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Editor's Idea: June 1991
SSUE 88, June 1991
Editor: Richard Cook
Michael Jackson? Elvis Costello? What the hell's going on here?
Nothing, actually, that we haven't done before. Maybe the scales are tipping a little differently as fro mthis issue, but The Wire (and yes, we've restored the definite article - since almost everyone we know has called it The Wire from the beginning) is essentially the same argumentative, alternative, demanding music magazine it's always set out to be.
The words that used to appear at the top of the cover were "Jazz, improvised music and..." Later we simplified that to "Jazz and New Music". The implication ought to have been clear enough: we were never merely a "jazz magazine", and we've never tried to confine ourselves to the cut-and-dried marketing of music which the business and our several contemporaries have chosen.
Jazz has always been a cornerstone of our coverage, and it will continue to be so. But the trouble with using the word 'jazz' is that people tend to think that that's all you do. Even though we've had Karlheinz Stockhausen, Anita Baker, The Fall, David Sylvian, Peter Maxwell Davies, Frank Sinatra, Frank Zappa, Harold Budd, Jimi Hendrix and many others in the magazine.
So the word from now on is 'music'. Excellent music. No teen-pop phenomenons, no fashionable fads, music wort hearing, worth talking about, worth documenting.
The spread of musics contained in this issue - Mozart to Costello - should give you a fair idea of what we're attempting to do. What we're not trying to be is an 'adult rock magazine': there's enough of that going on already. Nor is this the facile and cursed eclecticism which is making so much of the world's music in to a flavourless soup. Instead, we aim to be ever more discriminating as well as more diverse in our coverage. None of us have the time for nonsense or the merely second-rate. You can read about that stuff elsewhere if you want to. But if you also think that Michael Jackson is some addled freak making music for ten-year-olds, and not one of the creative masters of today's black music, we'd like to suggest a different perspective.
Our crusade on behalf of the margins isn't over. It's changing. We will continue to insist that Albert Ayler should be honoured alongside those musicians whose names mean far more to record-company accountants and Our Price stock buyers. And because we're opening up to the world, that insistence will resonate a lot further.
Richard Cook
Editor
Editor: Richard Cook
Michael Jackson? Elvis Costello? What the hell's going on here?
Nothing, actually, that we haven't done before. Maybe the scales are tipping a little differently as fro mthis issue, but The Wire (and yes, we've restored the definite article - since almost everyone we know has called it The Wire from the beginning) is essentially the same argumentative, alternative, demanding music magazine it's always set out to be.
The words that used to appear at the top of the cover were "Jazz, improvised music and..." Later we simplified that to "Jazz and New Music". The implication ought to have been clear enough: we were never merely a "jazz magazine", and we've never tried to confine ourselves to the cut-and-dried marketing of music which the business and our several contemporaries have chosen.
Jazz has always been a cornerstone of our coverage, and it will continue to be so. But the trouble with using the word 'jazz' is that people tend to think that that's all you do. Even though we've had Karlheinz Stockhausen, Anita Baker, The Fall, David Sylvian, Peter Maxwell Davies, Frank Sinatra, Frank Zappa, Harold Budd, Jimi Hendrix and many others in the magazine.
So the word from now on is 'music'. Excellent music. No teen-pop phenomenons, no fashionable fads, music wort hearing, worth talking about, worth documenting.
The spread of musics contained in this issue - Mozart to Costello - should give you a fair idea of what we're attempting to do. What we're not trying to be is an 'adult rock magazine': there's enough of that going on already. Nor is this the facile and cursed eclecticism which is making so much of the world's music in to a flavourless soup. Instead, we aim to be ever more discriminating as well as more diverse in our coverage. None of us have the time for nonsense or the merely second-rate. You can read about that stuff elsewhere if you want to. But if you also think that Michael Jackson is some addled freak making music for ten-year-olds, and not one of the creative masters of today's black music, we'd like to suggest a different perspective.
Our crusade on behalf of the margins isn't over. It's changing. We will continue to insist that Albert Ayler should be honoured alongside those musicians whose names mean far more to record-company accountants and Our Price stock buyers. And because we're opening up to the world, that insistence will resonate a lot further.
Richard Cook
Editor
Posted 27/03/08
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