It is said that journalists write the first draft of history. However, it's still not clear if the popular music academy values the pioneering groundwork that music journalism (and its broader cousins, music criticism and commentary) provides for further longer-form analysis. One of the most damaging criticisms a new piece of academic writing can be given is ‘it's too journalistic’, a comment that is common but also somewhat puzzling given that so many pioneering popular music academics spent significant chunks of their writing/research careers as journalists (Simon Frith, Dave Laing, Bruce Johnson, John Street, Roy Shuker, to name a few). Is the implication that deadline-driven music journalism can only ever be a sketch or a practice run – while long-form, longer time released academic writing is a final word?

Certainly American writer Chuck Eddy's collection isn't the first to focus solely on reproduced music criticism (see, notably, Robert Christgau's Any Old Way You Choose It [1973/Reference Christgau2000] and the collection The Pop, Rock and Soul Reader [Reference Brackett2005]). Additionally, collections like this do provide important reminders of the conditions of commenting on popular music as it is being received by the audience for the first time. Some introductions are given to artists and releases that now seem laughable (‘[Marilyn] Manson put on quite a show’, p. 64) but it also boldly goes where academics often nervously cower – making wildly outrageous appraisals with little other than gut instinct as support. The comparison between Radiohead's single ‘Just’ and Weird Al Yankovic's Nirvana rip-off ‘Smells like Nirvana’ (p. 20) was likely written as an absurdity to amuse at the time, but given the turns Radiohead have subsequently made, Eddy's ear may have been onto something in terms of the band's developing irony bypass.

So how can a collection of ‘first drafts of [popular music] history’ provide value for popular music academics? To begin, Eddy's work can be understood as a cultural history of music criticism and its relationship to journalism. Eddy never uses the term ‘journalism’ or ‘journalist’ (perhaps such a term is too grown up for his taste or narrowed his work prospects), but reading his pieces with their original publication contexts in mind there are clear markings of a cultural fourth estate gatekeeper. Eddy is prolific, energetic and loves a one-liner, and the collection (and the writer/critic/fan) demonstrates a musical scope that is richer than the collection's title implies. While Eddy explains in the introduction that this diversity came about because ‘my musical tastes never stayed in one place long’ (p. 3), surely it is the rare position of being exposed to so much music (often unwillingly) that helped develop this palate. Unlike academics who often have to demonstrate that a fire is already burning before they can justify publication, Eddy got to take as much kindling as he could get his hands on and choose where to set off sparks.

The book is arranged thematically (perhaps a throwback to the types of categorisation his work may have originally received in publications like The Village Voice, Rolling Stone and Spin), and there are almost 90 individual pieces ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand words. Often most interesting is the way musicians, styles and genres are framed, allowing a contemporary reader to gain a sense (or further confirmation) of political struggles emerging within the industry at the time. For example, his piece on the Spice Girls and Gina G, originally written for LA Weekly in 1997 (2011, pp. 277–281), reports on a music that was clearly omnipresent for ‘the masses’ of the day (even if likely cool readers of the publication may have liked to pretend they were unaffected).

Eddy explores the phenomenon of both epic female-led acts by providing historical and industrial mainstream pop context (‘the whole point of assigning individual “personalities”, obviously, just like the Monkees or Village People, is to cover all social-class fantasy-taste bases’, p. 277), but he quickly moves on to describe The Spice Girls' music in other genre terms. He describes the big single by applying an unusual genre label, ‘worldwide Spice hit, “Wannabe”, just plain rocks’ (p. 277, emphasis Eddy), going further with this description to suggest that mainstream Top 40 success had more music history cred than the teenage audience may otherwise allow (‘[Wannabe]’s got a hard '60s garage-guitar riff, but unlike, say “Devil's Haircut” by Beck, where the garage riff just stands alone in the corner with no comparable rhythm or voice pushing it forward, this riff actually helps communicate punk-rock emotion', p. 278). Beyond this he continues to compare the single (and The Spice Girls more broadly) to other artists-as-genre-pioneers like the New York Dolls, Neneh Cherry, Pink Floyd and TLC (p. 278), all interesting reading, but telling about popular music's cultural history, too. It seems that as of 1997, pop music could not be written about in its own terms, but still needed to be legitimised by references to other older, perhaps ‘heavier’ genres – why not compare the girl pop to other iconic girl-driven pop over history such as The Supremes, or even solo songwriter-factory work like Stock Aitken Waterman? Perhaps because as apparent value went, rock still remained the most valuable currency for ‘serious cred’ at the time.

Eddy doesn't go directly with the expected stereotypes of a male writer of a certain age with a certain mainstream profile (that is, he doesn't directly say which one of the Spice Girls he most fancied). However, it is telling that he still doesn't quite use each artist's name when talking about them either, instead using ‘the redheaded one’, ‘the sporty one’, ‘the blonde one’, and so on (p. 277). This shows that despite the apparent ‘girl power’ of pop music that ‘rocks’, a question about the broader value of women and this type of music remained. In comparison, one of Eddy's earlier pop tart-describing pieces, a 1990 Request review of a comparable group of pop ‘boys’, New Kids on The Block, at least provides details of each first name of each member of the group (‘“the cute one” (Joey), “the smart one” (Donnie), “the banana-nosed one” (Danny), “the preppy one” (Jon) and “the preppy one's brother who often catches the flu” (Jordon)’ (p. 18).

Looking back at such details, they may be small, but they are also the types of things that can remind contemporary readers, listeners and writers that history often repeats. Genres and genders have not been equal for a long time, even during times when apparent barriers were considered relatively permeable. Overall, for listeners who claim to have ‘eclectic taste and like a bit of everything’, this might serve as a beginning-to-end read. However, for popular music academics and journalists it provides an opportunity to cherry-pick according to target research, market or taste. Despite the current ‘anyone can write anything about any song’ culture that seems to dominate discussions of music gatekeeping generally, collections like this demonstrate the skill required to actually pull it off.