Interview conducted for UK research student Laura Nineham for her BA (Hons), 2009

Can't remember if I posted this already. Don't think so. Being an academic appendix, my speech is quite fearsomely unedited. The first paragraph is her wording.

Appendix B
Everett True is a British music journalist who is the publisher of Plan B Magazine. His career started in fanzines and then moved onto NME. When he was sacked from there he moved across to Melody Maker. He moved to Seattle to break grunge music and he famously became friends with Kurt Cobain. He went on to edit various publications and has weekly [online] columns for The Guardian and Village Voice.

What would you define music journalism as?
I was just looking at a thesis today where the guy who wrote it said music journalism is all about the performance and the performance of the music journalists and establishing a dialogue between the readers and the journalists themselves. I think that’s the kind of traditional way and it’s a separate discipline to other forms of criticism in as much that it doesn’t directly engage with politics. I mean it can, but it normally doesn’t. If I defined it, for a start I wouldn’t use that phrase. I don’t think it’s got anything to do with journalism what most critics do – journalism is a very specific trade. Again going back to where I am at the moment in Brisbane, where I teach music criticism is under creative writing, it's not journalism at all. I just saw my own role as to try to enhance and amplify the experience of listening to music and to try to illuminate it and try to, you know, give insights into what it’s like to experience music. The reason I started writing about music was because I used to dance around the front at shows and I just wanted to communicate the enthusiasm that I felt about it.

Do you think the music press influences the opinions of its readers?
Yes definitely.

Do you think Internet has changed this?
Yes definitely.

Do you think critics are more or less important now the Internet is so popular?
This is absolutely what I’m dealing with in my PhD but there’s good and bad to both approaches. I would say that the more access that people have to music, the more you need filters because there’s just too much information. I’d say strong authoritative voices are needed now more than ever, but the problem with that is that music criticism is traditionally an exclusionary medium. The whole idea of forming taste – it was just as important what you didn’t write about as what you did and the problem with music criticism in web 2.0 is that web 2.0 by its very nature is an inclusive medium. So you’ve got these two kind of ideological forms kind of clashing and no one’s really worked out how to make music criticism work in web 2.0. I mean sure, there’s plenty of blogs and plenty of fan driven sites and the ones that aspire to be some form of the web equivalent of The Wire, but I don’t think anybody quite understands music criticism at this point in time. So yes, it’s great that people can go and discover their own music for themselves but that doesn’t happen. It’s as simple as that because most people just aren’t that motivated to do it and most people look to opinion leaders and look to whatever sites they’re accessing to form their tastes – they still do that. It’s misleading to think that that still doesn’t happen.

Do you think if a journalist is friends with a musician whether that poses a conflict of interest?
No not at all. You see that comes down to what you define music criticism as, which is why, quite rightly, you asked that as your first question. You know, what are the parameters of music criticism? Is it bound by the same notions of integrity and honesty and truth as regular journalism? And I would argue that it probably isn’t. music criticism exists within the entertainment industry and I don’t really know what truth has got to do with it being a great music critic. I think integrity is important. I think it’s very important to establish an identifiable identity, but I don’t think truth has got anything to do with it.

Do they interpret the music correctly?
Well what is correctly? How would you define correctly? The problem I would have with the idea that music critics can be professional. I think yes, there is a certain craft to music criticism that needs to be learned, but this just turns to the subjectivity and objectivity thing. I mean even academics are coming round to the notion that you can’t really be objective; that your personal experience will always affect and cloud your judgement, whether you’re aware of it or not. The notion of objectivity to me just seems absurd and particularly in the area of criticism. You can put forward any number of arguments and examples and historical anecdotes to back up you arguments, but ultimately when you’re valuing a piece of music, what it comes down to is a core judgement which is always going to be subjective unless, of course, you’re of the mind that you should be writing what other people want you to write, which to me again seems absurd.

What do you think about the idea that fans make better writers?
Yes I agree with that. I can’t even begin to say how right that is, but I mean I don’t really understand why anybody would be writing about music who wasn’t a fan.

Do you think fan-generated content is credible?
I don’t see why they’re any less credible than platforms like the NME or Mojo or Rolling Stone or any of the broadsheet papers. I think they’re just as credible. This is the great debate isn’t it? It’s like is one replacing the other? Is one more authentic than the other? You see to me music criticism is a purely subjective art form. It can be informed – of course it can – but I don’t really know the answer to that. My instinct – absolutely my instinct – is to side with the bloggers and the fan driven sites because that’s my foundation, you know, I started at fanzines. You know, when I came back to the UK from Australia in 2000 and started Careless Talk Costs Lives, one of the places I was looking for new writers was - that was back in 2001 so it was very early on in terms of blogging, but it was the 2001 equivalent of the bloggers – because instinctively I sided with them because I preferred their approach to discussing music.

Is there still a place for fanzines?
Absolutely, yeah. I mean, it’s like every week you see – I’m tutoring in digital journalism as well to fund my doctorate – and every week somebody, somewhere, comes out with a fresh doom and gloom story, you know., ‘there will be no printed newspapers in 2011’ or whatever and that’s obviously bollocks. It’s exactly the same thing. People used to say when the television came ‘oh well, the radio’s over’

Do you think it’s a male dominated industry?
Yes I do. This is something I’ve struggled against my entire life. I think it’s because within the sphere of rock music that is a male dominated art form. It was set up along firstly patriarchal lines. It was set up at a time when women were very much treated as second class citizens and it has always been constructed and discussed along those lines – certainly until maybe the last 10 or 15 years. I do see it changing. I mean at Plan B we quite deliberately positively discriminate. I do see it changing and I think it’s more likely to change on the web than in print because it’s kind of ingrained in print. I think it’s mainly because of this focusing on a kind of inherently patriarchal art form. Critics will often set themselves up for some form of authoritarian figures, you know, it’s kind of part and parcel of being a critic and men are a lot more pompous than women it seems, to make a gross generalisation.