Maud Berthomier

The emergence and development of rock as a new form of commercial popular music in the period from 1965 to 1979 is usually analysed by reference to a new kind of music market (youth culture, counter culture), new sound technology (various forms of electronic amplification), and a new organisation of the music business around the production, manufacture and marketing of long-playing records. But rock also involved and, indeed, was an effect of a new way of writing about music: rock criticism. Rock criticism was culturally significant for a number of reasons: it articulated a musical aesthetic that shaped the understanding and reception of this new music; it changed the overall terrain of public music criticism; and it challenged taken-for-granted cultural distinctions between high and low music, between art and commerce. In this respect rock criticism was instrumental in developing new ways of thinking about cultural accreditation in music and art worlds and thus, in the long term, laid the foundations for the new academic field of popular music studies.

Despite its cultural importance, rock criticism has not been subject to systematic academic inquiry. There are broad surveys of the history of rock writing, but these studies are primarily concerned with the star writers in American and British music magazines. They are essentially celebratory, conjuring up a misleading picture of a critical golden age.

This research is designed to challenge this orthodoxy in a number of ways. First, it is interested in how rock criticism was established and is maintained as a significant cultural field. It will therefore address and decipher the mechanisms by which some writers were consecrated and others excluded from the canon. At the same time, it will be concerned with the material as well as ideological construction of rock writing as a particular kind of journalistic occupation. The question to be addressed here is how rock writing communities were put together and maintained in shared spaces – publications, venues, and other meeting points, such as radio studios. In approaching these questions, this research will adopt a particular methodology: crosscultural analysis. Its methodological aim is to elucidate the varying effects of the forces at play here by examining the emergence and development of rock criticism in contrasting cultural contexts: Britain and France.