moral and aesthetical examinations, and projecting the results directly into the blogosphere, he/she aims to open up a new channel of communication between the impoverished critical discourse of the present day and the millennial dreams of the old school rock-hack. As well as establishing a repository for music journalism’s finest traditions of unfettered idealism, syntactical overload, and industrial-strength sarcasm.
This edited selection of entries covers the period December 2007–December 2008.
December 2007
—
Forensic perusal of the Christmas best-of lists is one of the great pleasures of the musical year. Seeing which obscure but not entirely brilliant album has overcome its incipient mediocrity to be controversially number two with a bullet in the Rough Trade Shops’ top 50 (‘Oh, you mean you haven’t been listening to The Novelist by Richard Swift or [this year’s choice] Patrick Watson’s Close To Paradise? How can you possibly live with yourself?’). Marvelling at the sudden disappearance of records prematurely deemed to be classics on their initial release (Roisin Murphy, how quickly we forget). These innocent enjoyments of the festive season are to be cherished with the same intensity that earlier generations used to bring to the roasting of chestnuts
But this year a sombre shadow has fallen across this idyllic winter landscape. When last month’s free Q CD managed to come up with a 16-track ‘best of 2007’ selection which contained absolutely no music by black artists (for all the considerable input of peerless Afro-beat drummer Tony Allen, The Good, The Bad & The Queen cannot really be classified thus, however much Alex James might argue that Damon Albarn would like them to be), it was possible to view this as an isolated aberration. Looking at this month’s editions of Britain’s leading music magazines, however, that head-in-the-sand position gets increasingly hard to maintain.
– The rest of this article is printed in Loops Issue 01, available to buy from these Stockists.
This edited selection of entries covers the period December 2007–December 2008.
December 2007
—
Forensic perusal of the Christmas best-of lists is one of the great pleasures of the musical year. Seeing which obscure but not entirely brilliant album has overcome its incipient mediocrity to be controversially number two with a bullet in the Rough Trade Shops’ top 50 (‘Oh, you mean you haven’t been listening to The Novelist by Richard Swift or [this year’s choice] Patrick Watson’s Close To Paradise? How can you possibly live with yourself?’). Marvelling at the sudden disappearance of records prematurely deemed to be classics on their initial release (Roisin Murphy, how quickly we forget). These innocent enjoyments of the festive season are to be cherished with the same intensity that earlier generations used to bring to the roasting of chestnuts
But this year a sombre shadow has fallen across this idyllic winter landscape. When last month’s free Q CD managed to come up with a 16-track ‘best of 2007’ selection which contained absolutely no music by black artists (for all the considerable input of peerless Afro-beat drummer Tony Allen, The Good, The Bad & The Queen cannot really be classified thus, however much Alex James might argue that Damon Albarn would like them to be), it was possible to view this as an isolated aberration. Looking at this month’s editions of Britain’s leading music magazines, however, that head-in-the-sand position gets increasingly hard to maintain.
– The rest of this article is printed in Loops Issue 01, available to buy from these Stockists.
