David Keenan


David Keenan is a Scottish author, critic and musician who has been a regular contributor to The Wire since 1995. He is the author of England's Hidden Reverse, a biography of Coil, Current 93 and Nurse with Wound. He used to run Volcanic Tongue. His novel For the Good Times won the 2019 Gordon Burn Prize.
His work for The Wire has been 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", where Keenan coined the phrase "free folk", later bastardised to include "freak folk" 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" 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, on the Beatles: "The Beatles are the absolute curse of modern Indie music...my favorite Beatle is Yoko Ono; without Yoko's influence, I don't think there would be any Beatles music I could listen to."