David Keenan (born April 1971) is a Scottish writer and author of four novels.

Career

He used to run the Glasgow record shop, distribution company and record label

Volcanic Tongue Volcanic Tongue is a record shop, distribution company and record label located in Glasgow, Scotland. It specialises in underground music from the UK, US, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. They describe their remit as "free folk, psych, J ...

Journalism

His work for ''

The Wire ''The Wire'' is an American Crime film, crime drama Television show, television series created and primarily written by author and former police reporter David Simon. The series was broadcast by the cable network HBO in the United States. ''The ...

'' (who he wrote for from 1996 to 2015) was highly influential, helping to focus the magazine more towards coverage of new experimental rock, noise, folk, industrial and psychedelic music. His most frequently cited article is a cover story that appeared in the August 2003 issue entitled "

New Weird America New Weird America is a 21st century style of music that primarily draws on psychedelic and folk music of the 1960s and 1970s. Etymology The term was coined by David Keenan in the issue 234 (August 2003) of ''The Wire'', following the Brattlebo ...

", where Keenan coined the phrase "free folk", later bastardised to include "

freak folk Psychedelic folk (sometimes acid folk or freak folk) is a loosely defined form of psychedelia that originated in the 1960s. It retains the largely acoustic instrumentation of folk, but adds musical elements common to psychedelic music. Charac ...

" and "wyrd folk" and used to describe everyone from Jack Rose and Charalambides through Devendra Banhart. In an August 2009 piece for ''The Wire'', Keenan coined "

hypnagogic pop Hypnagogic pop (often abbreviated as h-pop) is pop or psychedelic music that evokes cultural memory and nostalgia for the popular entertainment of the past (principally the 1980s). It emerged in the mid to late 2000s as American lo-fi and noise ...

" to describe a group of musicians whose work resembled "pop music refracted through the memory of a memory". His article incited a slew of hate mail that derided hypnagogic pop as the "worst genre created by a journalist". Keenan became disenchanted with the movement once it homogenized with the mainstream. A 2009 quote of Keenan cited by Karl Shaw, reproduced in his article in the Wall Street Journal (Review, 24–25 Sept 2011), on

the Beatles The Beatles were an English Rock music, rock band, formed in Liverpool in 1960, that comprised John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr. They are regarded as the Cultural impact of the Beatles, most influential band of al ...

: "The Beatles are the absolute curse of modern Indie music...my favorite Beatle is

Yoko Ono Yoko Ono ( ; ja, 小野洋子, Ono Yōko, usually spelled in katakana ; born February 18, 1933) is a Japanese multimedia artist, singer, songwriter, and peace activist. Her work also encompasses performance art and filmmaking. Ono grew up i ...

; without Yoko's influence, I don't think there would be any Beatles music I could listen to."

Novels

His

debut novel A debut novel is the first novel a novelist publishes. Debut novels are often the author's first opportunity to make an impact on the publishing industry, and thus the success or failure of a debut novel can affect the ability of the author to p ...

, '' This Is Memorial Device'' ( Faber, 2017), won the Collyer Bristow Award for Debut Fiction and was shortlisted for the 2017

Gordon Burn Prize Gordon Burn (16 January 1948 – 17 July 2009) was an English writer born in Newcastle upon Tyne and the author of four novels and several works of non-fiction. Background Burn's novels deal with issues of modern fame and faded celebrity as l ...

. His second novel, ''For the Good Times'' ( Faber, 2019), won the 2019

Edna O'Brien Josephine Edna O'Brien (born 15 December 1930) is an Irish novelist, memoirist, playwright, poet and short-story writer. Elected to Aosdána by her fellow artists, she was honoured with the title Saoi in 2015 and the "UK and Ireland Nobel" D ...

described reading his third novel, ''Xstabeth'' (White Rabbit, 2020), as 'feel nglike being cut open to the accompanying sound of ecstatic music’. His fourth novel, ''Monument Maker'', will be published by White Rabbit in 2021. He is also the author of ''England's Hidden Reverse'', a biography of Coil,

Current 93 Current 93 are an English experimental music group, working since the early 1980s in folk-based musical forms. The band was founded in 1982 by David Tibet, who has been Current 93's only constant member. Background Tibet has been the only const ...

and Nurse with Wound.

References

External links

Interview in Stylus magazine
{{DEFAULTSORT:Keenan, David Living people Melody Maker writers The Wire (magazine) writers Scottish rock musicians Scottish experimental musicians Scottish journalists 1971 births