Illustration by Dean Lewis whose website, Older Than Evil, can be found HERE.
Wake up! Wake up! You’re already dead…that’s my message to whoever runs the Independent On Sunday.
The news that you have dropped your leading rock critic Simon Price should not really come as a shock to anyone in these increasingly penny pinching and bland times.
These are times of conservatism and fear and saving pennies. These are certainly not times of fierce writing, great ideas and feeling fired up by machine gun prose, not a place were words are weapons…just dull space filling fodder.
And that’s not what I want from the iOS , thats why I thought it was called the Independent…you are one of the few papers I read, primarily for your indpendence, Simon’s stuff and the dinosaur coverage…
Maybe you were trying to save money or preferred to turn your music writing into the usual bland mush that makes up mainstream music coverage. You know the usual list of half baked hipster indie and music as lists of trendy bands to talk about but not to listen to. This is the world of caring about the Mercury Prize and coffee table fake alternative. Simon Price never fitted into this world and that’s why he was one of the few we could be arsed to read.
The great thing about Simon was that he was as eccentrically brilliant as his hair- part goth, part pop, part agent provocateur and always entertaining. You didn’t have to agree with the music he liked to love or the way he wrote about it. He was like a one man war against the boring Sunday paper coverage of music and he created a world where polished pop could be taken seriously as well as ignored goth genius Bauhaus and the Manics were the poet laureates to a generation of sinners, a place that had no rules and was always a wake up call in the monotonous hip list of the world of the Sundays where the talk is of which is the correct carpet to have in your correct flat to walk over to get your correct meal.
Thank fuck for the internet that we don’t have to rely on these papers any more.
There is less and less to read if you live outside London and you want more from culture than a tame run down of Hoxton hip or metropolitan fashion lists. If you are losing readers Independent On Sunday how about living up to your name and becoming independent. Stop reading like some sort of London weekly and acknowledge the rest of us in the UK who have far wider tastes and ideas than you give us credit for. I would hate to see you disapear, there are far too many right wing rags out there to lose one that is meant to be on our side.
If the IOS were too skint to employ Simon then you are in more trouble than we thought and if you were trying to get more mainstream hip then you are even in more trouble than that.
One thing is for sure, Simon Price will be back pretty soon.
The post Open letter to the Independent On Sunday about the dropping of your best music writer, the great Simon Price appeared first on Louder Than War.