Nick Hornby as punk paradigm-smasher (Sorry, Tom couldn't wait)

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Well is he? Let's get this one going. P'raps someone should define the punk paradigm first (Tom?). 76 as year zero? Not learning yr chops? Anyone can do it?

― Dr. C (Dr. C), Tuesday, 11 February 2003 14:39 (twenty-three years ago)

This comes out of Jerry The Nipper's ruminations on the Xgau thread - it's talking about paradigms of rockcrit rather than the music itself.

― Tom (Groke), Tuesday, 11 February 2003 14:42 (twenty-three years ago)

or is it breaking down the Morley/Penman/et al set of values that crystallized a few years after?

― Dr. C (Dr. C), Tuesday, 11 February 2003 14:44 (twenty-three years ago)

Yes, partly.

I think Hornby is very bad at doing it and would be apalled if he thought he was, mind.

― Tom (Groke), Tuesday, 11 February 2003 14:45 (twenty-three years ago)

Oops posts crossed - I see. Need to think about this - I can't really see what Hornby has achieved other than an ultra-trad sensibleness. Have others trodden the same path as his hush puppies?

― Dr. C (Dr. C), Tuesday, 11 February 2003 14:51 (twenty-three years ago)

Hornby really rates low as a critic. He's a novellist. And fairly good at that.

― Horace Mann (Horace Mann), Tuesday, 11 February 2003 15:04 (twenty-three years ago)

I've only ever read his post-famous criticism, notable one in The Face about The Lemonheads. It wasn't very good, but then neither was the album he was talking about. What did he do before Fever Pitch? (apart from the things listed in Fever Pitch).

I've always imagine that someone goes through his novels telling him to make them a bit more square.

― PJ Miller (PJ Miller), Tuesday, 11 February 2003 19:16 (twenty-three years ago)

What about the chummy Collins/Maconie/Q (not Dave Q!) 'hey it's all a bit of a laugh and doesn't matter very much really' paradigm as a (much delayed) backlash to the post-punk 'it MATTERS and IT'S ART!!' thing?

― Dr. C (Dr. C), Wednesday, 12 February 2003 11:01 (twenty-three years ago)

Yeah I was thinking last night about how Q fits into all this. Hornby is coming from a Q perspective and reinserting first-person.

― Tom (Groke), Wednesday, 12 February 2003 11:21 (twenty-three years ago)

There should be a 'Logan's Run'-type thing for critics. Obv. it wouldn't be the same chronological age for each victim though. Hornby would've had his ticker switched off as soon as he learned how to plug in a stereo

― dave q, Wednesday, 12 February 2003 11:31 (twenty-three years ago)

I've always imagine that someone goes through his novels telling him to make them a bit more square.

I think that's true in a sense! I remember Chris Roberts (who is in FP - it boggles my noggin to think of the two of them as friends) interviewing NH about some scene in FP where he's talking about the loneliness of obsessive geezers, quite serious stuff about mortality etc, and how NH gets almost embarrassed about getting too deep and with a kind of metaphorical cough, changes the subject. Hornby said something like [apologies for misquotation etc] "well, yes, a lot of my readers won't have read many books before and I don't want to risk alienating them and losing them by getting too serious or literary. I'm more interested in that kind of reader than in a literary audience because I think the interesting things happen in the mainstream rather than in the margins."

I think Q/Collins&Maconie/Never Mind the Buzzcocks/old style GLR/Danny Baker etc are a kind of lapsed punk - I'm not convinced there's any kind paradigm-shift going on, it's just what happens to Clash fans in their forties. (Another trajectory is the art school one from punk->stylepress->Wallpaper* or from punk->stylepress->Network7->BBC3).

I'm not aware of very many concerted attempts to analyse or critique this paradigm (apart from Kym Marsh on NMTB obviously, Mark :). The late 80s MM boys had a go, but nobody really paid much attention to them. And as they themselves admitted, any kind of new perspective is almost immediately recuparated as a trend - eg NO LOGO etc.

― Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Wednesday, 12 February 2003 11:43 (twenty-three years ago)

**it's just what happens to Clash fans in their forties**

Not all of them, Jerry!!

(hastily hides scribbled '10 greatest songs about 70's footballers' under laptop)

― Dr. C (Dr. C), Wednesday, 12 February 2003 12:03 (twenty-three years ago)

The Nipper seems correct about varieties of 'lapsed punk'. He's right that that formation could use a little more analysis - even how it feeds into BBC3 and all.

The Lemonheads are (were) good.

Hornby's books suck: you people all forgetting that. One early book of his that I don't know is about US Fiction. Possibly the Nipper can tell us whether he thinks that it is a book that is quite good.

― the pinefox, Wednesday, 12 February 2003 12:40 (twenty-three years ago)

Why does no-one ever pick up on the Nipper's good ideas? They seem to have the power to kill threads stone dead: the reverse of what they deserve.

― the pinefox, Wednesday, 12 February 2003 16:08 (twenty-three years ago)

The reason I'm not picking up on-thread PF is that my position is very unformed and I want time to form it without (for once) ILX involvement.

― Tom (Groke), Wednesday, 12 February 2003 16:10 (twenty-three years ago)

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