I like Everett True. Many don’t but I do. He’s a personality and modern music writing has a paucity of those. But that doesn’t mean I always agree with him. This week he’s been posting up the archive of one of his much-missed projects Plan B, a fine magazine which gave birth to many a great up and coming new music writer. But while that’s a brilliant public service it gave me occasion to read his editorial from Issue 0 and now, a few years late, I need to disagree with one of his quips. 

Recounting a trip to lecture some media students, Everett talks about dismissing “NME and Q as being put together by people embarrassed to be writing about indie music…” That’s the point at which he and I take different paths.

Both Q and NME have been terribly compromised publications for years but that isn’t down to the people working on them not caring or not loving music as much as Everett does. It’s because those magazines are cogs within large corporations with confused agendas, turned into toys for editors enthralled with a philosophy of “brand”, “content partnerships” and other phrases that translate to bad magazines. 

Everett’s advice to potential Plan B contributors was “be yourself” but that’s not always been a choice at NME or Q (although NME under Krissi Murrison is 1000% sharper than the dull days of Conor McNicholas running the paper into the ground). Q is like the Borg. It gobbles up writers and pulps them into a bland mush.

The Atlantic has just published a list of what makes great editing in celebration of its 153rd birthday. One point stood out for me as a big failing at Q was this: “Don’t over-edit. You will often estrange an author by too elaborate a revision, and furthermore, take away from the magazine the variety of style that keeps it fresh.” Too often Q has been like a mangle, squeezing until all the writer’s personality is left in the bucket.

That is not the fault of the people who work on Q [I was front section editor there for just over a year]. They are a sharp, smart, committed team with a real love of music. But the product they are made to produce is a sad compromise, under the cosh of powerful PRs trading access for writing about bands that just aren’t up to snuff. Q has to play safe.

Editors aren’t given the scope to be imaginative – they can’t take risks and there have been some terrible decisions (putting Johnny Borrell aka the least palatable man in music on the cover?!). No one in the office besides the boss backed that move but it happened anyway. A few months down the line the revisionist history had begun: “Who’s idea was that then?” 

Plan B was wildly inventive and individualistic. It could never sell more than a nominal number of copies. Q is bland and it struggles to maintain the sales figures it once easily pulled in. Neither is the solution for what a music magazine should be now.

In some ways, the question is whether a traditional music magazine, a bound collection of pages, still has a place. I think it has but a successful one needs freedom of movement that an oil tanker like Q doesn’t have right now. The ship can be turned around but the captain needs to accept that the iceberg it’s headed for is there to begin with. Right now, they’ve got their hands on the wheel and their eyes closed… 

I have been thinking a little bit about why there are no real ‘hip young gunslingers’ in journalism today. Where are the Burchills? The Shaar-Murrays? The Kents? God forbid, the young Parsons? 

Well, it makes sense that they don’t really exist because the environment to foster them doesn’t exist either. The NME, which originally ran the ‘hip young gunslinger’ ad which flushed Burchill and Parsons out of the undergrowth, is a corporate branding machine more bothered about club nights, sponsorships than ‘monetizing’ anything like passionate music journalism. 

That’s what rattled Neil Kulkarni’s cage so much. And in that respect he’s right. But as I said yesterday, criticising NME writers for being somewhat mechanistic in their output is like telling McDonalds workers that they should be pumping out Michelin-starred creations and not the Big Mac. The environment is not conducive to Bangsesque creative chaos. The brief is quick, concise, uncontroversial copy. 

The days when Lester Bangs [PDF link] could pump out thousands of words over two issues on The Clash and go out of his way to offend them are long, long gone. When I worked on Q, it was pretty damn clear that the order of the day was not offending big acts with big PRs who could have a big effect on who the mag got on the cover and ultimately how many issues it managed to shift. The ‘truth’ was a very flexible concept, especially when it came to giving Razorlight albums a star rating. 

There are brilliant young music writers at work today. Look at the ziggurat of independence Sean Adams has built and maintained with Drowned In Sound. Look at the quiet, solid excellence of MusicOMH (full disclosure: I write for it, for basically no cash). Consider the brilliant work of John Doran (not so young) and Luke Turner (young enough) at The Quietus. Take a good hard look at some of the stuff The Line Of Best Fit is doing. If you have to, turn to the pretentious cul-de-sac of Pitchfork. 

And, of course, there’s the writer who I cheerlead incessantly, my good friend Eve Barlow who I strongly believe deserves to be our generation’s Caitlin Moran. Eve’s got a grasp of pop culture and politics that makes my head spin. And the girl does jokes. Good jokes. Every time. I cannot wait for the day when she emerges full force onto the scene to kick some faces right off.

I long for a time when Eve is in the position my other good friend (name-dropping tosswank klaxon) Suzanne Moore is in. Suzanne writes as she wants for polar opposite titles – The Guardian and The Daily Mail – and she started out on Marxism Today! Now that’s inspirational. 

It’s true that there are no hip young gunslingers in the mainstream press these days. Pop writing has become far too commodified. But there are glimmers of brilliance allowed to play at the edges.

Any national newspaper or forward thinking magazine that commissions Peter “Popjustice” Robinson gets a massive A+ gold star from me. But The Daily Telegraph, still employing Chief Rock Writer and perpetual misser-of-the-point Neil McCormack? Oh sweet lord that’s embarrassing. You too can be this obsessed with U2. If you have a frontal lobotomy. 

There are also exciting turns going on in the music press. James “Jam” McMahon is leading Kerrang! through a creative renaissance as the fannish focus of rock brilliance. Andrew Harrison has taken over the good ship Q and brought it back to music-obsessed zenith it should dance upon and Mojo has the solid, home running hitting form of Babe Ruth on a good day. That it plays home to my other favourite young music writer, Sonny Baker, is a massive bonus. 

The gunslingers are out there. But like the beginning of a Sergio Leone flick they are all dissipated. Chewing cheroots on deserted platforms. Wandering among the tumbleweed of an industry that has lost a gun fight. But shit, there are still vital things to be said about music and vital people making those points. If you don’t believe that is true, well, you’re just not looking in the right place.