The Illusion of Shutting Doors
On dreaming of entering a profession that everyone is telling you is dying - and how an article by Laura Snapes indirectly changed my life
Sylvia Patterson does something that all the writers I love make me do: she makes me envious. She writes with the kind of beautiful, funny prose I wish could flow from my own hands. When I began to read her memoir I’m Not With The Band: A Writer’s Life In Music, I also envied her because, at first, it seemed like she got to be a music journalist at a better time than me.
As she writes about more recent events in her career, in her mind, Patterson is writing about what she perceives to be a slowly dying art, with publications ‘decomposing in the Dumper’ (Patterson 429). At the back of the book is a list of the magazines that have folded since she began her career: Melody Maker, her beloved ‘ver Hits’ (where she was writing when she was my own age), the print edition of NME. She invites the reader she befriended in the last 430 pages to write in the names of ‘the next lot’ of magazines to be added to the Dumper, ‘as they come in, providing lines at the end of the list for this purpose. ‘Hours of fun guaranteed!’ she comments with a depressing gleefulness. (Patterson 429) That book was written in 2016. When I first read that book, there were three names I could write down off the top of my head – sadly, I can add a fourth in the form of (the soul of) one of my teenage self’s beloved scene bibles Rock Sound. I thought about extreme music magazine Terrorizer, who reportedly left their subscribers in the dark for months, taking their money and giving them no new issues in return. (Neilstein, paragraph 2). The short-lived Planet Rock, which tripped over its own feet because it was looking too far back at the past, presuming only people who grew up during the golden age of still read them. Only 22 issues were ever made.
The magazine death that I remember affecting me most, bar Rock Sound, was Q. It closed down in July 2020 after a long struggle to get off its knees, its circulation dwindling before the initial COVID-19 shutdown sounded the death knell. I joined in with its online mourners, shaken. This was one of the magazines that first showed me music journalism existed. I had not yet had a paid commission. I began to worry that music journalism was a slowly shutting door that would lock before I had a chance to foist a limb through it. Did I have an ambition that I couldn’t fulfill through the simple misfortune of being born too late for it? Had I arrived to find every seat filled with no space for me? I imagined being born in the right generation, a time where I’d have test pressings for review sent to a nice-ish flat in London that I could reasonably dream of affording to pay for with a comfortable, stable income. The thought made me bitter. I imagined Rishi Sunak popping his head round the door and advising me to retrain in cyber instead.
Not long after, I watched the trailer for the upcoming film adaptation of Caitlin Moran’s How To Build A Girl. I’d been waiting years for it. I’d clutched that book tightly to my chest for many reasons. Beyond making me envious of the prose, it is the one book that I felt had been written all for me. Set in the mid 1990s, it semi-autobiographically follows a teenage girl from a Wolverhampton council estate into the lights of the big city as she becomes a music journalist. I’d found the trailer on Twitter with a heinous caption: “Before we had social media, we had music journalists.” It hit a nerve.
I was adamant that such a notion wasn’t true, but I had a false sense of conviction, because that was what I wanted to believe. My circumstances have changed – I am now more of a journalist than I was, with my name now in Kerrang!, NME, Rolling Stone UK, Alternative Press, DIY, The Telegraph and others, but even now, I still want to believe. If I don’t believe, what is the point of any of it? I refuse to pronounce music journalism dead or even comatose, even if it’s very easy to do it as a job, or a hobby, or something in between, for not a penny. Music journalism is not a bloated corpse, even its body has been battered. What matters most is its heart is still beating.
Laura Snapes understood that. As Q’s parent company Bauer contemplated its future, she wrote an article for The Guardian about the music press’s fight to stay alive during the COVID-19 pandemic. The magazines had their advertising revenue cut off at the source with live music on ice indefinitely. On the surface, Snapes’ article seemed like it would be bleak, like the beginning of a mourning ritual. At points, it is. Yet halfway through, the clouds appear to break.
