Hey! Still not Alex, still Cecily. 

I was at a conference, earlier this year, on "The Changing Politics of UK Music-writing 1968-85". In fact I was helping to organise the conference, so I spent quite a lot of time outside the room, running about, talking to interesting people. I made sure to be in the room for a couple of essential things, like Val Wilmer talking about her life in music writing and photography (Wilmer was also, incidentally, the collector who made available a great number of the historical photos shown at Rivington Place's Black Chronicles II exhibition last year). And I was there when Hazel Robinson, a friend of mine who was moderating a panel on the future of music writing, talked about the kind of music writing that's being done on the internet, right now, by fans. Writing that feels like music criticism, writing that absolutely doesn't. The ways that fan fiction and fan art can be media criticism, music criticism, political criticism. 

We live in a different media landscape from the 1968-85 that the conference conjured up, and a lot of the music writing we encounter rushes past, part of the endless millstream of #internet #content. Huge hype of each tiny new thing released, gossip items, will-this-do pr-fluff rewrites... It was ever thus, even though it feels more thus than it ever was. And it was always the case that fans would invest the time and emotional energy in long-form, in-depth, quirky, personal writing about the things that they love. I've got, somewhere, a great Elvis fanclub annual from the late 1960s, with fan letters and long pieces that can't quite stomach making that year's output of mediocre films sound good. Writing by fans and other fan creations have plenty of opportunity to be critical, to investigate, to identify not only what's worth loving but what gets in the way of it. Music writing has always been about the experience of being into music, even when it thinks it's about the music alone. The fan writing that sets itself free from the pressure of "being objective" can reveal so many interesting, alternative aspects of living in a world with a soundtrack. 

So here's some bits of music writing in the form of fan creativity, by fans, about fans. 

One Week One Band, being a tumblr where a person writes for one week about one band, has a tendency towards showcasing fan writing that's overtly personal. So you get, for example, some great writing about Taylor Swift that's also about being a person in the world, and how you react to the music and the artists that have been around you all your life. You get, also, The Jenny Lewis Dream Hair Tutorial, probably my favourite piece of music criticism of that year (also excellent from that week: the piece on Rilo Kiley's "Breaking Up"). 

Possibly my favourite OWOB - and I say this as shouldn't, as it's written by a friend of mine - is the one on The Libertines, a band I have never particularly liked, never really wanted to know more about. I'd always considered them with a kind of lazy misandry as just one of those bands whose songs made dance-shy boys flood the floor at indie discos -- but in the OWOB I learnt so much about the female fanbase, how the band and its fans and its friends (and the music press!) together created a mythology. 

It's great when writing makes you excited about something you didn't know you could be excited about. There's a games-maker called Porpentine, most famous for her games created using Twine (predominantly text-based, sometimes described as "hypertext fiction" - Porp's just been interviewed for a piece on how twine, as a format, works particularly well for making horror games). A little while back she made a Twine game called Crystal Warrior Ke$ha. It's great! I would probably have ended up liking Ke$ha anyway, but this game gave me a whole new set of possibilities for imagining how I could like her. 

And that's me done here! Hope you're having a good Friday and looking forward, as I am, to having Alex back.

xx

c