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March 28, 2024, 02:11:41 PM

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Neil Kulkarni’s shitty Tori Amos review and 90s music journalism in general

Started by Kankurette, January 13, 2022, 10:36:26 AM

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Kankurette

I didn't want to hijack Jockice's thread, hence the separate post. He mentioned Neil Kulkarni's review of Boys for Pele and how the crux of it was 'lol Tori is ginger'.

I get not liking Tori. I get Boys for Pele isn't too everyone's taste. But Kulkarni's review of it wasn't a review, it was an all-out attack on Tori. Calling her a freak and sneering at her for being middle-class? So fucking what? Kulkarni jizzed himself over Catatonia and Cerys is middle-class. She's a fucking surgeon's daughter. Yes, Tori does talk out of her arse but she was dealing with a break-up and Kulkarni forgot the bit about her being a rape survivor, or is the silly middle-class ginger bitch supposed to just shut up about it because people have it worse? Is co-founding RAINN not political enough? She actually did do a political album, Scarlet's Walk, several years later.

And again: Catatonia weren't political. Cerys got a pass. I know Tori Amos and Catatonia are different genres but it always bemused me that journalists who sneered at bands for being middle-class or apolitical (yes, Swells and your Bis article, I mean you) made an exception for Catatonia. Maybe they saw Cerys wearing trackies and sovereign rings and knocking back brandy and just assumed she was, to quote Nicky Wire, the queen of a council estate. Cerys' buddies Space are working-class as they come but they were never heralded for it.

My general point is that the one thing I hated about the NME and Melody Maker was the weird personal attacks. They could be pretty nasty about women and gay men for people who were supposedly right-on. Daniel Booth wrote a review of Garbage calling Shirley Manson a fake and implying she wasn't genuinely mentally ill because, unlike Richey, she hadn't killed herself. It was horrific. Someone else mentioned that Everett True used to creep on female musicians.

And don't get me started on the ableism. People calling Talulah Gosh 'professional retards'. Ugh.

Link: http://theincrediblekulk.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-most-racist-thing-i-ever-wrote-fear.html?m=1

shiftwork2

Not that you don't make valid points, but I always saw that grandstanding Melody Maker / NME stuff as an exercise in absurd writing rather than a discussion of music.  Fluff that maybe raised a smile before going in the bin.  I read lots of it and grew tired of it and I'm relieved it's gone.

the science eel

Quote from: shiftwork2 on January 13, 2022, 10:53:45 AMNot that you don't make valid points, but I always saw that grandstanding Melody Maker / NME stuff as an exercise in absurd writing rather than a discussion of music.  Fluff that maybe raised a smile before going in the bin.  I read lots of it and grew tired of it and I'm relieved it's gone.

The NME had some great writers in the 70s (although I'm sure the average copy was mostly tossed-off blah), some still through the 80s, and sadly by the 90s - no doubt encouraged by the whole Loaded 'culture' - they'd lost any kind of integrity and style were shamelessly part of a circle-jerk boozy Britpop liggers crowd who didn't even pretend to try. It was all about laying into people who weren't with 'em. 'middle-class' of course doesn't mean middle-class but it's lazy journo-speak for all manner of things they didn't approve of. Being Californian and singing about abuse is just one.



Kankurette

I never got why they thought 'middle-class' was an insult. Fetishising working-class people's lives as being romantic and real?

the science eel

Quote from: Kankurette on January 13, 2022, 11:18:42 AMI never got why they thought 'middle-class' was an insult. Fetishising working-class people's lives as being romantic and real?

Yeah, something like that. But it's a common pejorative, isn't it? kind of a short-cut, anything that's insubstantial (in their eyes) or fey or poetic.

The irony is of course that there wasn't a single NME/MM journo that didn't come from that kind of background themselves.

Kankurette



Quote from: shiftwork2 on January 13, 2022, 10:53:45 AMNot that you don't make valid points, but I always saw that grandstanding Melody Maker / NME stuff as an exercise in absurd writing rather than a discussion of music.  Fluff that maybe raised a smile before going in the bin.  I read lots of it and grew tired of it and I'm relieved it's gone.

