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

[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.