275: The attack and the empathy, the open heart and closed fist.
Hullo.
Kulkarni
Links
Bye
When the Chart Music Patreon mail arrived entitled Neil Kulkarni: 1972-2004, I thought “that's a shame” as I presumed it meant that he was leaving the podcast. It took several re-reading until I really grasped the fact it was saying exactly what it was saying– he'd died. I was distraught, and I bounced through several levels of distraught, approaching it from angles which surprised me. It's a lot. In terms of people I don't know, this one is up there with Banks. And 51. 51.
The pieces people will insatantly link are his precisely-controlled knife attack ones, and understandably so. They're hilariously entertaining. He didn't suffer fools. He made fools suffer. He would guide all easy, unexamined accepted wisdom into an enormous wicker man and set it on fire. Here's his piece on the lies of Britpop (“Nothing more enraging than a badly rewrit history.”) and you can see the seething frustration that of how a historical period was flattened (and you can likely see how his thinking worked into the mix in Rue Britannia). You can see his attempt to create an alternate history of the 90s in his A New Nineties series on the Quietus.
However, he wasn't a contrarian – he cared intensely about what music could do, in all forms, and he was demanding the highest standards, from whatever genre he was approaching (he approached everything, including genres many just shun - he was always an amazing Metal critic). I'm also amazed what he didn't write about. It was only when listening to Chart Music did I discover that he was a huge fan of the Rolling Stones – perhaps his fave band, and he never wrote significantly on them. When he was so fiercely anti-retro, part of me was surprised – but it clicks into space when you see it through the filter of “If you have the Rolling Stone (so born of their time) what's the fucking point of a knock-off who is echoing them (and divorced from the time they're creating)?”. Art of excellence always comes from the time it's in, and trying to understand the world from the place they find themselves rather than trying to recapitulate some golden age.
But we're getting ahead of ourselves here.
When I first hit Kulkarni it was when he was a writer at the Melody Maker. He stared writing around when I started reading, being hired off the back of this letter...
...which says a lot about him, in terms of the core energy. It also shows why I loved the Maker so much then too. There's not many organs which would get a letter like that and understand the writer is exactly who they need working for them.
I probably first noticed him from his knuckledusters-on stuff. It was fun to see him kick period Tee-shirt bands to death – here's him on Ned's Atomic Dustbin - but it was always venom with an intense purpose. He wanted pop music to be better – a perennial uphill battle. He championed what he loved fiercely, often to a readership who were ambivalent at best whenever he wandered out of the indie band canon. He wrote so hard, he made me want to follow wherever he led, and that's what I think of – not that he murdered Kula Shaker with such ferocious grace, but that he led me to (say) the Wu-Tang clan and told me I'd love it, and he was right.
When asked about my criticism, I list four names who influenced me growing up in the 90s – two games critics, two music critics. Kulkarni was one of the music ones. In the 15 years, when that was basically what I did, he was there, and especially as a younger writer, I tried to bring more of that approach to games. The attack and the empathy, the open heart and closed fist. Most importantly: this shit matters.
There's one period piece I think of is actually one of his interviews, with Marilyn Mason. Specifically, this bit...
...Which I read on a Wednesday Lunch in Stafford, and then re-read, and then insisted on reading aloud to my friends. Look what that does – it opens hard, paraphrases Nietzsche, applies to to Manson and gets him to buy into it... and then kicks the legs out from under him. I get it, I get you, and I still think this is a bullshit way to go. So much critical vitriol is in bad faith, and refuses to even try to understand. That's basically only ever good for yuks. Where I most loved Kulkarni was when he engaged with something, got it and then still rejected it. Take this later piece over at the Quietus, where he reviews the re-issue of The Stone Roses. Understanding need not end with a shrug or a hug.
He never stopped writing professionally in places like the Quietus, and for his own newsletter. He taught. He made his own music. In the last eight years, he was one part of Chart Music, the podcast where he and some of my other fave Melody Maker journos spend a looooong time talking about music and culture via the filter of a deep read of a single Episode of Top of the Pops. Also, jokes. If you haven't and you're in the audience who TOTP would mean anything, it's a wonder, and well worth your time. There's still so much of his I haven't read either. I still haven't had a chance to gothrough his records of 2023.
We followed each other on twitter, but I didn't know him. If you want a tribute by someone who did, here's Simon Price writing at the Quietus. I saw him in the flesh only once, at the Chart Music live show just before Christmas. Afterwards, in the bar, I wanted to go and say hello, but chickened out. I clearly regret that now. I'm not sure what I'd have said. I'm sure it would have been embarrassing.
An occasional correspondent wrote to me recently, asking what sort of fan letters creatives like to receive? Have you any advice what to write? I gave some basics: just talk about what the work did for you, and don't expect or ask for a response. This is about human connection, and you're sharing what something they did did to you. Let it be that. Because, in a real way, a fan letter is mainly about you – it's about pilgrimage, and them as an altar. They can't say anything they haven't already said. That's why you want to say something back.
Embarrassing is fine. Caring is cringe.
I did have one interaction with him which I think of a lot – and I'm not even 100% sure it was him. It was circa Plan B or Careless Talk, where he was doing some bits and pieces, including copyediting. I'm pretty sure added a perfectly sarcastic Ed comment to one of my reviews. I'd been lazy with thinking an idea though. I was venting some overblown purple prose about Sigur Ros, talking how you experience the vocals as pure sound, and the Ed comment said something like “Because they're singing Icelandic, you twonk – Ed”. I laughed. I should have nailed what I meant better, because as written, I was a twonk. I think of it often when doing a second draft, looking for things which would make my internal Kulkarni roll his eyes.
