The Last John Peel Post

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I was going to do a poll on the 1982 All Time Festive Fifty but got bored about 5 songs in. It's an astonishing thing in its way though: of the 1976 tracks (also 'all-time'), NOT A SINGLE ONE survived - a handful were later reinstated for the 2000 all time poll. If you want a bit of "punk was year zero" evidence this is surely it EXCEPT I still don't think we've got to the heart of the Peel question, beyond "was he good?" or "was Burchill good?" or whatever:

- How much did he CONVERT his audience to punk and how much did he get a completely new one?

- And the really big question (for me): how come he couldn't then convert his audience to the kind of wideband listening we were talking about on Matt's post?

And the same goes for the NME too, or Pitchfork now to an extent - why is it difficult for tastemakers to move their audience's tastes? It's a question about elitism really - the difference between "knowing what's best" and "knowing what's best for you", the latter being virulently reacted against. Should media gatekeepers - like Peel or the NME - try to educate their listeners and where do the listeners say "that's enough thanks"?

Comments

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

as a kick-off idea with no time to expand (PRESSDAY GAH!), the entire history of rockwrite readership feat.MAG-LOVIN POP-FAN is a complex battle for AND against gatekeepership --- wave on wave of "reader representatives" hoisted from the audience to battle AGAINST the sell-out poacher-turned-gamekeeper element in the (just) previous generation, and themselves then proving WORSE sell-out gamekeepers/gatekeepers

[cis.livejournal.com]

i support this poacher-turned gatekeeper idea!

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

subquestion could be why tastemakers DO succeed occasionally - the elitist argument explains their failures to change their audience's tastes but how is it that this anti-elitism kicks in sometimes, but not others? eg Adele, who is about the most pure example of a wholly tastemaker-driven artist I've seen in ages; and whether or not she goes on to have a long career or not she's done a zillion times better out of it than eg MIA.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

one of the interesting distinctions is between tastemakers with an overt evangelical ideology, tastemakers with a COVERT evangelical ideology, tastemakers as pragmatic re-affirmers, and (if these last exist in pop) tastemakers as IDEOLOGICAL reaffirmers (eg i'd argue that roger scruton is the latter but he HATES ALL POP)

[lockedintheatti.livejournal.com]

Surely the only reason Adele has worked is that the tastemakers in question were going with an artist who is totally on-trend in terms of record sales - they knew she would appeal to all those people who had already bought Amy Winehouse and Kate Gnash and so on. So the tastemakers in question were hardly taking a risky bet there.

Whereas selling MIA is a whole different proposition - she was always going to be a tougher sell.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

that makes sense: I'm trying to think of how new, risky, not-on-trend sounds actually bust through to the mainstream, and the consistent answer seems to be either

a) organic grassroots scenes, whether this is an underground subculture which suddenly gains some sort of pop impetus (eg bassline, emo(?)) or
b) via the trojan horse of a manufactured (or 'manufactured') popstar - manufactured not the right word, but whatever it is which connects manufactured britney and non-manufactured beyoncé?

so MIA is notoriously not part of a) (not that a) is any guarantor of success, hello grime) but for whatever reason doesn't succeed as b) either (and arguably b) is a dying model anyway)

[braisedbywolves.livejournal.com]

Pitchfork kind of stands out today as being a (sorry) old media "These are the ArtFacts" attempt at tastemaking, doesn't it?

Was Peel doing the wideband playlist before 76, though? Was it just a result of the narrowing of focus (as Kat said, 1/4 of the best single ever being Joy Division/New Order is crazy, even to me for whom 1976 is basically year zero)?

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

sorry i am still superbusy and have still not explained this aspect in ref peel in particular in 75, the uk vs us rockpress in particular in 75 (difft to each other AND to peel)

[braisedbywolves.livejournal.com]

Don't be sorry dude, I look forward to it!

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Yes PFM is very old media in a sense. I think it's moved from one kind of elitism - we are the cool kids with the cool taste - to the more Peelite mission-to-explain kind. In terms of its content span it feels quite like a version of the 80s NME, except the occasional verbal pyrotechnics have been smoothed out - stylistically Pitchfork now is a completely different beast than it was when it became famous.

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

Re converting to punk but not other things: for fans of rock, punk could easily be seen as (and was often pushed as, sometimes by the bands themselves) a reaffirmation of lots of rock's core values, harking back to the early days of rock 'n' roll, as well as widely adored later acts like the Stooges and the Dolls and so on. This makes selling a rock audience on punk a lot easier than selling them on hip hop, techno, African pop and so on. He DID convert a lot of people to those things - I am one of those people - but it was much more wholesale with punk, and fragmented and partial with the others. Converting a minority to each of those (and other things) shows up poorly in consensus polling, of course.

