My Thoughts Exactly

"It is such a no-holds-barred book. We know that she’s a great writer because of the songs she has written since her first album, but I thought her capacity for self-reflection and for seeing the patterns that have defined her life and maybe sometimes led to a degree of self-sabotage was really arresting. “It’s that cutthroat, repulsive prizing of money over morals and the well-being of artists.” You could equally read it as history of tabloid culture in Britain in the twenty-first century. She writes about how her life was invaded by the tabloids when she was barely out of her teens. The way that they distort the truth of her life ends up feeding back into the way that she lived it. She alludes to the phone hacking scandal and how very personal things ended up in the papers without anybody having told them. The way that the tabloid media sought to gaslight her over the course of her career is horrifying. Yes. She talks about being allegedly assaulted by somebody who has a close relationship with her record label. Perhaps she talks about this in interviews rather than the book, because it might have been legally problematic, but she claims that when she tried to raise it with the label, their response was essentially, ‘he’s more valuable to us than you are, so we’re not going to do anything about it’. It’s that cutthroat, repulsive prizing of money over morals and the well-being of artists. I’m planning to read Dan Hancox’s book Inner City Pressure: The Story of Grime over Christmas, and I’m excited to read Margo Jefferson’s On Michael Jackson that was recently reprinted. I’d like to read Jeff Tweedy’s memoir and also the Beastie Boys Book – I love the way that has been put together. I also really want to read K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher , the critic who died last year. But Dan Hancox’s book especially, I feel bad that I’ve not read it yet."