There’s an argument to be made that the reason British music criticism is in such a fucking hole at the moment is because we never had any heroes to look up to when we were at that suggestible age. It’s not as if, say, Daniel Booth’s Melody Maker opinion pieces in the late 90s were sufficient enough to inspire my generation to rise up with pen and follow in his footstep, or as if there’s 3,000 female bloggers out there who duct-tape a set square to their chin before they go to sleep each night, hoping they’ll wake up looking more like Kitty Empire.Like the majority of guys writing good music hackery in the UK these days, however, I learned to love journalism through video game reviews. Zzap! 64 was the first magazine I purchased regularly as a youth, the short-lived period Sega Power went through where every single review was based around a gimmick and they mainly parroted lines and quotes from The Day Today was the first time I realised how fun journalism could be… video games journalism means, and has influenced me, a lot more than anything else. A lot more than music criticism, at least. When it comes to belligerent motherfuckers that look like child sex offenders, I’d take Stuart Campbell over Everett True ten times out of ten.
But we want to talk about the guys who started it off for us. And so I here present a series of columns I first read aged 8. Bobby “The Brain” Heenan’s “Brainstorms” columns from the old WWF Magazine. Whether you’re up for light-hearted racism, jokes about some guy’s dead mother, old school Catskills stand-up zingers, or more light-hearted racism, Heenan had you covered. The guy is currently in a medically-induced coma, so I’ll upload a few more of these when he dies next month. But, seriously, they’re fantastic.
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