Sunday, June 20, 2021

On `The Sad Truth' About Post-1970's `Rock Journalism'

 


In the 2003 book that Bloombsury published which former Mojo editor and Rock's Backpages Co-founder Barney Hoskyns edited, titled The Sound and the Fury, post-1970's "rock journalism" was characterized in the following way:

"The sad truth is that rock journalism has become little more than a service industry, with scant critical autonomy and even less responsibility to its readers. We have all, in our different ways, colluded with the entertainment machine in its canny efforts to dictate what music sells.

"...The major conglomerates have done their best to control and commodify rock rebellion.

"The music industry's greatest victory has been to make pop music--from boy bands to nu metal--a mere lifestyle choice, a disposable commodity...

"In this tame new world of fame for fame's sake...we are all living out Warhol's nightmare: an endless parade of pneumatic automatons who signify and celebrate nothing other than their own narcissism and greed...We cannot let capitalism erode our souls..."

Wednesday, June 2, 2021

Woody Guthrie's 1949 Prediction

 


In an April 12, 1949 letter to Mary Jo Edgmon and family, 20th-century U.S. protest folk singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie wrote the following:

"After you starve clean to the rim of death they call you a professional, and after you die off they call you a great genius. And when somebody steps in and buys up all of your diaries and scribblings and songs and poems they call you the greatest feller which ever lived, so's your debtors and loaners can get rich off the stink of your dead bones and yaller pages of ideas."