As I have detailed in the past, I want a paper fanzine again, filled from cover to shining cover with good writing about music that doesn’t suck. But not only are paper fanzines basically obsolete, the process of producing one involves dealing with ripoff cowboy advertisers, dealing with ripoff cowboy printers, dealing with ripoff cowboy record shops, dealing with bloody arsehole ripoff cowboy indie record distributors who pay only on threat of lawsuit KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL and I got just a little burnt out on it.

That said, I remember sitting around my then-girlfriend’s back yard in 1998, idly leafing through the Trading Post and looking at stuff going cheap I would have killed for in 1990. Linotypes! Halftone camera setups! Entire clunky publishing systems, Mac IIx still in the middle! That stuff was sorta fun. Except that even 1991-level desktop publishing knocked it into a cocked hat for convenience and ability to get the damned information out, of course.

So I feel some slight old man’s schadenfreude at these meddling kids set to the task of producing a magazine with the technology of the 1980s. Poor dears had to do arithmetic to work out their layout. HA! HA!

What It’s Like To Interview A Celebrity, from Lovelyish.

Cleveland rock critic Jane Young died on Monday after 38 years at the job, from 1964 until 2002. Yeah, guess I have to keep rocknerding now until at least age 83.

Last week I took The Wolfgang Press in Wikipedia from two paragraphs to a proper article. Yesterday it was on the front page Did you know? section for six hours and got 3065 hits, compared to its usual 25-50. Not bad for an article about an obscure band approximately no-one cares about. (“Kansas”, from Bird Wood Cage, is a lost goth rock classic. DJs, please play. Thank you.) I’d forgotten how much quiet nerdy fun it is writing and researching a Wikipedia article.

Writing about anything artistic on Wikipedia is arse, though, unless you can find critics to quote. Printed ones by preference. (Wikipedia’s epistemology is severely broken at the edges, and knowing how it got that way doesn’t actually help.) Google Books and Google Scholar help, but if you don’t have access to a significant clippings pile, or a really well-indexed library collection, it’s ridiculously difficult to write about things that happened before 1995. Though McFarlane is still on the Internet Archive and basically just needs someone experienced in Wikipedia’s little ways slogging through it. Do you feel lucky, punk?

You know how no-one you know cares about your shitty band? No-one on Wikipedia cares either.

May I commend to you this fine blog, by London media casualty Jamie Willcocks. The four-word single reviews are particularly brilliant.

The Fall: 1-3 foundation; 4-7 elevation; 8-12 Brix-ification; 13-16 rhythmnation; 17-21,24-26,28 recapitulation; 22-23,27 late revelations.

Spotted by Redcountess, Martin Newell’s 1992 rock’n'roll Christmas lyrics. I particularly liked “Hip King Wenceslas.”

From NewsBiscuit: “Two decades after being given a C60 cassette of specially selected songs, Rachel Hannigan, a 38-year-old consultant from Knutsford, finally realised the collection of tortured alternative rock songs given to her by her chemistry lab partner James Barr was not just a compilation of some of his favourite songs that he thought she might like, but was intended as a declaration of love.”

A buncha MP3s just really doesn’t cut it. Who has time, for one thing?

Back in my day, we had to search the dial for radio that didn’t suck and search the city for the one record shop that didn’t suck. And pay money for music! On pieces of plastic!

Now culture is preserved endemically. I see records on Australian indie MP3 blogs with thousands of downloads — the original was a pressing of 500, twenty copies even leaving that city.

To sell records, you need to (1) compete with every record ever made; (2) convince people who can get your music free to want to give you money; (3) after they’ve already listened to your record repeatedly (“try before you buy” can be assumed). If you can make people want to give you money for a record they’ve heard lots of times that competes with every record ever made … then you can sell a record.

The scarce commodity is people’s attention. The only telly I watch is YouTube to amuse my baby daughter, and even that has a hard time keeping my attention more than sixty seconds. I load my MP3 player with fresh stuff and dispose of the weak links daily.

Which catches your attention, a rock journalism blog or an MP3 blog? Industry news gets readers, before the bitterness becomes terminal. Live performance can be written about, but you never see that linked from the MP3 blogs. And I’d have to leave the house.

Where’s room for the modern Lester Bangs? Does good rock journalism require music to be hard to get for dancing about architecture to substitute? Or just never-mind-the-quality-feel-the-width bloody-mindedness?

Where have you gone, Byron Coley? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

Fiction about rock’n'roll is usually dire. I think John Hawkes-Reed has nailed it, though.