Sometimes you read a piece of criticism and its author immediately becomes one of your guys. That never happened for me with music critic Neil Kulkarni, though I must have read his work given the music magazines he wrote for. That changed a couple of weeks ago when I went to Kieron’s (RPS in peace) newsletter in search of his piece in rememberance of J Nash (included in a prior Papers), in which he linked to his similar piece on Kulkarni, who passed last year. I read the examples of Kulkarni’s work that Kieron linked, and then the Kulkarni articles the man himself linked, and several hours and several layers deep, I thought: oh no, Neil Kulkarni was one of my guys.
Which is a terribly self-indulgent way of talking about another human being, who I didn’t know and who is gone, but it feels like a necessary precis to explain why this week’s Sunday Papers contains several articles to old pieces of music writing.
Here’s the one I’ve been quoting the most on WhatsApp, on the revisionism of the BBC’s recent Britpop documentary, which builds to an important argument but opens with some gleeful vitriol I’ll quote in full.
Actually before we even get to that – there IS something more enraging and that’s because it’s more enraging than any other sound on earth. It’s the sound of Jo Whiley’s voice. Every time I hear it I can picture her insufferably smug expression, I can picture her grinning and nodding in agreement with another legendary bit of Noel Gallagher bants, I can her utterly revolting dismissal of Lily Allen as just a daft girl who doesn’t deserve an opinion on music, I can picture her struggling with Mark E.Smith’s refusal to join her in speaking the corpse-breathed corporate-spiel she thinks passes for communication – I can hear ultimately the sound of someone who perhaps kindalikes music, but who blatantly loves money and business and marketing more, someone whose indiscriminate endless sycophancy around musicians (and consequent snotty snobbery around anything that wouldn’t coincide with her grisly ‘real music played by real people’ conservatism) percolates into everything she does, everything she plays, everything she’s ever said and done in nearly three decades of co-opting the independent and ‘alternative’ into the corporate deathspiral of her soul. Who knows what Whiley thinks or feels about music? Who can recall a single thing she’s ever said about music? For Whiley, if you’re an indie band/bloke, and you’re signed/successful/willing to join her live from Maida Vale that’s all that matters, and it deserves cheerleading and applauding for the sheer effort and success in and of itself and nothing else. Her voice is the living embodiment of the word ‘iconic’, the word ‘legendary’, and the words ‘coming up, Snow Patrol live from the Livelounge’ and I will die happy knowing I will never ever have to endure hearing it emit a single simpering syllable again.
I feel a great temptation to make every young games journalist I work with in future read Kulkarni’s guide to being a music critic, much of which applies regardless of subject matter.
4. Teenagers. Read. By which I mean devour. Listen. By which I mean hollow yourself out until you only exist in the spaces between the pop you love. Then, try and find yourself again, or at least create something tangible in the gaps. Find the unique thing you have to say, the unique way you have of saying it, and hone the fucker until you can hear yourself talking on the page, until you can recognise yourself a line in. Your voice is easier found with a chip on your shoulder and a pain in your heart. Think about those writers who you feel weren’t just writing for you but who come to live in your life, a constant over-the-shoulder presence yaying or naying the choices you make. If you don’t want to be that important to your readers get out the game.
From there, you might move to his tear-it-all-down excoriation of the ten most overrated albums in pop history, but I’d rather recommend A New Nineties, a series for The Quietus, which instead attempts to build a new narrative of ’90s music that incorporates more than what was on Radio 1 at the time. The Quietus have, to their shame, seemingly changed their URL structure in a way that makes all old links to this series instead redirect to their general Interview category, but the whole series remains live if you do a bit of digging.
Whenever a musical epoch has been retrospectively looked at, being part of that generation that found itself in the wrong place at the wrong time, I’ve been suckered into the visions of others who were ‘there’. In the first flush of my love for 60s music that sustained me through the appalling sonic Blue-Stratos-bath of the mid-80s, even a dick like me could tell he was being sold a mixture of magic and snake-oil. Stuck up in Cov I was well aware of how a swinging capital can convince itself it’s the only story, how it’s easy to see a time as golden if you’re on the right end of the class & income scale (and especially if you’re paid to come up with such mind-lint about what an ‘era meant’), how for most people out beyond NW1 those supposedly revolutionary moments in pop culture passed by unregistered in the shitty business of survival. But c’mon now, in the usual 20-years-on retro-pattern that pop keeps on sticking to, things have now swung into an era I at least vaguely recall – the 90s. And you can’t fool me with this bullshit any more because I was there.
The great pain of much of Kulkarni’s online writing is that a lot of it is on his newsletter, and you’ll get to the end of every article and be prompted to subscribe for future updates. But then, there won’t be any future updates. I subscribed anyway because what else can you do?
Hard pivot, but I enjoyed this YouTube video explaining the process of remaking the early levels of Super Mario World in 3D.
Cabel Sasser is the co-founder of Panic, manufacturers of the Playdate and publishers of Untitled Goose Game and Thank Goodness You’re Here!. This blog post he wrote isn’t about any of those, it’s about the new snacks and cereals of 2024 (in America). I am always here for this kind of ’00s blog energy.
Every year brings at least one or two nearly-inedible novelty products, and this was a big one. There’s not a single person on the planet that wished their potato chip would taste like “world famous breakfast flavor”. But here we are, regardless, suffering endlessly at the hands of flavor scientists.
Speaking of ’00s blogs, here’s a button you can press to load a random blog post somewhere on the “indie web”. It mostly gives me blog posts about coding, which is not what I was hoping for but which is probably illustrative of that “indie” corner of the internet as it survives today.
I once used a website called HARO, which stands for Help A Reporter Out. The idea is straightforward: reporters doing research for a story make a request, and experts in the relevant field respond, offering information and answers. The incentive for someone like me is that perhaps that reporter writes a story that quotes me and links back to Rock Paper Shotgun, and that backlink is a ranking signal for Google that tells it that this site is credible. Isn’t online publishing fun?
Anyway, here’s a story about HARO, now called Connectively, connecting a reporter with a therapist who seems to be an AI-generated fiction.
The stories I’ve seen quoting someone identified as therapist Sophie Cress are typically about relationship topics, like improving your marriage. In those instances, her advice, while technically not bad, is not particularly groundbreaking: “Don’t overlook red flags or compromise your standards due to the fear of being alone.” “Engage in open and honest communication with your partner to identify values and aspirations that you share.” But she’s also been tapped to comment on more specific, high-profile news stories: In February, at least one UK-based outlet used quotes attributed to Cress to speculate on how the Princess of Wales’s mental health was faring after abdominal surgery. Her comments—including Very Powerful Quotes like: “From a psychological perspective, it’s critical to acknowledge that surgery is a major source of physical and emotional stress”—were picked up by multiple international outlets.
Music this week is Fireworks by The Whitest Boy Alive, which is one of Erlend Øye’s many musical projects. I have also, for reasons I now no longer recall, been listening to a bunch of old Janelle Monáe tracks this week, so here’s Q.U.E.E.N., which I had on repeat for weeks in 2013.
