Policing Bohemia, pinning up grunge: the music press and generic change in British pop and rock

Abstract

After a decade of relative stability a flurry of closures and launches has changed the face of the British popular music press (see Table 1). This article examines the new structure and its development in three interlocking areas: in music industry organisation, rock and pop genres, and the process of discursive formation in the press itself. On the first of these, I argue that the function of the music press as an ‘institutional regulator’ (Hirsch 1990, p. 132) of music industry output has been subverted, during the 1980s, by a fluctuating record market and the growth of music programming on television and radio. A uni-directional model of cultural production is now problematic. Media, including the press, may be sponsors or initiators of music texts rather than mere filters. Secondly the New Pop, and more recently rave, has threatened the straightforward alignment of taste and cultural capital which underpinned rock hegemony. In the patchwork world of contemporary youth music the para-pedagogic work of the rock press in both guiding and excluding communities of taste has an extra urgency. My third point concerns critical method. Just because the rock/pop field has become decentred, the drive to fix meaning tends to generate crisis as successive critical solutions break down, revealed as monstrously excessive, as ‘more than’ the music. Journalists usually anticipate failure. But this only serves to speed up change and the movement towards the next untenable position.