Quarter Life Crisis

The world according to Sven-S. Porst

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Music Magazines¶

Over the years I’ve grown tired of music magazines. Somehow most of them seem to be keen on hiring bad writers whose articles circle in an invariable innuendo of writing what the pop stars (or rock stars or whatever terms your sensibilities dictate) where, in which hotels they stay, what just happens to be written in the press material and every other magazine and web site, how hung-over the pop stars are or – in the past few years – how not hung-over and well-behaved the pop stars are, and so on, and so on, dribble dribble dribble.

Add to those ‘reports’ their record ‘reviews’ which also invariably seem to serve mainly to point out what extensive back catalogue and general music the writer can refer to for coming up with inadequate comparisons to other bands (although in many sad cases that back catalogue doesn’t seem to be all that comprehensive), to point out that the writer actually has read all the PR material and other press reports and jokingly mentions their key points in the first sentence before going for his own two paragraphs of fame and you’ll start thinking Zhil byl korol’ kogda-to, Pri njom blokha zhila (damn have to find out how to write this properly in cyrillic letters…)

That isn’t to say that good articles don’t exist. And it’s great to read them. But the number of people who are able – both from their musical background, their knowledge of the subject at hand and their writing skills – to write good articles seems to be minute. So, invariably you end up getting music magazines ‘for the train journey’ or ‘for the CD’ rather than ‘for the music magazine’ (actually the free German magazine Intro tends to have nice photos as well).

And when I bought the Rolling Stone (Germany) this week, I actually mainly did it to read the report about Haldern for which they bought one of Richard’s photos (I’m afraid he’ll have to suffer from Almost Famous style remarks for this in the forseeable future…). And that article was, err, rather bad, making the weekend sound rather unpleasant, which up to that one rainstorm it wasn’t.

But then I listened to the included CD. It was from their “rare tracks” series – which can be quite annoying. And indeed many of the songs on there are a bit annoying. But somehow it’s one of the weirdest and most fun compilation CDs I got from a magazine in a long time. With a title of Another Time, Another Planet they promise A journey into far-out sound and we get just that. You may want to grab a copy if you can: