I vividly remember watching an interview with the late Jeff Buckley on the now-cancelled music show ‘No Disco.’ It had always been my dream to be a music journalist but he said things that made me seriously question the whole practice. He criticised the whole notion of reviews. “I don’t really understand why they even exist. What purpose do they serve? I don’t get why someone can sit in an office and listen to this music that is so important to whoever has made it and just say “no, that’s garbage, and I’m going to write about it so everyone else knows.” He made one point in particular that really got me thinking. “Music is an art form. It is not spoken, it is not written, it is composed and it comes from somewhere unknown. For this reason, why should a person try to describe it using words?” I had always thought that music reviews served a v

Despite what Jeff Buckley said, I do think that there is a place for music criticism.

With this is mind I asked Ryan Brennan, editor and journalist with ‘The Voice’ magazine about his feelings on the matter. “When I started writing about albums and gigs I definitely had weird feelings about it. I was such a huge music fan and I felt this strange kind of guilt about criticising people I respected. I specifically remember an incident with Placebo. I interviewed them shortly before their second album came out. It was one of the best interviews I’d ever done, I really liked them and I had a really good laugh with them. A couple of months later I got their album to review and I didn’t like it at all. I had this huge wave of guilt as I wrote the review. I just kept remembering how nice they’d been and I knew they probably wouldn’t give a shit about my review but I still felt bad.” I put it to him that this is a feeling that fades as you gain more journalistic experience. “I agree completely. With music criticism you undoubtedly develop a thick skin and you get over the childish feeling of wanting to get on well with the bands.”

Does he think that music criticism is an important form of expression? “It is and it isn’t. If you actually stop and think about the fact that any review is simply one person’s opinion, it does make you question its worth. Saying that though, I know that people could take a reviewer’s advice about an album and agree with him or her about it and this could happen a few times. In this way, you can find a few writers who you think like the same kind of stuff as yourself and you trust them from then on.” I asked Gary if he’d ever been hurt by something written in the papers. “There was only one thing that really pissed me off. I played a few support gigs with Jack L around the country and there was a random paragraph in a Dublin music newspaper making fun of me. I just didn’t get it. They were mocking me for playing with him and it was such crap, unnecessary journalism. I think this is the area where music journalism goes sour. Techn

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