[...] "journalism" has had an awful awful awful effect on [music] criticism, has developed rules and prejudices that are dysfunctional and anti-intellectual and that produce continual stupidity and shallowness. One example: that we're supposed to report the news, not make the news ourselves. Why? As it is, rock critics are forbidden to write about each other and about each other's work. [...] if you use music in your prose as you would in your life, and comment on how other people use it in their prose, then you're a wanker, either a weirdo rock-critic geek or a gonzo wild thing, a beatnik, a "personal journalist". Or a diarist, a blogwriter. And if what interests you in the life of the music doesn't match up with the standard idea of newsworthiness (e.g., doesn't tie n with some reportable trend or connect to some newly available commodity or recent disaster), then you're just plain off the map. [...] To me this is the subject matter (...) eight million stories in the naked city, sixteen million hands, everybody grasping the music and each using it in his or her own way (...) no one's experience duplicated by the next person's but each drawing on those sounds and the people in the immediate environment - EXCEPT IN MAGAZINES [...] My principle is this: We can't convey the romance and the adventure of music unless we're willing to convey our own romance and adventure. And if we are to continue on with the so-long-ago ideals of the music ("Don't follow leaders" someone once said) - if we want readers to be inspired by the music, not subordinate to it - then we must set the example and not be subordinate to it ourselves.

Frank Kogan, Real Punks Don't Wear Black, s 217-218

Den här boken, som jag fick Västerås stadsbibliotek att köpa in i somras, innehåller något av den mest stimulerande musikkritik - eller tänkande kring musik och musikens sociala liv - jag någonsin läst. Ställ den bredvid Simon Reynolds Rip It Up and Start Again, och man ser genast hur andefattig och begränsad Reynolds är, med sin "objektiva" journalistiska prosa, sitt pedantiska katalogiserande av historiska detaljer. Ben Watson hade alldeles rätt i sin recension av Rip It Up:

The author’s ‘subjective’ viewpoint should not just be there to provide moral asides once a story has been told (like Robert McNamara looking glum about genocide in Vietnam); it is an essential moment in the unfolding of any objective account. What was Reynolds doing during this period? Which gigs did he attend? How did he earn a living? Did he meet anyone at gigs? Was he ever scared? How did punk and post-punk challenge his sense of identity, his view of the British class system? Without information about the storyteller, we can’t get critical purchase on their story.

Dessvärre är det Reynolds som är normen, Kogan undantaget. Den senare är okänd i Sverige, men Reynolds - och hans vulgärt reduktionistiska argumentation mot Kogans påstådda "popism" - hyllas och citeras flitigt på svenska popkulturbloggar.