Also, he did get new listeners and lose some old ones. Plenty converted, plenty went to the DJs who still played Floyd and Yes and ELP (Alan Freeman was big on these), and people who got hooked by punk knew that Peel was where to go to hear it.

[awesomewells.livejournal.com]

I think part of the problem, for Peel or NME or anyone really, is that you can only influence an audience that WANTS to be influenced. So leading an audience through punk to post-punk and even 80s indie is a fairly unfraught path.

Taking them from 70s rock to punk is a gigantic chasm in comparison but as Burchill and others have hinted that audience was already there for Peel to attract. So the fact that he was picking up new listeners maybe masked the fact that the old ones were going elsewhere.

Maybe Peel's success was that he was able to tap into what appealed to the punk fanbase. Whereas the NME putting Aaliyah and Missy and Craig David and So Solid Crew and whoever on the cover in the early 00s was offputting to a lot of existing readers, while the format of the magazine in general just didn't appeal to the market they were trying to attract.

Failed attempts like this probably account for the late 00s obsession with focus grouping and demographics, across TV, radio and print, really. That and increasing fragmentation - in the early 80s there was no other national pop radio, so the pool of listeners was much larger, so it didn't matter if Peel alienated hippies wholesale because there were punks there to pick up the slack. I'm not sure that could happen now.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Whereas the NME putting Aaliyah and Missy and Craig David and So Solid Crew and whoever on the cover in the early 00s was offputting to a lot of existing readers

WHY, THOUGH!

(a: becauase rrjmmg

sjdd


qwh

they wrrrrr

wer rrr


w

GAH
\they weree or ARE RQC
RAVC
]
RACISTS

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

i measn dhfthey wewewrew racists

[http://users.livejournal.com/xyzzzz__/]

"Whereas the NME putting Aaliyah and Missy and Craig David and So Solid Crew and whoever on the cover in the early 00s was offputting to a lot of existing readers, while the format of the magazine in general just didn't appeal to the market they were trying to attract."

Way late into all of this, but I don't know whether it was really all that off-putting (half of the letters page was written by the staff wasn't it?). Sure, you can look at the way the NME seems to have gone, but that could be playing safe as the music paper press collapsed.

I was fine with all that. It wasn't until ILX (learning more about the history of the music press) that I was made fully conscious of the battles surrounding any of this.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

the fragmentation of the 60s counterculture -- generational as well as along other less obvious lines -- coincides with (and to some extent enables) three intertwined transformations in the market:
i: hugely more ffective niche-marketing
ii: the arrival over a certain threshold of collectors (or call them connoisseurs) as a non-luxury market
ii: the arrival over a certain threshold of collectors (or call them connoisseurs) as a YOUTH market

[koganbot]

Well, punk rock (at least starting with the second wave [if you count ? & Mysterians and Troggs and ilk as the first wave and Velvets, MC5, Stooges as the second]) totally owed its popularity to tastemakers, almost all of them in print rather than on the radio. This was probably a bit clearer in the U.S., where the fanbase built very slowly, and the tastemakers didn't lose control of the "punk" taste until the early '80s when hardcore punk and glammetal began to take off and the press started to play catch up. In fact, I'd say that the punk rock was a rock-critic idea before it became any kind of a movement.

[http://users.livejournal.com/xyzzzz__/]

I think you can use the polls to talk about the audience, but its difficult to say anything about Peel - and what he was up to - from these polls.

Skimmed through some of the discussion over the threads. I thought I ought to say that this shouldn't be the last Peel post, that maybe there could be a better way to get to the 'heart' of the question. The problem is that for the most part it seems we stuck with the show for not a lot longer than a while (?), and that this while was about a decade ago.

One other memory was around the time of his death I read a little tribute on Terrorizer (metal mag). One writer was relating a story of his first time w/Peel -- upon recommendation by a friend -- he ws already into metal, and ws disappointed how it was all South African pop, indie schmindie, reggae. He was about to switch off, but left it on for long enough to hear Napalm Death, an event that changed his life! Now there are a couple of things from this, you can say Peel ws: a) great at providing seismic events, but b) poor at providing a depth to the thing so you'd stick around.

Peel went easily further: he'd play Dancehall and old school reggae, when oldersters would not make the leap to Dancehall; he played thrash metal when older metallers would be actively hostile to it. But what about the guitar stuff? He certainly never played Dead C or much of the noisier end of things (the stuff that Reynolds also struggles with, I remember him as a non-believer of the Dead C, when many would say that they were the ones who claimed to listen to the Fall and Ubu and go places with it). Indie-ish stuff is what I also followed (or at least far more than what was going on in Metal), so the less you knew the more you'd get.

So he made the space to discover your own worlds...and that might very pop, but not v poptimistic, from what I've read on this board.