“Writing Matters. Writing always matters”: considering the recent Robert Florence controversy

Although I have no real knowledge of contemporary video games, I’ve been reading with interest about the scandal which has affected Scottish comedian Robert Florence over the past few days, and his reaction to it. Florence writes a column for Eurogamer, and his most recent one looked at a picture of another, fully professional,* games journalist Geoff Keighley sitting beside a table of Mountain Dew and Doritos, and in front of a promo poster for Halo 4. Here is a writer indulging in shameless promotion for the same product he should be critiquing, as well as stuffing his face with garish manufactured foods, as well as the profits of these foods. 

 

Later Florence brings up an example of professional games journalists happily entering a Twitter competition to win a PS3, a competition which involved tweeting about certain games using a certain hashtag. An argument broke out between various writers arguing over whether it was acceptable for people in their profession to enter, and win, these competitions. Two who defended it are named as Lauren Wainwright and Dave Cook (again, I know little about gaming, and I’ve never heard of these two, so I’m quite out of my depth in this way. I only know Robert Florence from his excellent comedy Burniston, which you should definitely watch).

In his article Florence criticises Cook’s response: that a hashtag is not an advert. Which it is, hence why companies pay for sponsored hashtags to trend on Twitter, and companies give away PS3s to people to use their hashtag. Florence also wrote that, after reading Wainwright’s tweets defending this kind of corporate relationship with journalists he was unable to take any sentiments she had about gaming seriously.

This is where everything got out of hand. Enter scandal.

Lauren Wainwright complained the article was libellous, and Eurogamer pulled it. The article, which you can still read in full here, contains nothing libellous, certainly not that I can see. Wainwright is not even Florence’s target, as he takes care to note. His problem is with the system that binds together journalists and corporate PR men. Wainright, Cook and Keighley just happened to enter his field of view at this time. As he says, any other day and it could have been two different journalists. Had it happened even a day later it would not even had made it into his article.

In the first half of the article Florence also tackles the problem of the Games Media Awards, where the PR men of the games industry converge with the writers of the games industry to drink and slap backs. He says:

The GMAs shouldn’t exist. By rights, that room should be full of people who feel uncomfortable in each other’s company. PR people should be looking at games journos and thinking “That person makes my job very challenging.” Why are they all best buddies? What the hell is going on?

On the first read I thought that Florence was making a crass joke about gamers being socially awkward. He’s a better writer than this, obviously, and his greater point, and the point of this article, is that these people shouldn’t be friends, not because of personalities, but because of their jobs. The writers are ‘journalists’. They are intended to be separate from the industry, of which these PR men are very much a part. This fault line should run through all industries. It is expected that politics journalists should stand outside the political world, shining a light into the dimly-light rooms of power and showing the results to the wider world. This should be replicated at all levels of journalism, down to ones which are regarded as the least important, like film and games.

But it’s not the case. As Robert Florence points out in both of the articles I’ve linked to above, journalists and industry men mingle. It benefits both sides, in the short term – journos get rewarded with prizes and exclusives, the PR and marketing men get some help to shift their product, be it a new Michael Bay movie, JLS album, or Call of Duty. In the long term, however, the reputation of the writers are sullied – they are not longer proper journalists, but mouthpieces for companies. They are the new PR men, albeit on likely much lower salaries. The marketing guys, they continue as usual, moving from product to product. It matters not to them.

How does wrong-doing become institutionalised? The police force is institutionally racist not because it is comprised entirely of racists (they’re not, probably). What happens is that the racism of some is overlooked and accepted by those who may be non-racists. A bond is created where racist is accepted. Managers and bosses, who could use their rank to do something in fact do nothing, either because they do not want to risk a mutiny from their troops. New officers join a police force in which racism has been normalised, and the need to conform and fit into a group which may be hostile to newcomers means that they to turn a blind eye. And so it continues, wasting the lives of black and Asian youths with impunity. With the Savile investigation widening by the day, institutionalised child abuse and victim shaming may well be revealed. It will have come about in the same way, with the opinion formers (popular or high ranking police officers in the first example, celebrities and producers in the second) leading the way.

