U2/NME versus Sinker

Aug 88: part company with NME over right to claim that U2’s Rattle and Hum is perhaps not that great.

maybe that's just my own pro-intellectual, pro-late 80s MM bias, though ...

please tell me these wars took place in outer space

what Marcello wrote is essentially a sub-Marxist analysis; the really curious thing to me, as is so often the case, is that he's targeting the cultural proletarianisation - or as i call it "Wienerisation" - of the middle classes, something which also angers the old guard of Conservatives (you can imagine a certain sort of shire Tory ranting about the fact that Radio 4 dares to cover Glastonbury). this is also why that thread is not entirely "unrelated" to the point i made about the media ubiquity of the anti-intellectual clique that took over the NME in the late 80s; the fact that Andrew Collins is on Radio 4 now is relevant, surely?

i can fully understand the motivations behind Marcello's point - it's just that i really don't know how the syndrome he describes could have been avoided by any means other than having an octogenarian Alec Douglas-Home as prime minister in the 1980s. i just feel that this sort of hardline, dogmatic class analysis no longer makes the sense that it probably once did - and the weird thing is that, to make it make sense, ultra-leftists now have to despise changes in the middle classes which the mainstream left of 40 years ago was actually calling for on a cultural level, and wish that the middle classes could again conform to a vision which has more in common with that held by Auberon Waugh or the Conservative Democratic Alliance than it has with anything mainstream-left, ever (or probably anything hard-left before the Berlin Wall fell).

i thought Enrique came best out of that thread; his point that culture-war analysis of "the urban-rural divide" actually reinforced right-wing ideas of what the countryside is like is, and i know it's extremely predictable for me to say this, probably the most OTM thing i've seen on the forums in a long time. i feel the same way about class-war analysis; the only way for the middle classes to please such sub-Marxists, it seems, would be THE SAME WAY THAT WOULD ALSO PLEASE OLD-FASHIONED CONSERVATIVES. a very curious situation.

Southall and Passantino and Stelfox can call me a Blairite if they want. i don't care - being lectured about crypto-Toryism by someone who claims that people should stick to their "own class heritage" (a phrase far more overtly old-school Tory than any of my comments around that time were post-Thatcherite latter-day Tory) hardly sticks in the mind. what worries me is what Marcello will make of my recent blog entries, which are full-on discussions of Wienerisation which do not cite it as some kind of great evil, and refer at length to the old-school ultra-conservatives whose loathing of Wienerisation is precisely the reason why i cannot bring myself to condemn it. ah well, i didn't start blogging to win friends and influence people ...

Spent the next coupla weeks getting enjoyable props from various foax in the London media, as being the Last Principled Man in Rock etc etc (not to mention Nick Coleman at Time Out's comment: that I am a "designer eccentric"). Point being: this was considered a watershed moment, a signic turning point, etc, when the Great NME caves to mere record company whatever (or actually, much more to the point, to some lame focus-group judgment of the tastes of the median NME reader, as insisted on by IPC).

OK: complicating factors here, to demonstrate that I am as much a Manipulative Snake as a Bold Lonely Hero. I got given the review by outgoing reviews editor Alan Jackson — dull writer, lamentable taste, but *extremely* nice bloke, honest, straight-up blah blah — because he was pissed off and wanted to fuck with the system, and knew I was ditto, felt ditto. I wrote the review in order to *get it pulled*, then (more or less) absented myself in order to be able to Yell Scandal!! to the Very Rooftops. Did me no harm whatever (as per my gamble): in two/three years I had my own mag to edit (courtesy another angry NME refugee, Richard Cook), and a Rep that played.

Of course, R&H ¡!sUxOr¡!, which helps. I still get a wee buzz off seeing a great barren reach of second-hand copies in a U2 bin, anywhere in the world.

-- mark s (mar...), June 5th, 2001.

...on his way to becoming one of the nineties' biggest country music stars in America.

Trade Secrets..U2 review swapped to tie in with negotiations for a U2 NME cover feature