“Without music, life would be a mistake” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, or, How to Philosophize with a Hammer , 1889

 “The man that hath no music in himself,

Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,

Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils,

The motions of his spirit are dull as night,

And his affections dark as Erebus;

Let no such man be trusted.

Mark the music!” - Shakespeare

"When you come back to England from any foreign country, you have immediately the sensation of breathing a different air. Even in the first few minutes dozens of small things conspire to give you this feeling. The beer is bitterer, the coins are heavier, the grass is greener, the advertisements are more blatant. The crowds in the big towns, with their mild knobby faces, their bad teeth and gentle manners, are different from a European crowd. Then the vastness of England swallows you up, and you lose for a while your feeling that the whole nation has a single identifiable character. Are there really such things as nations? Are we not forty-six million individuals, all different? And the diversity of it, the chaos! The clatter of clogs in the Lancashire mill towns, the to-and-fro of the lorries on the Great North Road, the queues outside the Labour Exchanges, the rattle of pin-tables in the Soho pubs, the old maids hiking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning – all these are not only fragments, but characteristic fragments, of the English scene. How can one make a pattern out of this muddle?

"But talk to foreigners, read foreign books or newspapers, and you are brought back to the same thought. Yes, there is something distinctive and recognizable in English civilization. It is a culture as individual as that of Spain. It is somehow bound up with solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes. It has a flavour of its own. Moreover it is continuous, it stretches into the future and the past, there is something in it that persists, as in a living creature. What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.

"And above all, it is your civilization, it is you. However much you hate it or laugh at it, you will never be happy away from it for any length of time. The suet puddings and the red pillar-boxes have entered into your soul. Good or evil, it is yours, you belong to it, and this side the grave you will never get away from the marks that it has given you.

"Meanwhile England, together with the rest of the world, is changing. And like everything else it can change only in certain directions, which up to a point can be foreseen. That is not to say that the future is fixed, merely that certain alternatives are possible and others not. A seed may grow or not grow, but at any rate a turnip seed never grows into a parsnip. 

"...... Nor need we fear that as the pattern changes life in England will lose its peculiar flavour.... The Stock Exchange will be pulled down, the horse plough will give way to the tractor, the country houses will be turned into children's holiday camps, the Eton and Harrow match will be forgotten, but England will still be England, an everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past, and, like all living things, having the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same."

- George Orwell

[advice to  young writer]

The easy answer: if you want your writing to be more passionate, write about things you feel passionate about

Otherwise it can feel a bit forced

If you feel neutral or indifferent about something to start off with it, it’s hard to not reproduce that – you can maybe get round it by finding something interesting in the larger phenomenon, or the question of why do people like this

It’s tricky one, passion, because it’s easy to overdo it and slather on the superlatives and the lyrical descriptions

Nothing worse that sort of SHOUTING LOUD kind of prose, or uncontrollably gushing , or overly poetic

Cos gushing and superlatives can be quite vague – the praise terms are interchangeable, you could substitute a different artist or record’s name – the tricky bit is being precise in your passion

I think the goal is sort of ‘controlled passion’ or ‘controlled power’ – it’s actually more effective if you ration it out, have a little burst where  some kind of excessive feelings cut through

How you develop that, I’m not sure – you could experiment with different registers, more personal elements – do some writing that isn’t for publication, where you write about your emotional responses to films or books or music, how things have related with what’s going on in your life -

Then you can see if there’s a way to ease that element into your writing that is published, without it becoming cloying or too memoiristic

And read some more criticism – read some of the classics, in lots of different fields, to see how they managed it – Lester Bangs is the king of the super-passionate rock critics, it reads often like a guy who is drunkenly spilling out his guts in a bar (he’s the only rock critic to have a biography written about him and it was called LET IT BLURT), but then later he gets more controlled and elegant while still passionate and moving. See if you can find online or in a library his piece on Astral Weeks by Van Morrison (it appears in his posthumous collection of writing but also in the various writers collection Stranded). Try writers on film like Pauline Kael or David Thomson (although his stuff is cooler in tone)…

There is also negative passion, where people denouncing stuff, Mark Fisher was good at that! For that, you really have to believe in the moment of writing that there is something deplorable and pernicious about the thing you are writing about.

Nowadays that kind of outburst oriented, fiery style of criticism has gone out of a fashion a bit, or at least the younger generation don’t do it – I read music writing these days and a lot of it seems very hung up on authoritativeness, knowing your facts, having done your research, and  positioning – where does this fit into the scheme of things, the artists’s career moves,  what they are trying to signify, statements being made etc… It’s often done very well and is precisely written but rather dry… 

What’s missing for me is that sense of music’s power to seduce and to break you down – the flooding of pleasure almost to the point of swooning –   the bliss and in a way the violence of music– whether it’s a very physical thing of the bass impacting your body or the way melody and harmony can tear into you emotionally, because sometimes the softest music has the most powerful effect  - if a record (or a film) can make you cry that is really powerful, much more being noisy or slamming.

There are some great music writers who never go into that aspect and well reasoned and eloquent. But for me, for  music writing to be complete, it needs to register at some point the sensual and emotional power of the music, a little bit of rhapsodizing about the beauty – that’s what we are in it for, the beauty, the intensity.

Experiment with it, listen to things and try to think, why do I like this, what it is doing to me…

 "I felt very puny as a human. I thought, ‘Fuck that. I want to be a superhuman."

~David Bowie