The examples are not on the same scale as writing about games from freebies, but the method is the same - the system adopts a method, the method becomes the system. It becomes so ingrained that to separate the two becomes impossible, and the system, the industry, or the professional, must be torn down and rebuilt, forever noting the lessons of the old.

I made a similar point about football earlier on this blog, and, of course, this is rather drastic. You may ask - is it even worth it for writing reviews of films or games or music? Florence tackles this as well. He said in his reply in the aftermath of the scandal that what he was saying was about writing and journalism on a wider scale, not a positive review of Fifa 13. I touched on this earlier. Writing 'always matters' he says, and it does. It definitely does. Again: journalists are how we mediate the wider world. They channel real life events into news, which is how the vast majority of us consume these events. You may say that writing about music does not matter, but what if every journalist wrote an article about how much of a cock Chris Brown is? Not just the rock/indie critics who hated his music anyway, and have fun with how creative they can get obliterating his album. I people who write about pop music, who's writing is actually read by the fans of Chris Brown.

The fact that Chris Brown attacked his girlfriend and showed no remorse for it would concern no one outside their immediate circle of friends, were Chris Brown and Rihanna not hugely influential and opinion forming for millions of young people. What does it tell pre-teens and teenagers, who are going through a formative stage of their lives, especially where relationships are concerned, that a man can attack his partner, and he will be forgiven, and continue to be successful? The reason Chris Brown continues to be successful is that he receives backing from a music industry with no moral compass, and is not repeatedly slaughtered in the pop press for what he did. Because, ultimately, these pop journalists are part of the same music industry. They continue to support the career of a vile man they could, and should, have ditched ages ago. But Brown turned a profit, something that is increasingly difficult to come by nowadays. Ditch him and you have to find some new singer to mould into a teenage heartthrob.

Of course, the nature of journalism does not always come down to incidents as important as this. At the root of all this is that old saying 'journalistic integrity'. Journalistic integrity is removed as soon as you step within the realm of the industry you claim to critique. As soon as you give something a positive review for a ticket to the Brit Awards. As soon as you prop up the career of a domestic abuser who happens to be a flavour of the month beloved by marketing and PR groups of record labels. As soon as you don't report a politician for wrong-doing because you have drinks together every Friday. As soon as you accept a PS3 for tweeting in support of a company. Without journalistic integrity what are we left with?

Empty words on a page. An industry not dead, but lifeless.      

  

*I use the term ‘fully professional’ here to denote a difference between Florence and Keighley, not as a slight at the former. From my perspective, Florence is a comedian with a sideline in games writing, whereas Keighley earns his wages solely from writing.

Album Review: Titus Andronicus - 'Local Business'

RATING: 8/10

How do you follow an album like The Monitor? It's an album adored by many people (me included), one of the best of the last decade. It sums up the ethos and attitude of Titus Andronicus so competely that it will always be regarded as their calling card.

The first point to make is that Local Business is not The Monitor. Nor is it simply The Monitor: Part Two. To try to top it would be foolish, so Titus Andronicus have shifted their sound to a different plane. The entire album feels less ramshackle. The songs are reined in, the band itself thinned down and refined to a core of five. Singer Patrick Stickles sounds less like he is hauling notes out of his throat from the pit his stomache, and the pace throughout is slower, like an album comprised of the first half of 'Theme From Cheers.' Overall, Titus Andronicus continue to draw from their punk rock background - when I considered this at first, I wanted to draw a comparison to The Clash recording London Calling, embracing a world of different influences as the confines of punk music dawned on them. But, despite adopting a style more suited to classic rock (there's even a hint of country rock at the start of '(I Am The) Electric Man') Titus still stay true to their roots. After all, they expanded a love of punk into a concept album about the American Civil War as a metaphor for a coming of age journey to New Jersey. The boundaries of genre perhaps do not matter here.

