LOWEST OF THE LOW
A PERSONAL HISTORY OF THE LITERATURE OF AUSTRALIAN POP in the hard-copy era OF INK
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Who was it who said, “When rock critics started needing university qualifications, it was the beginning of the end"? Ah thank you, Clinton Walker
- Collapse Board: Whatever Happened to the Music Press? |
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The following pages, or chapters, were largely written, the guts of it, in the early 2010s. The text was originally meant to be the introduction to a proposed book of the same name, which never eventuated. Subsequently, the idea under this title has developed even beyond the foregoing, into a documentary film and a different approach to a book. The film is a personalised one based on Chapter 6 (the 1980s) almost exclusively. The book is an anthology of my, ummn, 'greatest hits'. Originally, the book was going to be an historical anthology of Australian music writing. Naturally I'd read and enjoyed and been inspired by such British and American books as The Penguin Anthology of Rock Writing (1992), Dylan Jones’s Meaty, Beaty, Big and Bouncy (Hodder & Stoughton, 1997), The Da Capo Book of Rock’n’Roll Writing (1999), Hanif Kureishi’s Faber Book of Pop (2002) and Bloomsbury’s The Sound and the Fury: 40 Years of Classic Rock Journalism, edited by Barney Hoskyns (2003), and I thought it only appropriate that Australia produce something similar. But as much as I was able to get a couple of publishers interested, I couldn't convince any of them to commit to a budget with which to pay the contributors. And so the book foundered; there's still a need for just such a volume, I believe. I sat on the 8-part piece below and I post it up now, as updated as it needs to be, because apart from a few hard-to-find articles that are of course referenced through the text, it can serve as an accessible, concise as well as hopefully comprehensive and useful overview of the topic at hand. If the new book idea and documentary come to pass, all the better. |
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