They wanted to have their cake and eat it though, as they were quick to condemn, for example, Shabba Ranks (homophobia), 2 Live Crew (misogyny) or Morrissey (Union Jack fetishisation) but also happy to trample all over their stances on some of these things for cheap attempts at laughs. Don't want to be too po-faced about it, but a lot of it was pretty unpleasant in hindsight.

the ouch cube

There was a Taylor Parkes review of Kate Bush calling her a "fuckpig", as well.

Andrew Mueller claiming that the music line up at Woodstock 94 should have been used for target practice by the air force. (Mueller is from a military background and heartily approves of bombing people; only the "crank left" disapprove apparently)

That godawful cunt Quantick claiming in Select that George Michael being arrested by the LAPD ought to brook no sympathy because he was a bad role model for gay people because closeted. As if he had any right to pompously lecture a sexual minority he wasn't a member of.

Unrelentingly horrible people, and they're mostly still like that even now. Kulkarni and Price are maybe among the few who've calmed down, but the rest...

Kankurette

Did not know that about Kate Bush, but again, not surprised. I mean, she's a middle-class, eccentric, slightly hippyish female singer-songwriter with a very high-pitched voice, the kind of thing NME/MM writers hated.
Quote from: Clatty McCutcheon on January 13, 2022, 11:52:36 AMThey wanted to have their cake and eat it though, as they were quick to condemn, for example, Shabba Ranks (homophobia), 2 Live Crew (misogyny) or Morrissey (Union Jack fetishisation) but also happy to trample all over their stances on some of these things for cheap attempts at laughs. Don't want to be too po-faced about it, but a lot of it was pretty unpleasant in hindsight.
Like Swells calling a song about homophobia by Blue Boy 'limp-wristed'.

A lot of those types later went on to Q, Quantick being an example, and in an article about pathetic/soppy songs, one entry was described as having a bassline that sounds like Peter Hook after a sex change. Because us silly little ladies can't play bass with our teeny weeny girl hands, tee hee hee.

sweeper

Kulkarni wrote some great stuff in the 90s, and probably equal amounts of shite. It's perhaps a result of short lead times on articles, but also the aforementioned tendency to get easy laughs out of soft targets, which probably went down well in the office or pub with the other journos. These types of writers always thought they were above the laddy banter of the times, just because they could get waxy about something great, but seemed to give themselves a pass when they wanted to tear into something. A vintage mistake for young, serious men everywhere, I find.

Every few months someone digs out his prose-poem Ned's kicking, and every time it makes me cringe. It's some of the worst writing I've ever seen, and if it were me I'd want it kept buried.

On the other hand, his unloading onto Kula Shaker is still a great sustained and justified diatribe.

popcorn

Not 90s, but... the story of Liz Phair's 2003 self-titled album is interesting. She wanted to make a mainstream pop album like Avril Lavigne (and hired the same songwriters) and was torn apart by Pitchfork for it. Now of course Pitchfork are the biggest poptimists in the world, and in 2019 the critic apologised:

QuoteIn 2019, it is almost inconceivable that there would be any controversy around an established indie musician working on a radio-friendly pop album with radio-friendly pop songwriters. To a smug 19-year-old Pitchfork writer (cough) in 2003, it was just as inconceivable that an established indie artist would try to—or want to—make a radio-friendly pop album in the first place. The idea that "indie rock" and "radio pop" are both cultural constructs? Languages to play with? Masks for an artist to try on? Yeah. I certainly did not get that. Liz Phair DID get that—way before many of us did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liz_Phair_(album)

popcorn

Thom Yorke had a spat with Melody Maker in the early 90s when they said he should kill himself to become a legendary artist. One of the journalists wrote a retrospective piece about it in the Guardian:

QuoteWhen I was at Melody Maker, we put Yorke's face on the front of the paper, to go with an in-depth interview, next to the immortally provocative question, printed in big, bold type: "Is This the Next Rock Martyr in the Making?"

[...]