“Excellence is the minimum we should expect” is all the way through with Kulkarni. He tried to do it, he introduced you to as much excellence he could find and was furious at anyone who fell beneath that. He was by all accounts, an incredibly kind and gentle person – but the ideas came flowing out of him. He always seemed angry, not bitter. That's a hard thing to maintain. Bitter is anger eating itself. Pure anger is actually about hope. Pure anger believes things can be different than they are. That's why you're fucking angry.
Back in the 1990s, there was always a parasocial aspect with magazine writers for me – I suspect me running conversations in my head with imaginary versions of people is where I get my character voices from. That was definitely true with Kulkarni. I often thought of mag critics as kind of surrogate older siblings – I'm an oldest child, so don't have a cool older brother. That's kind of what the people in the music press were in those teenage years. That's all just imaginary, pure fantasy, in love with prose and where it takes you.
He writes about this in his Ten Point Guide to being a better music critic – and much of this is transferable to other criticism...
- Teenagers. Read. By which I mean devour. Listen. By which I mean hollow yourself out until you only exist in the spaces between the pop you love. Then, try and find yourself again, or at least create something tangible in the gaps. Find the unique thing you have to say, the unique way you have of saying it, and hone the fucker until you can hear yourself talking on the page, until you can recognise yourself a line in. Your voice is easier found with a chip on your shoulder and a pain in your heart. Think about those writers who you feel weren’t just writing for you but who come to live in your life, a constant over-the-shoulder presence yaying or naying the choices you make. If you don’t want to be that important to your readers get out the game.
Let's say that bit again...
Think about those writers who you feel weren’t just writing for you but who come to live in your life, a constant over-the-shoulder presence yaying or naying the choices you make.
He was one of those writers. He still is.
However, since I started listening to Chart Music, this image has been significantly more detailed, less fantastical. These multi-hour-long podcasts with him talking about about pop music, and life, and the intersections thereof inevitably give you much more. They become someone who is a part of your life. Especially in recent years: Chart Music was one of the podcasts I chained with Iris sleeping on me, working my way through all those early episodes as the nights inched towards dawn. Kulkarni talking about his family was a filter on my new family.
This is pure parasociality, but the details add up to a picture. You may not know someone, but you know of someone better . Each episode is talking about where they were in that year, so I know a lot of the Kulkarni life, the schools, the various hates and loves of his youth. I knew some already from his excellent Memoir, Eastern Spring from Zero books but so much fine detail, in the mode of the stories you'll lay down in a pub. I've heard Kulkarni talk that stuff for hours and hours and hours...
So with that, while I'm mourning the influence, I'm also thinking of the reality, as I know a bit more of the life that was lost. I know about him as a widower (I started listening to Radio 3 because of his piece about how he turned to it in grief.) I know about his children, and the war with one daughter over what real Metal is. I know of his grandchildren and his partner. I know that, and now when I think of it and the grief turns from the abstract of losing someone whose work you were a huge fan of to the much more specific loss of a real human leaving real humans behind. I can only imagine what they're going through now, and then I'm distraught again for them.
I'm writing this to see if I can process this. I can't just sit and stare into space. You have to believe writing does something, and that the world will be somehow make more sense when you assembled those letters in the right way. It's why the fingers keep moving, and that when your thoughts are externalised on a screen perhaps others will find that exorcism of use, helping them get wherever they need to be.
I have no idea whether it ever worked for Kulkarni, but I know what he externalised meant the world to me.
Here's the crowdfunder to financially support his dependents right now.
- These Savage Shores by Ram V and Sumit Kumar has just been released in a fancy new edition from vault. I was honored to write a new intro for it. They also just put the whole first issue online here, which is really worth your time.
- Chip's latest newsletter features his Daredevil Slides for his Marvel Summit. Him and Leah Williams are the people whose pitches I most look forward to seeing for their mastery of the form. I actually did a Leah homage pitch for my suggested plans for the Krakoan endgame.
- Sktchd presents their big year's retailer article, which takes the temperature across the whole industry – which is actually more optimistic than I was expecting. With caveats, obviously. “While I try to feature a mix of shops, talking to ones that offer a range of scale, geographic location, approach, experience, and everything else, this is just a small cross section of stores in a market comprised of a couple thousand of them. It is almost certain that some did far worse than those I talked to. Others may have done much better. Each shop represents itself and no one else. It’s like retailer Ryan Higgins from Sunnyvale, California’s Comics Conspiracy told me: “I’ve always liked the saying, ‘There’s not a comic industry, there’s like 2,500 comic industries. Every store is its own, special world.’
- Role To Cast finished their DIE RPG season and had me on as a guest to talk about it. You can listen to the whole season here.
I wasn't planning on sending a newsletter this week, but sometimes the world has other ideas. There's been various bits of comic news, but it can wait. There's nothing too urgent – solicits and the usual.
I've been pressing on with various WFH stuff I need to wrap – I actually said yes to a quick extra 15 pages for a Marvel thing, so while I'm working through my commitments, I added another one. It's kind of a gracenote on my time in the X-office, and is useful to various other things in other ways. Look at me be vague. I see myself basically carrying on like this to Mid February,.
There is one gap after that however – I've decided to actually do Emerald City Comic Con. I'll write more next time, but this is my first US comics con since before Covid, and the first (and only) time I'll be doing a con during my second time at Marvel. Which, yes, does feel weird.
After that: other stuff.
Speak soon.
Kieron Gillen
London
24.1.2024