Jag - you touch on a point I wanted to raise,
before this thread went completely kerplunk...

Weekly and monthly music papers and magazines
have filled millions of pages with interviews, articles, and criticism since the mid 20th century...
My youth revolved around the NME, Melody Maker, Sounds
and various other short lived publications..
That's basically how most of us aquired our music knowledge decades ago...
The journalism could be frivolous, or deadly earnest..
The NME would encourage young writers who were pretentious tosspot
wannabe intellectuals,
randomly dropping in trendy university jargon words like 'paradigm','hegemony, and 'semiotics'
to make themselves sound clever and superior...

But it was predominently jobbing jounalism, or enthusiastic fanzine writing..
Doing it mostly for love of music.
Not bloody elitist too far up their own arseholes academics,
hijacking music,
scrabbling for academic status and research funding...

Granted though, the more pretentious NME writers made some of us curious
about those unfamilar clever sounding words,
preparing us for our own problematic encounters with such 'specialist' academic vanity jargon
on our own degree courses...