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

[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.