Review: 'Totally Wired: The Rise and Fall of the Music Press'

One of the major factors that helped rock and roll "mature" from juvenile delinquent-soundtrack to the kind of thing they plop in a hall of fame was the emergence of a serious rock press. This went through its own maturation process beginning with the lightweight writing that appeared in rivals Melody Maker and New Musical Express in the early sixties through Paul Williams's informed and passionate Crawdaddy in the mid sixties to the destined-for-corporate-greatness Rolling Stone in the late sixties and on to overbearingly "anarchic" rags like Creem in the seventies and later taste-makers like Q, Spin, Vibe, and Mojo. 

Sometimes writers like Charles Shaar Murray, Lester Bangs, and Nick Kent made their work more about themselves than the music they were ostensibly covering, and often they expressed nothing more than icy contempt for that music. Rock writers crowed about how many drugs they did, slept with as many women as they could, excluded as many from their boys' club as possible, and, unlike many of the rock stars who did a lot of the same shit, rarely created anything of lasting value.

But they did serve their purpose in spreading the word about rock and perpetuating its myths, and poking gaping holes in a lot of them too. Paul Gorman covers this important tributary of the rock and roll story exhaustively in his new book Totally Wired: The Rise and Fall of the Music Press. Since he isn't a dickhead like so many of the writers his book chronicles, Gorman puts a lot of focus on the press' sexism and racism and draws a lot of the women who were often shunted to the side (Ellen Willis, Caroline Coon, Mary Harron, Penny Valentine, etc.) back into the story. He covers so much ground, especially when the industry became overcrowded in the eighties, that Totally Wired occasionally feels a bit more like a litany than a narrative, but Gorman does do a heroically thorough job and draws all the strands together quite effectively.