Loops – Volume One

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“Over time, Loops may find favour with people who want a kind of long-form commentary that they cannot find on the news-stand…”
John Harris

Loops is an intriguing new joint venture between Domino Records and the Faber and Faber publishing company – both at the forefront of their field as proponents of risky and exciting new music and literature, respectively. Intended to be released twice a year, each “issue” of the journal is intended to showcase the best music writing by authors, journalists and musicians themselves. This first issue contains interviews, thinkpieces, tour diaries and fiction pieces – notably, a tantalising (and curiously Avril-Lavigne’s-vagina-centric) extract from Nick Cave’s twenty-years-coming second novel The Death of Bunny Munro, and Chris Killen’s darkly comic depiction of Paul Simon as a lonely Yo La Tengo fan, and – amongst other things, clearly attempting to demonstrate the full range of how music can be written about.

The most striking of these is “Twice Upon a Time (Listening to New York)”, Hari Kunzru’s biography-cum-tribute to cult street musician Moondog, by way of describing his first experience as (ahem) an Englishman in New York; a fascinating mix of travelogue and memoir, as well as an affecting explanation of what Moondog actually means to Kunzru, it can probably lay claim to being the best article here. Kunzru’s main rival here is the mysterious Maggoty Lamb, committing a year’s worth of his savagely funny blog, which “subject the bedraggled remnants of the once mighty UK music press…to the sternest of moral and aesthetical examinations”, to print for the first time – including one entry which picks flaws in Loops a full twelve months before it actually hits bookshelves.

Unfortunately, rather than being a new development for music journalism Loops often lapses into a pure advertising exercise for both companies; many of the contributors are existing Faber authors with recently-released books to promote, and at least one contribution here – Jon Savage’s – readily admits to being a collection of offcuts from his new interview collection The England’s Dreaming Tapes. Having said that, It Still Moves author Amanda Petrusich’s essay “Blues in My Condition” is a definite highlight; an intriguing look at the obsessive nature of record collectors – specifically, those who horde century-old folk 78’s – her writing revels in the same enthusiasm as her interviewees, and the whole article reads like Louis Theroux interviewing Seymour’s gang of blues enthusiasts from Ghost World.

Nonetheless, publishing this collection in a pseudo-academic journal format puts a lot of pressure on the articles themselves, giving much of the more throwaway material – including David Shrigley’s cartoons, which appear to have little regard for the articles they allegedly illustrate – a rarefied air which it doesn’t deserve; this is made especially obvious when these articles share space with elder statesmen like the ever-insightful Simon Reynolds and Nick Kent, whose biography of Nick Drake will have you reaching for Pink Moon again in a heartbeat. Both Richard Millward’s and Sam Davies’ contributions manage to render their subjects – Spacemen 3 and hip-hop – disappointingly one-dimensional. Millward, often hailed as the closest this decade has come to producing a new Irvine Welsh, spends his entire essay explaining that there was little more to Spacemen 3 than prodigious consumption of class A drugs (a true, but extremely tired, point), while Davies’ arguments for the place of camp within hip-hop, though certainly insightful at times, become increasingly arbitrary as his essay progresses, failing to mention OutKast – surely the high priests of hip-hop camp – at all.

Ultimately, Loops presents an extremely noble and interesting attempt at redefining “music journalism”; however, its almost textbookish design, occasionally pretentious prose (step forward, Wild Beasts) and £12 price tag means that it often lacks the disposability, accessibility and uniqueness of tone that separated people like L*ster B*ngs and St*ven W*lls (rest in peace, you mad cunts) from your run-of-the-mill staffers. Still, I’m hardly one to talk, seeing as my formative exposure to the music press came with Melody Maker’s King Adora-obsessed death-knell. But, it’s early days yet, and there’s still a good chance that Loops may yet find its feet with issue two, which promises contributions from Gruff Rhys, Dirty Projectors, David Peace and – oh shit – Lord Paul of Morley, who contributes an article entitled ‘Learning to Write (About) Music’. He. OK…maybe I spoke too soon.

“In attempting to edit out the crackling static of commerce, not to mention the wow and flutter of deadlines and release schedules, there’s a danger Loops might create the kind of sterile atmosphere often ascribed by learned critics such as Jack White and Neil Young to the digital recording process…If [Loops] wants to be more than a short-lived vanity-publishing exercise, it needs to work out exactly who its readers are going to be, and start thinking up ways to piss them off.”
Maggoty Lamb

Loops Journal Official Website