I thought I would have thrown away all my old punky press clippings years ago. But I have been rummaging through them again; I have just written an article for an academic journal about the way that female punk bands used reggae in their music, and I'm now working on an article about détournement for a book on identity theory.
I have been struck by just how unpleasant some of the reviews were; unpleasantly personal, as opposed to talking about the music. Step forward Tim Lott (in some ways unsurprising because he was once extremely unpleasant to me on the phone and quite clearly regarded me to be extremely unimportant and far below him in the evolutionary plan) and also Ian Penman, whose review of a Slits gig was so nasty that the band demanded, and got, right to reply.
I suppose I had forgotten about this. In general, most rock reviewers were destructive critics at the time and made money out of nasty copy (copying punk's 'nastiness' I suppose) but the way that they write about the female artists is particularly negative.
ReplyDeleteGuess I'm not evolved cos I had to google 'détournement'
******goes back to playing with building blocks*****
Fanzines can be a bit eye opening sometimes too. I have a whole section in my fanzines chapter on how women were written about and how men were written about it fanzines. It goes both ways occasionally: City Fun were breathtakingly (and hilariously) dismissive of Billy Idol, but without quite being cruel.
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