Never mind the politics

Once again someone with a relatively high profile in the music world bemoans the lack of 'political' artists in pop music.

Usually it is an artist who makes the claim, which is disheartening enough but at least they have good intentions, but this time it was editor of NME Krissi Murison, writing not in her own paper but in the Guardian.

Now, I admire Murison's editorship of the paper - she's the best chief NME has had in over a decade.

She has brought structure and good - sometimes great - writing back to a magazine that lacked it for too long.

But what she wrote is problematic, simply because she herself is such a powerful gatekeeper, bemoaning the lack of people in a room while choosing who is allowed in.

I scarcely need tell you, it's not remotely true. As ever there is a great pile of high-quality, openly political, socially radical and progressive British artists of all genres banging on the door.

They're also well marketed, with better tunes and more savvy than the generations before - they're not crusty losers.

Any creative across any art form will tell you that these are fecund times for radical, polarised art.

Ms Murison, it is because arts critics and their editors suppress the political, radical and truth speakers in modern culture, not a mysterious lack of people doing it.

In the case of the NME, it is the writing of its critics and its own editorial decisions that have been unable to lift the post-Bragg exclusion zone around radical music in the Britain.

Not for party-political reasons, nor even for the often rolled out stuff about image being everything - plenty of sexy pop singers are socially conscious too.

But simply because the relentlessly corporate energies that drive papers like NME - and many others, as well as review sections in tabloid and broadsheet - find sincerity, optimism, commitment and opinion so unattractive and unnerving that they instinctively force to the periphery people who edge into those areas.

What these machines are comfortable with is schtick.

Modern pop cultural critics like style, form and rendering much more than they like content, intent or layers of meaning. They do so because it's immediately apparent - you know what a show looks like long before you unpack what it's trying to say.

It's quicker and easier, so notebooks are filled with vivid experiential fluff long before any actual meaning began to sink in.

Worse, meaning itself is always debatable, and there's nothing critics fear worse than being made to take a position that might isolate them from their peers.

The deepest, darkest fear in the arts critic's heart is that he or she will get a review "wrong," flying against everyone else's deeper understanding of a piece. So shrug off intent and write up the hats.

Meanwhile the editors are so busy worrying about the business that they forgot what they wanted to say in the first place.

Even as newspapers diminish and music splinters, even as blogs dominate, the NME remains a powerful voice in the music industry. If you get the NME vocally onside, you will likely break your band or at least give them a workable shot.

I don't mean reviews per se. I mean a slightly grander sort of feature-led coverage, alongside regular referencing in the news and other sections that places a band firmly at the heart of the reader's perceived scheme of things.

NME support also powerfully encourages Radio 1 to commit, which in turn is still perhaps Britain's most powerful method of kicking an act into the mainstream.

These decision-makers are not the faceless business types that artists - especially struggling bands - might believe. They do love music and they work in the music world for that reason.

However, at key moments their assessment inevitably has less to do with music and more to do with judging how much money is being invested and who is doing the investing.

And here is a truth long established by such organisations as Media Lens. The nearer you get to the top of any profit-making hierachy, the more the views will be concentrated in pragmatic, non-confrontational centrism.

So the radicals sit where they are perceived to be best suited, where their meaning doesn't need too much unpacking - outside the door.

Ms Murison, let them in or shut up with your moaning.

Don't go to a broadsheet and gripe - run a "new reds" special and radicalise your own charge.