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Zappa "a jack-off of all trades, and master of none"
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IanB
IanB
6761 posts

Edited Aug 28, 2013, 13:37
Re: Zappa "a jack-off of all trades, and master of none"
Aug 28, 2013, 13:10
caldervalium wrote:
I'm not a big fan of Wire magazine meself, as I believe I've said before, too often it reads like an 80 page edition of 'Pseuds' Corner'. As for Ian Penman, I can't claim to be too familiar with his scribblings beyond a hatchet job he performed reviewing an Eno album a couple of years back. I presume he was nasty about the Soft Boys at some point too, given the Robyn Hitchcock song 'The Lonesome Death Of Ian Penman'....!


I don't read Wire for pretty much the same reason. That and the fact that the bloody thing used to be ruinous for my bank balance.

Penman is someone who (along with Paul Morley) in the late 70s and 80s tried to bring some partially digested Barthes and Baudrillard to the analyis of the post Punk scene and not just Post Punk. Unlike most people writing about pop and rock at that time they could (along with the likes of Richard Cook and Max Bell) envisage a cutting edge of mainstream popular music that had little or nothing to do with rock n roll and Weller and The Clash and all that jazz. They definitely saw things coming down the cultural pipe at that time well before their colleagues latched on and they liked pure pop music before it was fashionable. It's a long time ago now but they were as important in their own way as they were annoyingly self-important. Of the two Penman was arguably the more original writer but significantly less marketable as a "personality journo".

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