1. About Music Gob (Or How I Stopped Worrying And Learnt To Love Irrelevance)

    There seems to be a lot of self-hate in music journalism but I understand why. The whole idea of writing about music is unnecessary and a little pathetic really. Music journalists are like the homeless on the street outside a Christmas party intellectualising about why the party-goers have got it oh so wrong. Or perhaps they’re more like the kind of people who would met Jesus, get cured of leprosy and then explain why he was a better deity before he pandered to the expectations of the masses through the obvious and frankly overdone healing routine. Or maybe they’re just embittered, failed musicians with too many opinions. You see despite wanting to think otherwise, no one has ever based their musical tastes on the subjective scrawling of anonymous music hacks or the editorial view of the music rags they might write for; and we all know it.

    Yet the worst and most dismal thing about all of this is that I’m not even a music journalist. I’m an aspiring music critic at best. Music Gob is the most terrible example of music commentary there can be: An unruly and unaccountable blog full of half-baked opinions, stolen links, zero accountability and myriad typos and grammatical errors. Don’t blame me, blame Tim Berners-Lee.

    The thinking that music journalism is a fallacy and that - if there is a distinction - music criticism is needless at best and out and out unwanted at worst isn’t a new one. There are several good articles about this, like this one for example, or maybe this one too, or even this news article whilst Ripfork is a whole site dedicated to analysing the ramblings of the music writer to hammer home the ill informed despair of it all.

    So with all this hate from inside and outside the music journalists’ world, why does anyone bother? Well because music writers of all descriptions care. Anyone (and I do mean anyone) who bothers enough to write about music loves it enough to do so. That of course doesn’t mean if you don’t write about it, you don’t care, but the mere demonstration of effort is evidence enough of the passion that person holds. For me, the reviewing, the criticism and this very blog have nothing to do with the egotistical practice of setting myself up as some figure of musical authority. Rather, it’s about being that young teenager we all once were and secretly still are. It’s about the feverish need to excitedly say “you have to listen to this!” to anyone and everyone when you discover a new band just as paradoxically it’s about the need to sit with your friends and explain at great length why one band or another is the worst thing to happen to humanity since Small Pox.

    OK, so anyone can write about music and that in itself doesn’t make them a bona fide music journalist anymore than someone taking hipstermatic photos on an iPhone doesn’t make them David Bailey; but who cares if you’re having fun? Everett True once wrote “Criticism is only as parasitical as you choose to make it: it is only as parasitical of music as music is of life” Whether we like it or not, our lives are full of music, good and bad, and everyone has an opinion, so why not write about it? This, my unwashed internet friends, is what Music Gob is all about. So read, garnish with a pinch of salt and enjoy. Oh and most of all, listen.

    There is no reason for the Al Pacino photo.

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    There’s also an archive of my subjective opinions in the form of what some people call reviews here.

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