In learning of Lorde’s dismay with music journalists, I have been asked to explain the nature of the business from an historical perspective.
First, background.
The pop star, Lorde, feels it’s unfair when web publications which use features and pictures of people like her for clickbait, money and eyeballs also disrespect her records. These observations were made in connection with an attractive-looking naked woman named Iggy, a friend of Lorde’s although not the real Iggy, who had been given a poor review by some publication after being on the cover. This was being thrown under the bus, Lorde said.
Dear Lorde: Pop music writers can’t throw you under the bus. When you are figuratively “thrown under the bus,” like people on a food stamps when the budget is cut, or deprived of health insurance in red states, provable bad things happen. Nothing like that can happen to entertainers, very popular, half-popular, or even unpopular, from a lousy record review.
This may seem flip. It’s not. (Well, maybe just a little.)
Stenography, that is to say, the passing on of favorable publicity and hagiography, is the major business practice of the mainstream media. Having the temerity of daring opinion in relationship to power, or money or whatever the majority feels is great consumer stuff, went badly out of fashion in the last few decades. So Lorde can be forgiven for believing something stupid, but which sounds superficially fair on first hearing, about the original nature of entertainment writing.
Stenography, or the rote passing on of free publicity, is a decades old problem, spread across many genres of journalism.
When I started writing for the Morning Call newspaper of Allentown in the late Eighties it came at a time when the entertainment section’s function was to be exactly that — providing of stenographers for the local arts people and those coming through town.
When that changed to sending in reports that frequently afflicted those deserving of it, it created a substantial short term fit. The assistant managing editor did not at all like getting angry phone calls on Monday morning, the first time he could be reached after the weekend bits had run. There was no e-mail you could just delete. You had to listen to grumpy people on the phone. In his estimation, the job of features section journalists was to make their subjects happy.
I worked the locals and area promoters into such a good lather with regular servings of bad reviews a petition to have me fired was hand-delivered to the office. But they had to learn to live with the novelty of ridicule for bad, sloppy or indifferent performances and art. I had the backing of a coverage editor, and surprisingly, the copy desk, who enjoyed working on wry and interesting things more than regurgitated press releases and pabulum.
And it was successful. People wrote occasional letters to the editor, not only in complaint, but also how they enjoyed the coverage of general entertainment and music, even if they weren’t going to buy the record or go to a show. It was amusing and stimulating.
Keep in mind, people actually bought the newspaper in those bygone days, either through a subscription in which it was hand-delivered to their door or by purchasing a copy on the street just to be in the know. And, if they had a comment, they had to scribble or type it, put it in an addressed envelope, and lick a stamp. There were no apps of convenience in communication, no instant gratifications. There was only antique steam-driven tech. We ate shoe leather and tacks and we liked it! No, just joking, made that last bit up.
Surprisingly, however, that meant people valued words so much they’d pay for them, much more than they do now. If they choose to pay anything at all, which is usually not.
This seems quaint or amusing to those writers and readers with a history that encompasses Creem magazine or other major music publications. (In other words, old people.) Those magazines were often adversarial, unafraid to publish a thorough hating, sometimes more than one an issue!
But stenography was and is not uncommon at medium, small and even large newspapers. The newspaper I worked for eventually went back to worthless crap. It was a natural consequence of editorial pressures and loss of the advertising business model which decimated journalism nationwide.
And those music journalists who wrote nasty reviews? Most were probably fired or laid off. More than once, too. That should be some consolation.
You can be thankful the global network changed all that. It took a while but the big corporations that control publishing realized they didn’t have to pay large numbers of people anything at all to get them to write things about the artists they were pushing. And most of the people who write entertainment reviews for free are glad to praise you. They greatly outnumber the haters and tallywhackers. There is so much love and admiration coming from the busy work of lickspittles it virtually drowns any small amount of negativity left.
Of the old fogies left over from the bad days when being mean was worth money, they’re stuck writing brief reviews if they want to be paid. And it’s really hard to write a good stem-winding thrashing that’s, at best, only a few tweets long. Besides, no one links to you when you’re regularly mean.
Primarily, writing about music is just something to hang high definition advertising on for stuff you need to go out and buy right now, anyway.
Be secure in the new knowledge that the sting that comes from thinking you’ve been thrown under the bus by those covering you will inevitably be followed by the same people, at some point in the future, going out of business or sliding into ruin. It’s as immutable as death and taxes.
