In Time Out, a piece on the singer Amy Winehouse is saturated with references to how it’s a shame she’s not Lily Allen. If I were the editor I’d tell the writer to go back and do it again. Once more with feeling, please.
This is to my mind music journalism at its worst: too busy looking over the shoulders of what everyone else is writing, or so they think. All this piece tells us is that the writer is hopelessly at the mercy of some mystical zeitgeist. Worst, he or she believes such a position to be an ideal.
It’s important to snoop around at the world, but for actual inspiration one should read works with a good coating of dust, as it were. Or read a writer who’s clearly of a much older generation and therefore exists in a different world anyway.
Never, ever, read the works of your contemporaries or those younger, just before putting pen to paper yourself (or fingers to keyboard). You will not be yourself. Being yourself is the whole point of writing, where you’re unfettered and unshackled by body language, bad teeth, a silly voice, a face that doesn’t match your mind. And yet journalists like the author of this Amy Winehouse piece seem only too happy to timidly cower in the face of Getting On. Likewise far too many people on the Web.
Never worry about Getting On for fear of losing out. You will not lose out. Stand your ground, stare the world in the eye, and witty, kind friends will buy you surprise birthday lunches.
Never write anything on the internet after just reading something else that’s just been written on the internet. Read something from a bygone age, or by a bygone author. You will bring to it your own modern persona, and the resulting giddy, original cocktail will be worth everyone’s time. Which will make a refreshing change.
Otherwise, it’s just the equivalent of in-breeding.