And we at the paper, perhaps like many of the readers, were wondering, I guess, whether Yorke would be the next to go - to buckle under the weight of expectation, to recoil from the pressure of being everybody's favourite tortured rock artist. To commit suicide. We thought it was a fair question. Yorke didn't: he thought it was irresponsible; that we were somehow suggesting that the logical extension of, and final solution to, his downcast worldview was to take his own life; that we were taking a sort of perverse delight in it all, almost encouraging him to absent himself forever because we thought it would be cool. Because, in rock'n'roll, there is nothing cooler than a premature death, especially when it's at the hands of the person dying.

We were only saying what people have been saying for years: that dying young, even if it's not the result of living fast, can be a good thing, if you want to preserve the integrity of your art.

I'm with Thom here, they sound like cunts.

Kankurette

Speaking of lad culture, I wonder if that was why Catatonia and Cerys Matthews were so adored by the weekly music press, because she was a ladette herself. Not like the other girls.

Btw I am actually a big fan of Catatonia, and I don't have a hateboner for Cerys (although I find the biography of Catatonia I have quite difficult to read now, it's hard to read about someone being praised for having an obvious drink problem when you have an alcoholic mother and you've been around her at her absolute worst). I just find the double standards surrounding her really bizarre.

What was Ned's Kicking? Something to do with Ned's Atomic Dustbin?

ETA: I'm also with Thom, and I hate the romanticising of suicide and mental illness. Kurt Cobain was not some kind of romantic hero because he shot himself, for fuck's sake, he was a deeply unhappy person who needed help and to come off the smack. Maybe Nirvana would have gone boring and mainstream if Kurt hadn't died, who knows. But implying that Yorke should have knocked himself off before Radiohead got stale is really shitty. And I don't know about Courtney, but I'm sure Franny would rather have a living father, and Kurt Cobain's parents would rather have a living son, and Dave and Krist would rather have him alive as well. Suicide is a bit less romantic when you're the one finding your husband's dead body dangling from the garage ceiling like poor Rachel Speed did.

sweeper

Quote from: Kankurette on January 13, 2022, 12:50:28 PMWhat was Ned's Kicking? Something to do with Ned's Atomic Dustbin?

http://theincrediblekulk.blogspot.com/2016/09/hatchet-3-neds-atomic-dustbin.html

I remember reading it at time of publication, and thinking that being Ned's in summer 1995 was punishment enough. I think it's where I first learned the concept of low-hanging fruit.

Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth

Is Kulkarni that really gobby one on the Chart Music Podcast? I've only listened to one episode and whoever that was put me off listening to any more.

QuoteWe were only saying what people have been saying for years: that dying young, even if it's not the result of living fast, can be a good thing, if you want to preserve the integrity of your art.
Fucking absolute bloody hell. What are they, 15 years old or something?

sweeper

Quote from: Kankurette on January 13, 2022, 12:50:28 PMBut implying that Yorke should have knocked himself off before Radiohead got stale is really shitty.

Mental illness was broadly still misunderstood in the 90s, and I think the music press viewed it with general suspicion, that it was something indulgent for fey, middle-class boys.

I think this was instrumental in Oasis' rise, because they came along with nothing but a good time, without any troublesome nuances like realistic human thoughts and feelings, or empathy, or anger. None of these things was remotely fashionable. The switchover in 94 from Nirvana dominance to britpop was at least partly instigated by this desire for something with less baggage. 

Kankurette

Oasis who Kulkarni always hated, incidentally. I agree with him on how they've come to represent everything bad about Britpop and how Noel Gallagher is a retrograde old fart, though him getting self-righteous about Noel looking down at female musicians is a bit rich coming from the 'lol Tori Amos is a self-absorbed ginger-haired freak' guy.

Also, don't some of the poorest parts of Britain have particularly high mental illness rates? Depression is hardly a middle-class disease, as much as cunts like Julie Burchill (whose own son killed himself, let's not forget) would like to think otherwise.

sweeper

Quote from: Kankurette on January 13, 2022, 01:07:35 PMAlso, don't some of the poorest parts of Britain have particularly high mental illness rates? Depression is hardly a middle-class disease, as much as cunts like Julie Burchill (whose own son killed himself, let's not forget) would like to think otherwise.

It was always much easier to pretend otherwise, and to insist that aspirations for a packed social life, a one-day travelcard and cocaine are the keys to self-improvement.