Punk or no punk, Stickles' lyrics continue the trend found in both The Monitor and their debut The Airing of Grievances. Albert Camus continues to linger a heavy influence ('Titus Andronicus Vs. The Absurd Universe (3rd Round KO)' being a good example, with it's sole lyric of 'I am going insane'). The opening gambit of Local Business is: 

Okay, I think, by now, we've established that everything is inherantly worthless
And there is nothing in the universe with any kind of objective purpose

Later in the same song:

I heard about my authentic self - what would I say were I ever to meet him?
I guess "Yr guilty of a terrible crime, and I know it was my birth"
I'm doing twenty-six to life now on planet Earth

An obsession with Camus' Absurd prevails, but the most powerful section of the album is when Stickles addresses his eating disorder on the self-explanitory 'My Eating Disorder', (preceded by the ironic 'Food Fight!'). Detailing the 'amorphous monster' that prevents him from consuming food, he moves between the artifical medication of vitamin pills and the self-medication of cigarettes.

Again, like their previous two albums the lyrics are strong, with regular moments of genius.

Your gonna get your chance to be hung
You'll make a great gift to gracious girls
Try to swallow while your still young
That your dick's too short to fuck the world

is an early personal favourite. The only problem is that some the lyrics begin to seem lazy. Both 'Titus Andronicus Vs The Absurd Universe' and 'Food Fight!' are limited to one line each, while the album closer 'Tried To Quit Smoking' has good lines, but makes the mistake of stretching them over ten minutes which begin to drag half way through. The astonishing 'The Battle of Hampton Roads' which closes The Monitor, by comparison, runs for fourteen minutes and flies by, by virtue of cramming in as many ideas as you could find in entire albums by other bands.

And there, the main problem with Local Business raises it's head again - the spectre of The Monitor, in escapable. Simply, Local Business is on no level as good as it's predesessor. We never should have expected it to be. The trouble is not with the album, but with the expectations. As a stand-alone album, Local Business is great - as part of the wider Titus Andronicus canon, not so much.

In an interview to promote The Monitor, Patrick Stickles remarked that the Civil War battleship from which the album took his name from hung over his thoughts, and his experience with New Jersey, that The Monitor, as impressive as it was, began to cloud everything. How right he was. 

Against Boybands

Ages ago I was asked to write for the For and Against section in my college magazine this month. I was against, and the subject was boybands. The version below I unfortunately had to scrap, because it was too long and jumbled for proper publication. But I liked it too much just to get rid of it, so here it is.

I hate boybands - I don’t think my DNA would have it any other way. I hate ‘pretty-boys’ (jealousy), I hate pop music (snobbery), and I hate solely-for-profit art (early exposure to punk music), and boybands are the saccharine mixture of all of these things. They are bred solely to harvest money from the pockets of teenage girls while not scaring the mothers of those girls – cheeky, but not threatening (this is probably why Charles Manson failed his Monkees audition). It’s all naive smiles, colour-coordinated chinos and expensively ruffled hair, leave any talent at the back door, out by the bins. If more teenage girls were cynical Darias we wouldn’t have this problem.
Gareth Campesinos, frontman of my favourite band and a man who, let’s just say, has to rely on his charms when dating, wrote an article a few months back in which he outlined his belief that ugly people made the best songwriters and lyricists.

If you were ugly, you had nothing to lose by trying to become interesting. Writing songs and poetry is personal, and can be embarrassing, so why risk humiliation and losing the friends that your face had won you. For example, Paul Heaton, who is quoted extensively in Gareth’s article, is one of the great British lyricists, and a man obsessed with his own ugliness. (He feels like London, but looks like Hull. When he was born, the doctor says ‘we’d had some ugly babies, but none were quite you’ then ‘looks as if the nose and chin are definitely here to stay’.)

On a similar note, Morrissey, probably the only British lyricist of the past few decades who was better than Heaton, was obsessed not with his looks but with his own loneliness and misery.
This point segues rather clunkily into the main crux of my argument - against boybands. Boybands are not staffed by men like Stephen Morrissey, Paul Heaton or Gareth Campesinos. Boybands are staffed by pretty-boys who have songs written for them, and instruments played for them, and their smiles, ruffled hair and chinos selected for them.

