Colourful, self-deprecating memoir ... In-depth analysis ... Music journalists tend to be square pegs of one shape or another, and Kessler’s is a rip-snorting account of a misspent youth well spent; a background full of secrets and lies, French skinheads and sticky fingers. You’ll feel for him ... Rich in musicianly colour ... This is recounted with self-deprecation and dry humour, listing wrong turns and cringes as well as detailing the absurd, joyful surreality of being behind the curtain, seeing the pop levers move.
While there is no shortage of books that celebrate the glory of music journalism, Kessler’s book is arguably one of the first to offer a post-mortem of sorts ... In a smooth blend of the personal and polemical, he maps out the co-ordinates using moments from his own music career ... The book’s sense of place is admirable ... The reader spends a beat too long in the Parisian banlieues with Kessler ... Ultimately, Paper Cuts reads as a Valentine to an industry and magazine that, far from burning out spectacularly, faded away at the hands of British publisher bigwigs.
After reading Ted Kessler’s account of living through the last hurrah and the slow decline of the music press, you would have to conclude that what starts out as a dream job is apt to dissolve into a nightmare ... It adds up to a funny, colourful, occasionally tragic trawl through the challenges of making a living from writing about music ... I would take issue with Kessler claiming he destroyed the music press, given that it is still alive. Really, he’s talking about the death of a mid-Nineties to early-2000s golden age when music journalists and the bands they wrote about were essentially in the same club.
Paper Cuts is primarily an elegiac hymn to that already sepia-tinted era ... Those seeking the not wholly inaccurate cliché of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll will be partly sated. Sex is chastely avoided, but there are drugs aplenty and, inevitably, rock’n’roll is everywhere ... [Kessler] is too smart, funny and deft a writer for his endlessly repeated self-descriptions as 'idiot' and 'doofus' to ring true. No matter: Kessler’s unswerving belief in both the redemptive, sometimes life-changing, power of popular music and the need for it to be documented from the inside by writers such as himself means Paper Cuts defines an era. And it defines it rather beautifully.
Ted Kessler’s Paper Cuts will be of interest not only to music lovers, but also magazine aficionados ... The book only really gets going when [Kessler] starts writing about that career ... In terms of entertainment there are other memoirs written by music journalists that deliver more anecdotes and tales of extravagance, but they were mostly written in or about times when sales, and budgets, were huge. Ted Kessler bears witness to the end times, or near it, which makes Paper Cuts a fascinating document for readers today and in the future.
