Why would anyone want to write about music? Why would anyone want to read about music, or more specifically, why would anyone want to read ‘the music press’? I’m damned if I know.

I hate the music press. I’ve hated it for years, probably since the day I realised I didn’t give a good god damn about what anyone else thought about music, save for a few cherished souls, and heaven knows they didn’t write in the music press, and the kind of music they wrote about and I loved so much wasn’t covered in the music press anyway, so… I mean, I think I stopped bothering with the music press the day I realised I was only doing so out of a reflex action, falling into torpor like routines. Which is always a horrible reason to be doing anything.

I stopped reading the music press when I realised I could care less about whatever was deemed to be hip that week, and what was deemed to be old hat. I stopped reading the music press when I realised I was never going to find anyone who felt the same way about music as I did.

And that’s what makes such a mockery out of the whole idea of writing about music, or reading about music: you’re NEVER going to find someone who feels the same way about music, about ANYthing as you do yourself, locked into your own world within your four bedroom walls, or attic walls and tiny window that glances out over tops of garages, yellow Reliant Robin car parked in the street and Linkin Park hoodie hanging on clothes line, swaying in early March morning breeze, listening to The Millennium. I mean, it’s not going to happen. We’re all alone, and there’s no more gloriously alone experience in the world than listening to great Pop music. Which is why the personal stereo is the greatest invention ever… I mean, even when you’re in the midst of a stadium watching Britney Spears; you might for a fragmentary moment of your life connect with others around you, but essentially, that’s YOUR moment, that’s your love and desire, your aspirations and desolations. It’s no-one else’s. So why would you expect anyone else to capture that for you in words?

You wouldn’t.

You shouldn’t.

Let me tell you why I write about music. No, rephrase that: let me tell you why I write about music and why occasionally not despise what I write: I’m writing about me. For me. About me. It’s all me, me, me. As it should be. How can it be anything less, or anything more?

One of the things that impresses me most about people is the extent to which they go out of their way to record, to document their lives. This is why I love that idea of notebooks, and sketchbooks with scribbled notes and drawings showing the fleeting passing of seconds, thoughts, faces, the details of the world. This is why I love those people who wander around with a camera in their pockets every minute of the day, snapping at the apparently most benign things, making the moments concrete, cramming data into collections that will, yes, atrophy and decay, but will nevertheless last longer than the forever fragmenting and corrupting pathways of flimsy memories.

It’s all about ego.

Well, it is for me. Like I could care less about what anyone else thinks.

Except clearly I do. Clearly I get up out of my seat in front of this screen occasionally, and I leap around the room, just from reading the words of someone who, and this is the key, for THAT moment in time, connects with me. And naturally some connect more often than others, land more carefully placed precision strikes on my soul, and that’s as it should be. Degrees of desire, love and devotion, and all of that.

Clearly the words of others mean a lot to me, and in that sense of course I’m not alone. It’s just that when it comes right down to it, there’s only a tiny percentage out there who give that same occasional damn, whilst there’s a whole mass of others who, it seems, don’t. There’s a whole mass of people out there who will crowd excitedly around shop windows gazing at signs about mobile phone offers, whilst there might be just me, in the same street, marvelling at the way the paint is peeling off the side of that building, revealing the number 5 beneath. That’s not to say either way of going through the world is better, or worse, more or less ‘intelligent’; it’s just to say that my life is always, and was always going to be more solitary. Which is no big deal really.

So the same applies to the media: the handful of teenagers who might once have read the NME to see which philosophers Paul Morley was going to plug in relation to what new band will still be out there picking away at similar seams, only not in the NME. Whilst the masses of like-to-think-of-themselves-as-hip-kids who might once have read the NME to find out what names to drop into conversation down the pub on a Friday night, or what records to buy on a Saturday morning will still be doing exactly the same thing. Only they’ll be doing that name dropping at the Carling/NME festival thing or whatever the hell that actually is. I’ve had a press release for it actually, so I guess I should know, if only it hadn’t gone right in the bin, unread…

Because I mean, who cares? Why should I care? Why should you care?

I don’t.

You shouldn’t.

Because if you do really care, then you’ll not be wasting time mourning the loss of what you perceive as a ‘better’ past, but you’ll be out there digging around for those few voices that speak to you still. You’ll be ploughing your own furrows like you always did and hopefully always will.


posted by duke harringay at 10:55 AM