Frank Kogan

A question I asked on ILM years ago was "can a music matter if its fans don't like to read?" (something like that, anyway)

This was -- deliberately -- rhetorically provocative and compressed: what I wanted to get at was the issue of the meaning of "it matters", and not very many respondents twigged this, and thought i was just claiming that the musics favoured by non-readers and non-writers obviously COULDN'T matter... (I was thinking more about dancemusic than ballads when I posted it; and the sense -- in uk writing anyway -- that enthusiasts of rave and techno and etc were historically considered a good deal less agile or interesting as writers) (This was certainly the case in the late 80s and early 90s; I'm not up enough on matters these days to know if the gap closed...)

So does your conundrum overlap with mine? Why does it matter whether a music "matters"? Why -- aside from anxious justification -- are we writing about music at all?

Is there a constituency who (if they craed at all) would answer "it really doesn't matter if a music matters, as long as I know what I like" -- and does this constituency generally favour different kinds of music than those favoured by people who care which music matter and why?


(We actually quite sharply disagree over the definition of a "critic" -- to me, you mean "Let's pretend for the sake of argument that most P&J voters are pretty good REVIEWERS"; this is probably worth thrashing out; I half started the debate on Popular and then as usual got weighed down by off-net concerns)