Leading music journalist attacks vinyl fans

Leading music journalist attacks vinyl fans

9 September, 2008 | 8.51AM

• Written by: Lee Smith
• Filed under: Music News: dapayk, vinyl

Semi-notorious British music journalist Steven Wells has launched a scathing assault on “loathsome turntable-owning nerds” in a new post for his Guardian Unlimited blog.

His attention-seeking vitriol has predictably resulted in an outcry from the vinyl-worshiping community, but beyond the over-the-top rhetoric and questionable attempts at humor, does Wells have a point?

“The resurgence of vinyl is a symptom of the dread diseases of authenticity and nostalgia - the terrible co-joined twins of cultural decline,” claims Wells in a rare moment of consideration, before comparing vinyl purists to antiquated readers of the British right-wing tabloid press, who “believe that life… was far more straightforward in the thirties, forties and fifties”.

“Morrissey was right in some regards, though,” he continues.

“We should smash the turntables, hang the DJs and make bonfires of the scratchy crap they worship in a mass abandonment of life-cluttering, natural resource-wasting, soul-restraining, spirit-encumbering, planet-raping, petit-bourgeois “stuff"."

Steven Wells is no stranger to mild media controversy.

As a leading punk journalist for the NME during the 1980s, he went under the alias ‘Susan Williams’, reportedly attracting praise from acclaimed feminist author Kathy Acker, who is claimed to have wrongly assumed he was a fellow radical female writer.

Wells is prone to provoking his readers, extolling kiddie pop like Daphne & Celeste as “successors to the punk aesthetic”.

He’s also written extensively about sport, scripted various comedy shows, appeared regularly as a pundit on TV music documentaries, and authored the fantastically-titled satirical novel ‘Tits Out Teenage Terror Totty’ in 1999.

Read the full rant here, and check out Berlin minimal duo Dapayk & Padberg’s paean to vinyl, ‘Black Beauty’, in the player below.

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