The Stool Pigeon music newspaper

Musical soothsayers have been casting doom over the future of the whole music industry for some time now, and with good reason. To many the death knell sounded the moment Radiohead put their new album In Rainbows online and offered fans the opportunity to download it legally, paying as much as they liked for it. This gesture to many symbolises the moment the industry lost control. Have Radiohead given music back to the people, or have they effectively taken the food off the tables of musicians everywhere?

Perhaps this is all a bit dramatic. Perhaps the music industry will find clever and effective ways to strike back. Who knows how it’s going to turn out? One thing’s for sure and that’s this: if you’re going to be a music fan these days then you’ll need a computer. Luddite lovers of melody will feel aggrieved. You don’t even need to go into a newsagent to read about your favourite bands anymore - magazines fold on a weekly basis. It’s been eight years since the Melody Maker, a paper few could rival for history, imploded unexpectedly, with the added ignominy of having nu-metal fuckhead Fred Durst gurning on the last cover. What a sorry way to see off a paper that predated rock’n’roll itself.

Without its rival to compete with, the NME has been given free reign, and we all know how disastrous that’s turned out. A paper whose name was once synonymous with quality journalism, integrity, with a fine upstanding reputation, is now an organ that carries generic, faceless white guitar shit, peddled to guileless simpletons who don’t know any better. Indeed, in a genre of such mordent ideas and low abilities, Pete Doherty does come out looking like a genius, rather than the drug-addled party guitarist he is. There was a time when you’d buy the NME to find out about new and exciting artists, written about intelligently; witty, incisive articles that conveyed the sounds with brilliantly chosen words, and before you’d even heard a band you would be able to tell whether you were going to fall in love with them or not. Nowadays you open the NME to find out which muscle-vest wearing bad boy Peaches Geldof is doing the two-back beast with. It’s facile to the point of being insulting. It’s Heat magazine for people who’ve not started shaving yet and it’s little wonder people are voting by not using their feet, electing instead to access their information about bands via the internet. It’s cheaper, it’s quicker and it’s more convenient.

And the joy of online is you don’t necessarily need to have any writing experience to get your voice heard. It’s a brave new egalitarian world where ordinary meatheads have the same rights as those who can command money for shaping 200 words into something vaguely lucid. Opinions are like assholes, everyone’s got one. And that goes for blogs too. Words: they’re everywhere. People are expressing themselves in ways they’d never have been able to in the past. Democracy reigns. Indeed, some music sites have even taken the progressive step of allowing their readers to upload their own material. They call it User Generated Content - unedited, untouched by anyone, it sits there in all its glory, riddled with grammatical errors and embarrassing spelling mistakes.

No longer do pimply young people badger you at Barflys to buy their much-laboured over fanzines. Paper costs money, whereas anyone with a basic command of HTML and a lot of time on their hands can inexpensively create their own online magazine. They may not smell as nice, and the ink may not come off on your hands, but it’s easier and cost-effective. And sure enough, while paper circulations dwindle, music dedicated sites pop up all the time.

Viva la revolutión right? Power to the people and all that. With the dawn of MySpace and the possibilities of downloading, the corporate music industry is on its knees. So what if the dole queues are full of unemployed hacks, those miserable drink-sodden fucks deserve everything they’ve got coming to them, right? Well, yes and no. Music journalists might not know which way round to put their trousers on in the morning, and they might be an unpleasant and unhygienic bunch in the main, but a lot of them can write their way out of a wet paper bag. The problem with blanket online music saturation is that so much of it is utterly fucking dreadful. Really tragic, inarticulate, over elaborate gibberish, full of mixed metaphors and riddled with crimes against writing. Lester Bangs is no doubt rotating under the Earth as we speak. It seems everyone is a writer these days, though having a modicum of talent is no longer a prerequisite for most online mags, just a willingness to turn up and then knock out 500 words about the gig you’ve just seen. New media scribes are generally willing to whore themselves for free if it means getting in to see a band or getting a free album in the post. The old adage about peanuts and monkeys was never truer, and the fact hapless clowns are willing to undercut or work for free means those with ability are suffering.

If this all sounds a bit snobby, fuck it - that’s exactly what it is. So bite me. You might think me bitter. You bet I’m bitter! I might sound like a friggin’ granddad, but I miss the days when most music writing you’d come across was erudite, well researched and expressive. Wading through the sea of shit that’s present on the internet in order to find something worth reading is deeply upsetting. Quality has been replaced with quantity, and most of it is toothless and redundant of the thing that makes great writing: ideas. The internet, the information superhighway, the great leveller that gives us all freedom of expression, is murdering good journalism. Oh, the irony.

And if you weren’t already depressed enough, consider the fact that the more generic and populist the website, the more hits, the more advertising, the more money. If you’re writing about interesting and uncompromising artists like Einstürzende Neubauten and Liars, chances are you’re not going to get as many hits as someone writing about the Kaiser Chiefs and Keane, meaning the more esoteric publications will struggle to survive, while the less challenging publications will prosper. Google advertising is a clever way of making a bit of cash, but it will always encourage ordinariness, because ordinary people want ordinary stuff.

It’s not all doom and gloom, however. Oh, who am I trying to kid, it is. But on the plus side, there are still great pieces of writing out there, they’re just more difficult to find. Nobody should be discouraged to express themselves, but they should be encouraged to try that little bit harder. So the next time you write a review and upload your content, challenge yourself to make it exceptional. Let us be the enemies of mediocrity. Let’s raise the standard and help dispel all this doom mongering.

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