PaulTMA

Quote from: popcorn on January 13, 2022, 12:47:41 PMThom Yorke had a spat with Melody Maker in the early 90s when they said he should kill himself to become a legendary artist. One of the journalists wrote a retrospective piece about it in the Guardian:

I'm with Thom here, they sound like cunts.

What would have Thom's final record have been at this point?  'Pop Is Dead'?  Yeah he really should have gone out on a high at that point and not diluted the catalog.

I only dipped in and out of MM in the 90s but everything that gets brought up on this forum suggests they outstripped the NME in the vileness stakes, yet oddly here we appear to have most of the people who still follow these journos.  Odd

sweeper

It's because they weren't only vile. It's not the whole story. They could write great things too.

In their defence, I think they took the job seriously. I think they saw themselves as having a responsibility to push culture in the right direction, and try and encourage readers to ignore the stuff that was worthless. Sometimes they took the easy way around that and went for insults, but other times, maybe most of the time, they got the tone right. 

Funnily enough I found a Melody Maker roundtable discussion about suicide and mental health from just after Richey Edwards disappearance the other day. Makes for interesting reading.
 http://www.foreverdelayed.org.uk/msppedia/index.php?title=From_Despair_To_Where%3F_-_Melody_Maker,_8th_April_1995

sweeper

Quote from: Bellalunaesme2 on January 13, 2022, 01:37:54 PMhttp://www.foreverdelayed.org.uk/msppedia/index.php?title=From_Despair_To_Where%3F_-_Melody_Maker,_8th_April_1995

QuoteRussell Senior: Pulp's guitarist. Russell believes pop's present preoccupation with death are [sic] morbid, overwrought and pointless

Yes, there was a lot of this. 'What's up with you? Just put on an old-fashioned suit and stop murning.'

sevendaughters

I miss the combative and battle-hardened days of British pop criticism. It seems like a boogeyman now because many mistakes were made, things were misunderstood, terrible personas were created, and people got hurt in the crossfire. But even the worst of it was readable and opinionated and at best it was often brave and necessary, and it wasn't overly credulous or in fealty to corporatism. I mean, if anyone prefers pop media now then I think you're genuinely fucked in the head.

I do think that history has shown Amos to be a precocious minor talent at best who flatters to deceive.


Quote from: the science eel on January 13, 2022, 11:21:14 AMYeah, something like that. But it's a common pejorative, isn't it? kind of a short-cut, anything that's insubstantial (in their eyes) or fey or poetic.

The irony is of course that there wasn't a single NME/MM journo that didn't come from that kind of background themselves.
This is just a guess, but I wonder if the issue was really that most of these journalists were from an ambiguous upper-working lower-middle class background, where they'd had to act differently in different situations? That Ned's Atomic Dustbin review reads like it's been written by someone whose become absolutely neurotic about all kinds of subtle cues that would mark someone out as being a bit studenty in a working-class pub, and I'd be surprised if there wasn't quite a bit of self-loathing going on there.

Obviously, the class system is the most evil thing in the world, but it's a perverse feature of British life that many people focus on these tiny manifestations of it-are Guardian readers who buy African music compilations smug?- are the lyrics to "Girls and Boys" by Blur condescending?- rather than focus on the main injustices- like poverty, inequality of opportunities.


Quote from: sevendaughters on January 13, 2022, 02:20:42 PMI miss the combative and battle-hardened days of British pop criticism. It seems like a boogeyman now because many mistakes were made, things were misunderstood, terrible personas were created, and people got hurt in the crossfire. But even the worst of it was readable and opinionated and at best it was often brave and necessary, and it wasn't overly credulous or in fealty to corporatism. I mean, if anyone prefers pop media now then I think you're genuinely fucked in the head.
In terms of coverage of new stuff I agree, but there really wasn't anything like some of the really good long-form blog stuff like Marcello Carlin's Then Play Long, reviewing every UK no 1 album or Chris O' Leary's brilliant analysis of the Bowie catalogue, Pushing Ahead of the Dame


Kankurette

Quote from: sevendaughters on January 13, 2022, 02:20:42 PMI miss the combative and battle-hardened days of British pop criticism. It seems like a boogeyman now because many mistakes were made, things were misunderstood, terrible personas were created, and people got hurt in the crossfire. But even the worst of it was readable and opinionated and at best it was often brave and necessary, and it wasn't overly credulous or in fealty to corporatism. I mean, if anyone prefers pop media now then I think you're genuinely fucked in the head.

