Unless you're a leftie, lesbian or of another short- listed "minority" group, you get no respect in latter-day Hot Press
This month marks the 25th anniversary of the founding of the Irish music magazine Hot Press. It's a nostalgic moment for me, since I got into journalism through Hot Press and, given how things were at the time, wouldn't have got in any other way. There are people who will find this a reason to be less that grateful to Hot Press, mostly the kind who nowadays read or write for the magazine.
It's hard to describe today how vibrant and interesting Hot Press was when it emerged in the summer of 1977. At the time there was perhaps a weekly total of three hours of pop music on national radio. Coverage of rock 'n' roll in the newspapers was arid and dull. Showbizzy magazines, making no distinctions as to quality or wit, came and went Hot Press, principally through the writings of the editor Niall Stokes, Liam Mackey and the late, great Bill Graham, hit the floor dancing to a different backbeat, seeming to comprehend that an obsession with this noise went beyond a need for entertainment or diversion, touching on the vital pulses and impulses of the human state.
Rock 'n' roll is about rebellion, yes, but a cardinal misapprehension among those who listen from outside the loop is that this rebellion is merely adolescent, social or political. Much bad and mediocre music affirms this perception, but the best overrides all such short-circuits and touches the pure revolutionary heart in its desire to be existentially free. A great pop song, like A Day In The Life, is like a great novel - it bypasses the intellect, conveying through its lack of weight or particularity, a hint of other possibilities.
I remember, among a number of seminal early Hot Press pieces, one by Niall Stokes about Graham Parker and the Rumour, three-quarters of which was an attack on the Catholic Church. This sounds lame and predictable today, in a culture in which the church is being attacked from all sides, but then it was genuinely liberating, making a precise connection between the oppression inflicted by the institution and the balm of the music.
This pinpoints the difficulty arising not just with latter-day Hot Press but with latter-day Ireland and rock 'n' roll. From the culture of a generation ago, which ignored its young, we have moved into one which lionises everything to do with youth.
Countless radio stations play pop and rock around the clock and the music coverage in the national newspapers is now indistinguishable from that of Hot Press. The culture has flipped over, and the meaning of the revolution has inverted itself without anyone noticing.
There are people who maintain that Hot Press has always been obsessed with sex and they are probably right. The reason is that in the beginning, defiance against the precise nature of actually existing oppression made this an obvious battlefield.
Things have moved on though and nowadays there is nothing revolutionary about confronting Catholic puritanism. The existential revolution is visible now in the work of writers like Michel Houellebecq, who have identified the new oppression as being precisely the freedoms which the Sixties delivered. Masturbation is not, after all, liberation.
The fact that Hot Press has failed to move on is symptomatic of a condition visible more generally in Irish social and political life: the refusal to accept that the war has been won. Hot Press is today crippled by a shallow neurosis developed in response to the exigencies of a particular moment of conception, resulting in an often embarrassing datedness in its obsessions with sex, political correctness and socialist politics.
Unless you're a leftie, lesbian or belong to another short-listed "minority" group, you get no respect in latter-day Hot Press, whose ethos is defined by the fact that its star columnist is the socialist reactionary Eamonn McCann. Part of the problem relates to the a larger one with rock 'n' roll itself. It is now a throbbing paradox, a bloated, narcissistic brat cossetted by a multinational, multi-billion industry. From behind the tinted glass, it wails about the oppression of the marginalised, its primal impulse short-circuited by neurosis and fetid politics.
Just one band in the history of popular music has fulfilled the rock 'n' roll mission to the letter. The Plastic People of the Universe, a Prague-based band, were jailed by the Communist regime of Czechoslovakia in the mid-1970s for "coarse indecencies" and creating a public nuisance. Their imprisonment led directly to the formation of the revolutionary body Charter 77, which spearheaded the drive which resulted in the toppling of communism in 1989.
The Plastic People were not sloganeers like The Clash. Their music was an expression not of agitprop energies but of existential refusal. Today's president of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel, said their trial and imprisonment represented "an attack on life itself". This band has never been featured in Hot Press. By virtue of being seen to be in opposition to a socialist regime, albeit a savage and inhuman one, they disqualified themselves from celebration by the high priests of the Western groove.