"Boy's Own Adventures: Critical Bias"

"Ironically, the college rock milieu whose taste Carducci derides as emasculated is just as much a boy's own world as the world of hard rock. Here, male cameraderie is expressed not through sports or motor maintenance but through collecting music, debating music, curating rock culture. To lapse into Carducci's thinking, this is a homosocial fraternity of nerds, rather than of brawny, brawling regular guys. In the UK, this sensibility is generally known by the shorthand term 'trainspotter' (derived from a particularly anal-retentive, futile pastime of collecting the numbers from locomotives). Its origins, according to Simon Frith and Howard Horne in Art Into Pop, lie in the jazz clubs of the late Forties and Fifties. These were 'rooms above pubs, people's bedrooms even, where serious young men (and a few young women) gathered to play and discuss records'. The peculiarity of jazz in Britain was that 'something understood as a folk form, live music for dancing and community entertainment, became a recording cult, music for collectors, for an elite of jazz students, musicologists and discographers. Solemnity not excitement defined true jazz fans, who self-consciously distanced themselves from the general public and were suspicious when anyone like Louis Armstrong became popular'. Music was seen in terms of authenticity versus commercialism - an opposition which has endured to this day, and with the same male v. female subtext. Jazz appealed because of its propensity for being taking seriously, for being more than mere fun. As Francis Newton observed in 1959, 'the quintessential location of the fan is not the dance hall, the night club, or even the jazz concert or club, but the private room in which a group of young men play one another's records, repeating crucial passages until they are worn out, and then endlessly discussing their comparative merits'."

On his blog, Simon Reynolds posts a lost chapter from his 1995 book, The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion and Rock'n'Roll (co-written with Joy Press).