I do think that history has shown Amos to be a precocious minor talent at best who flatters to deceive.
It still doesn't make calling her a freak because of her fucking hair OK. Which is my point. There's nothing brave about spending an entire article ripping the piss out of a woman's hair and sneering at her for being middle-class and not political enough. Criticise her music, sure. Boys for Pele is an acquired taste. But anyone would think she'd run over Kulkarni's dog or something. Maybe I'm getting sensitive in my old age, IDK. I know she's the kind of musician that CaB hate.

The thing is, I liked Swells and the NME went downhill when he left. His Space interview was hilarious. I liked Kulkarni, especially because he was always ill at ease about the whole Britpop thing. I liked Quantick. I liked it when journalists actually challenged musicians and asked them difficult questions rather than just fawning on them. What I didn't like was the hypocrisy and these guys espousing left-wing politics and claiming to be feminist or whatever while making gross comments about female musicians. Manda Rin was a perfectly normal-looking woman. Constantly calling her ugly and fat wasn't brave, it was being a cunt. And I'm autistic (and I am genuinely fucked in the head too, hence this thread), I got called a s*****c and G-d knows what else plenty of times so the ableism gets to me, a lot.

sevendaughters

Quote from: Kankurette on January 13, 2022, 02:39:04 PMIt still doesn't make calling her a freak because of her fucking hair OK. Which is my point. There's nothing brave about spending an entire article ripping the piss out of a woman's hair and sneering at her for being middle-class and not political enough.

I'd have to see it in context to base any kind of reasonable response, but I seem to recall gently ribbing everyone's public persona was fair game right back to the Bryan Ferry / Biryani Ferret stuff in the 70s, and wasn't exclusively aimed at women (not saying there was no sexist component to this media: there was). It seems unlikely that three relatively kooky people like Bjork, Amos, and PJ Harvey would all emerge around the same time and there not be some suspicion that this was not contrived (though I guess Bjork had been in touring bands since the mid-80s so journos would have known) in the same way that journalists ripped apart the bona fides of all of the new Nirvanas.

Quote from: Kankurette on January 13, 2022, 11:18:42 AMI never got why they thought 'middle-class' was an insult. Fetishising working-class people's lives as being romantic and real?

I read somewhere that one of the first people to use it as an insult, in modern times at least, was Enoch Powell...

Kankurette

QuoteTori searches for self-awareness. Tori reads some Jung. Tori sees a medicine woman who helps her acknowledge her inner universe. Tori sets it all to repugnantly tasteful artsy-fartsy music (this record made me gag). Various cretins, mainly ponytailed men, buy it and feel reassured by the tired cultural stereotype of attractive ARTIST, bit dippy, bit crackers, handily apolitical. (Attractive? How so? Never forget: ginger hair = freckles = tango eyebrows = can't go out in the sun = carrot-topped Belisha headed FREAKS.) Haven't Kristen, Nina Simone, Cassandra Wilson, Courtney, always had massive political resonance? Tori is the middle-class, bored, lazy retreat from political responsibility and urgency into the dead-end of introspection so characteristic of the American Artist (spit).

So fucking brave. Really sticking it to the man there, calling Tori fans 'cretins'. Also, it's factually incorrect. Tori co-founded RAINN. Because she got fucking raped at knifepoint and the only reason why she didn't end up dead was because the man who raped her needed more drugs. How is that not political? Silly little rape victim should just shut up and stop whining, right, Neil? Silly little middle-class girls don't have real problems!

And the other thing that bothers me is: when did Courtney Love have political resonance? When were Hole ever political? She slagged riot grrrls off, for fuck's sake. 20 Years in the Dakota and Rock Star (both that and Olympia) were her giving riot grrrls the finger. Why doesn't he mention Kathleen Hanna, for instance? You know, the woman Courtney punched in the face?

Jesus. I think something's gone off in my head. I've not been right these past few days.