‘Right now all the formulas that drive so-called music or rock journalism have really almost been exhausted. That's the main problem," said Nick Kent when Vanity Fair asked him about the state of music journalism in 2010.
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Are we really doomed to a culture of chronic attention deficit disorder?
Well, not exactly. Yes, the times they are a-changing. Perhaps the language and desires of 1960s and 1970s music criticism are not necessarily applicable to the demands of our postmodern age.
Maybe the old romantic idea of music journalism is over. But music writing is not dead. What most doomsayers forget amid the overdose of hyperlinked clicks and disposable content is that intelligent music journalism does still exist.
Whether it's Bongani Madondo's freewheeling "hot type" rhapsodies on the lessons of Philip Tabane's ancestral creative impulse, this writer's own poststructuralist riffs on Spoek Mathambo's crate-digging search for soul in cyberspace or even in capsule reviews, Rolling Stone's South African edition has been on a mission to involve readers in conversations about new ways to talk about South African music culture outside of the usual consumer guide discourses.
Similarly, jazz scribe Gwen Ansell is still smoking her Marxist joints into the collective consciousness in the M&G, Business Day and any publication that will print her by refusing to divorce music discourse from theory and complexity.
Don't be fooled: such writing is under threat.
But music writing will never really get its mojo back if market research continues to replace informed critique as the driving force behind content, and "professional" music journalism amounts to little more than bland blurb-length reviews and cheeky Twitter "copy" captions to glossy paparazzi photos of celebs.
But let's not forget those writers who see music criticism not only as a vocation, but also as a devotional practice aimed at creating a new vocabulary to map what culture is becoming.
As British music critic and theorist Kodwo Eshun observed, this vocabulary "begins where the consumer service of music writing stops". It starts with an appreciation that all of music – including the review and the interview – is just source material to build this new language.
It is precisely this imperative that pan-African publication Chimurenga has been championing since its 2002 debut issue, titled Music Is a Weapon.
Poets, theorists, authors, musicians and artists including San-dile Dikeni, Achille Mbembe, Aryan Kaganof, Louis Chude-Sokei, Keziah Jones and Stacy Hardy spearhead a network of writers who interrogate what Eshun terms "the frame of innocence around so-called black music" (traditionally anti-theoretical and anti-literary) and challenge readers with writing that is both complex, elusive and fiercely speculative.
So, if there are still spaces for contextual music writing and its evolving vocabularies, then the real question is not whether music journalism is dead, but what its future is.
As Eshun prophesied in More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction in 1998, perhaps it is finally time to "ask not what music [writing] means, but what it does".
Miles Keylock is the editor of Rolling Stone South Africa magazine