They might very well have been through some emotional turmoil, but all memories of it have been cast aside (unless it can help to shift a few more copies). It’s not just talent that has been jettisoned by boyband members - their personality has been thrown over to join the shards of flotsam drifting in the sea. Every member of every boyband has the smug veneer of someone who has been popular and had an easy life since they were hurried off to school by their parents. They haven’t risked those friends won by their faces, and they never will.

And I know I’d Paul Heaton, with his chin like a tramp’s juke-box, over them any day.

On 'The Monitor', Bruce Springsteen, and identity crisis

When I first heard The Monitor, the second album by New Jersey band Titus Andronicus, I dismissed it as a punk-rock take on Bruce Springsteen that would provide a bit of short-term fun. I underestimated the power of the album to get under your skin, to open itself further with every listen, and, of course, the phrase ‘punk-rock take on Bruce Springsteen’.

I heard it first over a year ago, and listening to it now, the Springsteen-references are not just a lazy way to describe an album, but actually the key to what the album is trying to say. Springsteen himself embodies the traditional, New Jersey working man. He speaks to blue-collar Americans in the way that politicians wish they could, because he is a working class American. One of the reasons for The Boss’ enduring success, it was once said, is that you can almost imagine that when he isn’t touring, Bruce actually goes back to his hometown and works in a factory with the same people he grew up. At the end of his shift, he goes to the same bar he always has and drinks PBR with those same people again. That is not the case, obviously, but perhaps more than any musician who sings extensively about his roots, he has maintained his pre-fame identity.

The working-class of New Jersey, and all around America, that Springsteen writes about and embodies, has been romanticised in much the same way that British miners were before Thatcherism – it wasn’t a glamorous life, or a desirable one, but it was their life, an honest life that was driven by a ‘honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay’ philosophy. It was the generation eulogised by Frank Sobotka in series two of The Wire, when he says ‘We used to make shit in this country, build shit.’
That quote represents the point where Titus Andronicus and other bands which count Springsteen as their inspiration split. The Gaslight Anthem, with a lead singer who worked for nearly a decade in a car factory before becoming a singer, are in love with the image of Americana that Springsteen promotes. Titus Andronicus, however, see things much differently. Their New Jersey is that of the sons and daughters of the people depicted in the songs of Springsteen and The Gaslight Anthem – some of the many victims of globalised capitalism and the crisis of identity which resulted from it.
The process of globalisation, which has really been happening throughout history, gathered momentum in the second half of the twentieth century. It was bad news for the working class of New Jersey, as their jobs were transported to the other side of the world as using Eastern-based wage slavery became an economic reality for multinational companies. The next generation, the Titus Andronicus-generation, were promised a new start, increased levels of economic freedom, free information, and everything else.

But globalisation, in a bid to create a global identity, tore up the roots that once gave people a real sense of self. Under Thatcherism and Reaganomics, class was apparently dissolved into one.
The real problem this created was that, when it opened new windows for young people, globalised capitalism made sure it bolted any doors closed, and moved those doors out to countries where it is legal to pay people less than a dollar a day. A vacuum of jobs for young people was created, and those that belonged to families of the working class apparently saw their history being erased by ‘trickle-down economics’ which never fulfilled their promise.

The Monitor is filled with references to depression, anxiety, alcoholism and worthlessness – they form the feeling of emptiness that comes from the lack of fixed identity. At the same time, the album reflects what, if anything, was good about globalised society – the spread of knowledge. Titus Andronicus is a consciously-cleverer album than any of those of Springsteen – it’s a concept album based on American history, is strewn with references to myriad other influences. The band name even comes from a relatively obscure Shakespeare play.

If The Monitor was given a human embodiment, it would be the slightly pretentious, university-educated son of a former New Jersey steel factory worker. The clash between the references and the dark lyrics, and the audible influence of traditional American anthemic rock, is the playing out of a struggle between this generation’s past and present.