Your library card now gives you free access to Rock’s Backpages - a massive online database of rock journalism, featuring a jaw-dropping 17,000 articles on artists from Aaliyah to ZZ Top, Eminem to Elvis, the Rolling Stones to the Stone Roses. Today's guest blogger, Paul Stevens, reviews the Rock's Backpages site. Paul currently writes the 'Whose Idea Was...' column in Manchester's Chimp Magazine and if you read Chimp, you'll know he doesn't mince his words...
If you like music, and more specifically, if, like me, you like to read about music… YOU NEED THIS. I’ve often wanted to take a look at it, but subscription costs for individuals are, to say the least, prohibitive, and now Manchester Libraries has made it free for all members, and accessible as part of its 24 hour library service, as Owen Paul once sang (sort of!) it’s my favourite waste of time.
Rock's Backpages is a huge online archive of music journalism from the 1950s until the present day, culled from seminal music papers such as Creem, Rolling Stone, New Musical Express, Melody Maker, Crawdaddy! and Mojo. It contains work by some of the greats, Nick Kent, Charles Shaar Murray, Lester Bangs and our very own John Robb, Paul Morley and Mick Middles. All in all there are estimated to be 17,000 articles on there from every genre of music, from the greats of jazz to the birth of grime and all points in between.
There’s a fantastic and far reaching “On this day” section, a superb collection of blogs, and digital archives of thousands of magazine covers which really give you a feel for the aesthetics of the time; in 1985 for example, triangles were massive. It’s not just the big names who are covered either, I’ve racked my brain, rifled through the foggy compartment marked “2nd rate prog bands of the 1990s”, hit search, and I’ve rarely caught it out.
The interesting thing to me is the evolution of music journalism through the decades, and there is plenty of primary source material here. From the 50s, when popular music was seen as an eccentric branch of showbusiness and jazz greats such as Charlie parker were written about in the same superficial tone as Ava Gardener’s choice of dress on Oscars night. Through the 60s and 70s when the writing became, to say the least, over technical, and NME journalists would pour over the modal shifts of a particular Stanley Clarke bass solo, or Alan White’s choice of cymbals oblivious to the snotty hoards of punk looming into view over the hillside. It’s the hushed and reverent tones that really stand out over this period, like a literary equivalent of “Whispering” Bob Harris and interviews from the era come across as a cross between a therapy session, an audience with the pope and a gloomy Wednesday afternoon in Johnny Roadhouse.
It’s during the punk period though, and then into the 80s when music journalism really loses touch with reality, and becomes an exercise in pure pretentiousness, with often hilarious results. It seems that the objective was to cram as many references to situationism, dada, obscure Russian poets, obscurer historical figures and works of sculpture into album and gig reviews until it wasn’t entirely clear if the writer was describing a piece of classic Soviet architecture or a couple of fops wearing slippers and a drum machine. On reflection it was probably just an attempt to compensate for the vacuous music of the time, it must have been a difficult job in imbue a sense of gravitas into an interview with Toyah Wilcox, hence the Eisenstein and Camus.
During the 90s, no doubt influenced by Loaded and the “New Lad” phenomenon, the journalists turned Gonzo and much of the writing of the Britpop era seems more concerned with documenting manic partying involving musicians, journalists and sleepless nights to a far greater degree than it does with music. Lots of cigarettes and alcohol and nary a mention of the innovations of, for example, Jungle and Hip Hop, which were breaking new barriers by the week, while Oasis recycled The Beatles with a dash of Quo, and Damon Albarn became the new Tommy Steele.
More recent articles show a new and lazy tactic as pop music finally eats itself, and every week the music papers take a fleeting moment from rocks illustrious past and try and flog it as something fresh and innovative, an appropriate approach to documenting a musical era when it seems more important to display the right influences than it is to create something genuinely new for the 21st Century.
That’s my jaded take on it all, anyway, and what do I know, but all the evidence that you could wish for is here for the price of a library card (!), feel free to test my thesis and reject it as the bitter and uninformed ramblings of the man who never got The Smiths.
Right then, I’m off to read that Emerson, Lake and Powell interview from 1986….
To sign in to Rock's Backpages visit the 24 Hour Library, select Rock's Backpages and enter your library ticket number and pin.
