Totally Wired: Too big a subject

Of course I had to read Paul Gorman's Totally Wired when my pal Nik offered to lend it to me, because a history of print music journalism in the last half of the 20th century is very much my thing.

Especially when so much of it was focused on the mags I read when music was my life.  I wasn't really a Rolling Stone kid - there was a smugness to the American writers that was deeply off-putting - but the Brit newspapers were dense and funny and cheap and mean, and that was two-thirds of my music education.

Totally Wired gets into the history of all of them, starting with the appalling racism of the Melody Maker in the 1930s, and charting a course through music journalism for the rest of the century.

Unsurprisingly, there is so much gossip in there, and it certainly reinforces long-held beliefs that a lot of the writers at the time might have been able to craft the prose of angels, but were absolutely rotten human beings who can not be trusted under any circumstances. The rich and famous flitter through the pages, and audiences hungry for the next big thing see circulations soar into the stratosphere, before inevitably crashing down to earth.

But it's all just a little unsatisfying, since the subject is just so big, and you get stuck in the shallow end of a vast pool of publications. Entire generations of writers and magazines that run for years get a cursory mention, and the general remit is just too wide.

It's similar to the way I can't read non-fiction books about comic books that are too generalized. Those types of books are vital for anybody trying to get into things and not knowing where to start, but have almost nothing new to offer anybody who has been in the culture trenches for years.

I can't read a book about the world's biggest superheroes and would rather read something about a particular artist. And you just can't condense the madness of 80 years of music journalism into one book, without losing the wonderful specifics.