19 f Ranting & Reeling I

once argued that it might become possible to state scientifically whether a piece of music is good or bad. I’m sure I believed it at the time (scrumpy will do that to a person) but it was nonsense. And yet stating whether music is good or bad is what I’ve been doing professionally for the last fifteen years. It’s almost as if I’ve wasted my time.

I don’t write album reviews much an more. Since most music is but a sneak pre- view/exclusive stream/illegal leak away, I figure no-one needs me to tell them if they’ll like it or not. And while that’s largely a democratic development it means most reviews have become little more than quote generators for adverts and press releases; that’s how low the art has sunk. Music criticism is in the gutter looking up at the five stars it gives every- thing for fear of losing favour.

When I wrote regularly for a main- stream music publication I was given the debut CD by a band called Razorlight to review. I was told that if I didn’t like it I’d have to relinquish the job to someone who did, as the group’s record label was taking out a full page ad in the mag. Had I not been bound by commercial interests

I’d have described it as a laughably self- conscious pose of a record, yelped through the adenoids of an educationally privileged buffoon. History would’ve proven me right.

Could anyone still employed (or not) in reviewing music on the folk and roots scene risk such a diatribe now? [In fRoots, yes… Ed.] Might they dare award some- thing two out of five? Would anyone tell it how it is if “how it is” is slapdash, sonically grating and disharmonious? I ask because I’ve heard an album this month that’s all those things yet not a single review has said so. They’ve all been either uncritically generous or padded with platitudes.

Perhaps I’m alone in apologising to my own ears after hearing said release. After all, what we require from music is as individual as a snowman’s fingerprint. But it’s also possible that no one took the record’s failings to task because we all know each other, we all (mostly) like each other and we all want to be able to enter the next gathering of the folk clans without catching the scornful eye of someone whose art we publicly chucked in the bin. And since I’ve not told you which album I was describing, I’m as guilty. Better to be an ambiguous cow-

ard than an honest pariah.

Some years

back, Adrian McNally of The Unthanks sounded off to me about this very dilemma. He asserted that the good reviews they garnered were devalued when

everything in the folk press received simi- lar praise. When it was my turn to cri- tique The Unthanks’ next offering I pur- posefully singled out a song I felt wasn’t to the same standard as the rest of the recording. He’s not mentioned it since but is it a coincidence I’ve never received a Christmas card?

Not that I’m shifting the blame, but if artists adhered to the adage ‘never read your reviews’ then their sensibilities would be spared. We could write what we wanted; publish and be damned. But then they’d never know if their music was good or bad.

Tim Chipping

The Elusive Ethnomusicologist D

eep in the forests of Papua New Guinea, the Kaluli tribe think of music as ‘like a waterfall’: for them and for other people in other places on the planet music is com- pletely intertwined with the world around them, part of the fabric of daily life in ways it’s difficult for us – where music is a com- modity – to imagine. But if life describes music in the Great Papuan Plateau, might not music describe my life in W4?

A gentle start to being woken up by a paw in the face when Nellie the Wonder- Spaniel thinks it’s breakfast time would be that ’70s classic Love Me Love My Dog. And as we walk in the park in the morning weather, not Blur’s paean to outdoor life (too cockney for Chiswick House) but maybe McCartney’s Martha My Dear, though he calls his dog “a silly girl” and there’s nothing silly about Nellie.

She’s not long been out of hospital – a time when I checked-in at Heartbreak Hotel with mounting vets bills piling on the agony and money too tight to men- tion. “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”, said the perky receptionist, “that’s exactly what insurance is for” (not a song title, so far as I know).

Actually, sang Sainsbury’s pet insur-

ance via a stiff letter, “These Boots Are Made For Walking and they’re going to walk right over you.” And so I plunged into the river of the world, that Tom Waits calls misery, only to come up spluttering for air as Nellie began to feel better. Then Billy Bragg came by in a boat and hauled me up with his protest songs, handed me a laptop and reminded me about fighting spirit. And I emailed a Mr Pearce with new and further information and pleaded “Say It Ain’t So”.

Mr Pearce kindly emailed not quite

suggesting Take A Chance On Me but I hoped everything might be coming up roses when a letter from his colleague arrived and I knew again that Misery Is The River Of The World because I was at the bottom of it with The Bends. But Billy sweetly came back in his boat and once more I emailed Mr Pearce. Songs featur- ing the words ‘reprehensible’ and ‘unethical’ and ‘conduct’ elude me just now, but they and others like them flew from my fingertips as I felt good faith wasn’t even on the road to nowhere: lying crushed underfoot by big business, it had met its Waterloo.

But Stop!

Wait A Minute – Mr Postman! As my email

winged its way over the

Chiswick Round- about three let- ters arrived on the mat, none as the song sug- gests, sent by my baby. There was one for next door – and two from Mr Pearce. Mr Pearce who had not signed his name across my heart exactly – but more helpfully on two cheques for Nellie’s treatment. Aghast, I realised his colleague’s letter must have crossed Mr Pearce’s first email. For big busi- ness had in this instance changed the tune. It was now playing Lovely Day, the day Mr. Pearce restored my faith in good faith (and Sainsbury’s pet insurance).

Only now I have to find a song to eat my words to. I wonder if the Kaluli have one? In the meantime I’m off to go Walk- ing On Sunshine with Nellie the Wonder Spaniel in the park.

Elizabeth Kinder