Entertainment For Lively Minds
The recieved wisdom that the NME is 'Not as good as it used to be'.
Posted by sandamiano on 29 July 2009 - 5:17pm.
Ever since i was 15, people have been telling me it's 'not as good as it was when (insert mid 70s/ late 80s journo here) wrote for it' only now, as i still read it, there's 2 generations of people saying it instead of just 1.
The new editor's appointment will stir up the usual 'God the NME! Is that still going?' talk on various forums as per. I'd say if many a WORD reader gave it a once over they'd be pleasantly surprised by at least 1 or 2 of the pieces in any given issue. The whole thing is usually written with a zeal and cheer missing from many a more po faced publication/ online music site, not THIS one obviously!
I'll miss it when it's gone.
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Yeah, but it's not as good as it used to be...
I don't know whether it's worse than it was
I think the main difference is it used to aspire to something more than being Heat mag for indie kids. But aspiration in the form of any attempt at intellectualism is so uncool now.
Does it challenge the readership?
I don't mean in the use of overwrought linguistic stylings by Ian Penman or Paul Morley, but by featuring music that the readership in the main isn't attuned to. One piece that springs to mind is Danny Baker's piece on Earth, Wind and Fire.
It was guaranteed to upset the hardened punk fan.
Hot to Trot
It may be an inappropriate time to mention it given the recent passing of Steven Wells, but the publication did get on my nerves somewhat in the mid-late 80s when it became pretty much the house newsletter for the SWP. Case in point - Lofty from EastEnders views on anarcho-syndicalism (not making this up)...
Noam Chomsky was unavailable that day...
so Tom Watt was seen as an adequate replacement.
"Heat for Indie Kids". Perfectly Put.
The NME is about the image, and not the music, and that is where the problem lies.
I suspect that the NME...
...has always been a blend of the inspired and the awful. The writers are given a lot of free rein that they wouldn’t get anywhere else. Some take this slack and end up hanging themselves with it (see the deftly executed gunshot to the foot that is James McMahon's review of I Started Out With Nothin’ And I Still Got Most Of It Left ). Others blossom and eventually move on to bigger and better things.
I was buying the NME from the 1990s, up until the mid 2000s. In the 1990s I remember it being a self-important and rather two-faced entity, wagging a moralising finger with one hand, and flipping a heartfelt V-sign with the other. Its main appeal was that it covered bands that didn't appear in the monthly music press.
I stopped buying it a couple of years into Conor McNicholas editorship, when I realised that I was paying quite a lot of money for something that irritated me. Whether this was a sign of a decline in the quality of the magazine, or an indication that I was beginning to turn into my father, is up for debate.
I’ve picked it up occasionally since then. It never seemed to be heading in a particularly inspired direction. McNicholas, the editor, embodies the slick-backed DNA of something that evolved in a coffee cup, left next to a radiator in The News of the World offices. The kindest thing that can be said about his tenure on the NME is that it didn’t close while he was in charge.
Maybe Krissi Murison can turn it around.
Funnily enough
I picked up the recent edition featuring Ian Curtis on the cover to mark the 30th anniversary of Unknown Pleasures. It was more as a shock reaction that 30 years had flown by - I remember buying the NME when that photo of Ian Curtis appeared originally.
I had not actually read NME in nearly 20 years probably. It's not aimed at me now - and I remember it fondly from days of yore - Penman/Morley/Baker/CSM et al - but the edition I picked up was well written and had a good range of features I thought.