I tried to brace myself, but it was no use. However, I rallied back to some sense of joy and am being encouraged by others to keep on with it, and also to enquire as to why my pitch was turned down - 96% of them were, so it could be for many reasons - though looking soberly at the list of books already or about-to-be published, I suppose I should have known better than to champion a New Pop album, or for that matter anything that could be described as 'pop' because so far they have shown almost no interest in publishing anything about or even near that kind of music. It could well be that this next batch disproves my theory; soon enough they will be announced and then I can start to see where the aesthetic lines, so to speak, begin and end.

So, you might say, is this a case of (dramatic sting)...rockism? Oh, probably. And yet I do not say this as an accusation, because the world of music writing is one of those chicken-egg situations wherein certain books sell, so more books are produced that fit that kind, and thus in a matter of a few years, the shelves in the music section are full of books on rock and very little else. (What makes this more complex is that 'rock' has the ability to confer itself to some artists outside itself and not others - hip hop is rock, for instance, but heavy metal is excluded as it is too rock. I'm talking about the 33 1/3 series here, in particular.)

This is, as you can imagine, a problem. The reading public who want to read about pop have probably already given up on the 33 1/3 books because for them, there ain't no water in that well; considering how, well, popular pop is, this seems foolish at first, but then who buys books? Who buys these books? I am not sure, exactly. The 50-quid-men, who only want to read another variation of what they know? (You can be any age and be this kind of man.) The sort of people who take rock very seriously and thus only want 'serious' albums discussed? Well, that does seem to be the case.

So, what to do? I don't want to speak ill of anyone, except to say that this hothouse-artificial situation has to end at some time, though I don't know how long I will have to wait to have someone sympathetically understand that what I am writing is of importance.

I suppose one secret weapon I have in this whole rockism thing is that I grew up in a household with a father who was against all forms of current music - anything recorded since I was a baby was simply not music to him, and it didn't matter what it was. He recognized no differences between domestic or import, popular or obscure, disco or AOR, British or American; to him it was all non-music that was ugly, had awful repetitive lyrics, no harmonies and so on. So I was left alone in the world of popular music, to make my way as I would, with no guidance at all. (My mom, wise as ever, stayed right out of this.) He did cut out a picture of Kate Bush and tacked it above his desk downstairs, but that wasn't because of her music (which he never heard) - it was because he thought she was beautiful. (You can only imagine my dismay at this - I look(ed) nothing like her, and my father never once told me I was pretty, let alone beautiful. But I digress...)

Thus, the rockist attitudes (and some people do have them and are proud of them even, as if they were proof that they aren't anyone's fools and they have a position to work from, etc.) I encounter in print or online seem to me to be...very old-fashioned. Not to mention snobby and predictable, bitter and grudge-holding. This does not make for good writing. Music, after all, is the highest form of art and the one that is the most able to unite people who otherwise may not have much in common (who else to better know this than me?) and it goes on its blithe way not really caring if you like it or not. Because someone else does, and lo and behold, there is nothing you can do about it....