The Nu-Normal #06: Back to the Future Part IV
Visions of music journalism from behind and beyond the now.
One of my favourite weekly newsletters is the Music Journalism Insider, written by Todd L. Burns. In his recent special edition, Burns put the call out to other journos in the biz to imagine what the state of music journalism might look like in two hundred years time. Why 2221 you ask? Well, according to Burns, it was a year “so far off that everyone could really get creative with their responses.”
And boy, they sure did. Jes Skolnik of Bandcamp Daily imagined a utopian pipe dream, where “music is recognized as part of the connective tissue of humanity," and a “passion for and thoughtfulness about music [is] placed at the fore in any kind of music writing.”
Others, like Dan Ozzi of REPLY ALT, leaned into the grim prospect of our neoliberal technocratic future, where benevolent ruler “Musk-Bezos VI” has launched a new virtual music festival, “Applezonchella,” featuring an impressive slate of acts, including “Blink-382, Dinosaur Jr. Jr. Jr. Jr. Jr., the vocaloid software voicebank formerly known as FKA twigs, Charli CCC, the Misfits (featuring holograms of all the original members except for Glenn Danzig), and Radiohead,” alongside headliner “Saint Blue Northwest Ivy Kardashian-Knowles-West-Swift-Sheeran-Corden III” performing on the “Pfizer-Monster Energy Drink main stage.”
Now, while yours truly didn’t get the call up (that’s okay Todd, I’ll catch you on the next one), I thought it might be fun to talk a casual stroll through history and look at the twists, turns, and possible trajectories of music journalism. Enjoy.
1821: Affluent aristocrats with the time and leisure to read for fun (or even read at all) peruse the weekly editions of Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, a German-language periodical published between 1798 and 1848.
The overly functional name translates to General Music Newspaper (very German), and one of the periodical’s most famous bits of early music journalism was critic E. T. A. Hoffmann’s influential review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony:
“Radiant beams shoot through this region’s deep night, and we become aware of gigantic shadows which, rocking back and forth, close in on us and destroy everything within us except the pain of endless longing—a longing in which every pleasure that rose up in jubilant tones sinks and succumbs, and only through this pain, which, while consuming but not destroying love, hope, and joy, tries to burst our breasts with full-voiced harmonies of all the passions, we live on and are captivated beholders of the spirits.”
1971: Leslie “Lester” Bangs (1948–1982), often labelled as “America’s greatest rock critic,” works as a freelancer and writes for legacy publications like Creem and Rolling Stone. Despite his level of clout, Bangs isn’t immune from hot and often bad takes.
In his review of MC5’s Kick Out The Jams, an album revered for containing the seeds of punk’s genesis, he describes the band as “a bunch of 16-year-old punks on a meth power trip,” and the album as “ridiculous, overbearing, [and] pretentious.” His 1970 review of Black Sabbath’s self-titled debut—rightly considered ground-zero for metal as a genre—doesn’t fare any better:
“The whole album is a shuck—despite the murky song titles and some inane lyrics that sound like Vanilla Fudge paying doggerel tribute to Aleister Crowley, the album has nothing to do with spiritualism, the occult, or anything much except stiff recitations of Cream clichés that sound like the musicians learned them out of a book, grinding on and on with dogged persistence. Vocals are sparse, most of the album being filled with plodding bass lines over which the lead guitar dribbles wooden Claptonisms from the master’s tiredest Cream days. They even have discordant jams with bass and guitar reeling like velocitized speedfreaks all over each other’s musical perimeters yet never quite finding synch—just like Cream! But worse.”
Remember folks: context is everything, and it’s okay to be wrong. Twice.
2021: Fast forward to now and things are pretty dire for the state of music journalism. Most legacy publications are shuttered and defunct. The hold-outs are almost exclusively online, littered with ugly banners and pop-up ads just to keep the lights on.
PR press releases are cut-pasted in for organic ‘news’ and negative album reviews are often neglected to avoid offending and upending this all-too delicate ecosystem. Most real content and reporting is lumped on desperate, burnt-out freelancers, where the idea of landing stable staff jobs in music journalism is a distant, bitter memory and the prospect of eternal precarity a more than likely reality. Memes are the future and TikTokkers are the new pop stars.
Oh, The Pitch of Discontent publishes bi-weekly on Substack and it’s sick and you should totally read it—just like you’re doing now. (Share, like, subscribe, etc.)
2071: With traces of COVID-23, G4-37, and MERS-69 continuing to ravage the globe, the idea of live music is now an anachronistic fad remembered by time-addled Baby Boomers, perpetually sad Gen X’ers, and still-living-at-home Millenials—all of whom steadfastly refuse to die thanks to expensive pharmaceutical longevity treatments that have significantly boosted the human lifespan. On this crowded, hothouse, rising tide future Earth, younger generations stay inside and consume music in strange otherwordly forms.
With Gatesway™ 10G technology and Neuralink chips connected via brain-machine interfaces, music fans now receive music singles as instant downloads directly to the neocortex. This had made both the concept of the album and music PR effectively obsolete, where music is experienced in real-time, as it’s created and subsequently air-dropped to consumers direct from the cloud.
Okay, but let’s say that you’re not a fan of bedroom pop? Or ska-metalcore? Or reggaetinnitus? Do not dismay. Emotional mapping now allows OnlyFans subscribers to purchase and experience the sensation of listening to music as another human being entire. Not your emotions? Not your problem! Mood-influencers are the newest form of literal taste-makers, streaming their lives as POV-consciousness episodes, where people can choose new artists, music, and opinions via the lived experiences of hive-minded others. Rejoice!
2221: While archaeologists and historians watch the shattered ruins of Earth from the safety of dome cities on Luna, music continues to evolve. With the security of hermetically sealed habitats and the advantage of ruthless security and emigration procedures, music is once more a tentative live phenomenon.
The newly freed serfs of the disparate asteroid prison colonies hold hardcore punk shows in the zero-G atriums of the vast inner mining blocks, moshing back and forth without the need for crowd-surfing, floors, or even stages to dive from.
In the barely terraformed Musk Protecorate on Mars, the nineteenth-century classical revival is in full swing as large-scale orchestra ensembles, playing deep in the depths of Valles Marineris, let the full majesty of Wagner’s The Ride of the Valkyries reverberate off the seven-kilometre high cliffs of the planet-stretching canyon, causing a dazzling display of falling regolith and debris in the process.
Meanwhile, in the outer reaches of the solar system, self-replicating robot farms are building a giant radio-wave amplifier in the Kupier Belt to broadcast and soak the far corners of the Milky Way galaxy with the choicest cuts of Earth’s most exemplary artistic forms. Top contenders include the “Baby Shark Dance” and “Despacito” featuring Daddy Yankee.