“Many British music magazines editors and publishers say they were thriving in straitened times, at least before the pandemic,” she writes. (Snapes, paragraph 7). Metal Hammer’s sales were going up year on year after they almost went under in 2016. The boss of their parent company revealed that all of the music titles they owned were comfortably in the black. Dork was having its best year to date prior to Covid-19. Snapes discussed how my generation still gravitates towards physical music magazines in spite of the plethora of online content out there, much in the same way many of them buy vinyls rather than streaming new records. Although media researcher Douglas McCabe described their continuing existence as “illogical”, I wonder if this is a backhanded compliment. Music journalism is beautifully stubborn.
That piece may well have changed my life. It meant I no longer had to vouch for music journalism’s health with blind belief. It was profoundly comforting. What I didn’t anticipate, when I read it, was that it would indirectly be the making of me. Quoted within the article was Sophie Williams, a music journalist who The Guardian had previously published, and who now has a staff role at NME having previously freelanced for them. She was nineteen years old – three weeks older than me, I would later discover, and she was living my dream.
I contacted her on Twitter a couple of months later and innocently asked for some advice in breaking into music journalism. She went above and beyond, offering to jump on a Zoom call with me, and sent me a list of contacts I could pitch. One of these was Josh Gardner from Guitar, which, as the name suggests, is a specialist guitar magazine. I cannot play anything on the guitar beyond ‘Seven Nation Army’, but it turned out that wasn’t a pre-requisite for interviewing musicians about why they prefer Fenders to Gibsons or the like. Without this exchange, I would have never thought of pitching to them. Without this exchange, I wouldn’t have had my first paid commission in October 2020.
A while ago, I had a fascinating conversation with an editor once. While she was studying for her journalism Masters, she went to see the founder of some music magazines speak about music journalism and he told the bright-eyed young journalists in front of him not to bother with it. This, she told me, was in 2005. People were playing Snake on Nokia bricks and buying CDs still – although a few print titles had fallen by then (with the esteemed Melody Maker shutting at the turn of the millennium), technological advancements like digital media and social networks had not yet begun to snap at their heels. “Journalism, not just music journalism, has been this way for a very long time,” she added.
I began to get the impression that career-related doubt would have come along to bite me no matter what year I was born or whatever dream had chosen me to chase after it. Sylvia Patterson was writing for Smash Hits at a time where a million copies were flying off the shelves every fortnight, yet hers is a story of waiting for the next payslip and moving from shitty London flat to shitty London flat as much as it is a story of wild encounters, great music and drug-fuelled nights. The only difference is that the cost of living has soared since then (and I write this as we’re knee-deep in a cost of living crisis and the phrase ‘choosing between heating or eating’ has become the new ‘social distancing’), and I’m still not entirely sure how I stumbled into doing music journalism full-time, as a freelancer, when I anticipated I’d only be able to do that if I got a staff job. For the majority of us, music journalism remains a side hustle.
I am in a position now where I can return to the frightening question I had asked myself - ‘Do I have an ambition that I can’t fulfill through the simple misfortune of being born too late for it?’ – and answer it definitively. The answer is no, on two counts. I am fulfilling it., which I say in present tense because this dream is not complete. I am living it; it is continuous. Secondly, if I were born in another generation, it may not have been any easier for me to get a foot in the door. It might have even been more difficult given that I am not from London and life back then still revolved around spending five days a week in the office, with anyone not living in London having to watch train fares burn through their salary.
Perhaps I hold this thought in my mind as a comfort blanket, but I don’t think there is a single parallel universe where I gravitate towards another career and don’t face the struggle of breaking through. Whoever said that a desirable, nicely salaried career is easy to get into? I’d have to fight thousands of others to earn a place at medical school or law school or on a lucrative graduate scheme. I couldn’t have built a foundation for myself while still at uni with any other career. I suppose the struggle to break through is a universal experience that forms part of the reason why nobody appears to say that your twenties are the best years of your life. You’re building a life for yourself. You’ve got to hope it features a stable income, a decent job and adequate mental health. None of them are guaranteed. Sometimes they are but dreams. I suppose the way that I will have to try and survive is to shut my eyes and crawl and crawl and crawl through it while squeezing out as much fun as I can to make the hurting head and scuffed knees more bearable.