THE WORST NME COVER OF ALL TIME

If a publisher launched a new weekly music magazine - they would wipe the floor with competition so weak as the NME.

One out of 10 *cackle, wheeze*

Do you have this fucking sentence on your desktop so you can c+p it in every time a thread about the NME pops up?

Also, the new 'Tracks!' section doesn't work. Even though it quite easily could, as a million blogs have proven. They haven't sorted them properly - you can't tell straightaway what's a proper single, what's a download or what's simply getting radio play. It seems to completely ignore 'illegal' downloads in favour of iTunes or Napster stuff, unsurprisingly.

http://microsites.nme.com/thisweek/img/cover_191004_L.jpg

They've sort of rejigged the insides as well. As in taken what they'd obviously spent months on for their last redesign, and changed some of it about a bit. Like emboldening the font they'd use for headlines for the 'Go Postal' page (ie 'Angst') and putting a border around it. Except now the letters page is called 'The Letters Page'.

I count at least four plugs (including one full page) for 'SUBSCRIBE NOW! GET EIGHT ISSUES FREE!'.

This has to be the last stage before it gets to the 'shrink it down to A4 size and make it glossy like Smash Hits' point that killed Melody Maker. Now that the whole Strokes/White Stripes fuss has died off, it's got to be losing sales again, right?

...except we'll fold soon so you wont.

http://perso.wanadoo.fr/sebsioux/Sioux%20other%20items/Sioux%20mags/mag%20covers/NME%2008Nov80.jpg

ihttp://kinks.it.rit.edu/discography/singles/UK/NME660304Dedicated.JPG

http://cambodia.e-files.dk/nme.jpg

http://www.geocities.jp/suuuku/keyword/keypics/76nme.jpg

1. When did the NME begin to feel that good graphic design was incompatible with its survival, and why?

2. Was NME's artyness in the late 70s and early 80s the result of New Wave etc being inherently more 'arty' than what's around now, or an attempt to differentiate itself from competitors Sounds and Melody Maker?

3. 'Good NME' seems to express divergent values -- 'let's expand the definitions of what music is, and who makes it, and what its values are' -- whereas 'bad NME' expresses a hysterical convergence on 'rock values' which nevertheless seem further away than ever: parodic, post-modern, Spinal-Tappish, Golden-Ageist. Does Britain as a society no longer believe in 'the future' and 'the other', but only 'the past' and 'us'?

Let's look at the text this time.

'Your bigger, better NME starts inside'.

Now this is a parody of cliched marketing-speak, right? And yet it is also cliched marketing speak. So is it ironic or sincere? A joke or a plug? Have the inverted commas around a moronic phrase sort of melted away, leaving a kind of sincerity?

Next: 'Win Justin Hawkins' guitar!' ('Win' in white, 'Hawkins' guitar underlined' in red)

Competitions, imperatives, more marketing cliches. And we're only on line two!

Okay, now the headline. All caps, three lines, three different point sizes, two different colours, two lines of type slanted diagonally.

THE SOUTHERN BOYS ARE BACK IN TOWN
KINGS OF LEON
RICHER, RANDIER AND ON THE ROAD TO HELL

Okay, so there's a Thin Lizzy reference. They're British, so 'southern' doesn't mean redneck confederate staters, but middle class boys from southern England, right? The NME sets up a 'bathetic gap' between cliched rock iconography, which is American, and reality, which is British. Already there's an Alan Partridge / The Darkness comedy element creeping in. We can't be authentic, but we can make you laugh by presenting the gap between real and fake, America and Britain...

The 'richer, randier' line. Sex, money and religion. But 'hell' here is nothing to do with Christianity, right, it's just another invocation of tired old rock cliche? And what are we meant to feel about these people being 'richer and randier'? Again, it's just an invocation of rock cliche about stars getting tons of money and blowjobs, isn't it? If so, couldn't they have added a drug reference, just to complete the cliche?

So is the NME being genuinely moronic, or ironic-moronic? Or perhaps they're hoping to be both? In which case, couldn't they clutter the graphics even more by adding a few of the invisible quote marks that seem to be hovering around every word on this cover (even the incongruous comedy southern accent of 'art-rockin' in the USA')?

Drop shadow and a funny angle on those quote marks, please, Mr "Art" "Director"!

2. Cf. Jon Savage/Chris Bohn/Richard Williams in the MM of the time and Dave McCullough in Sounds; there was just more scope for being arty in that pre-Q era.

3. Not necessarily, but the post-1986 NME does believe in demographics.

The weird thing, to me, is that this sort of ironic-moronic marketing-speak is not even necessary for actual, effective marketing. Here in Berlin we have free mags which rely totally on marketing for their existence, like Intro. They look arty and their design is good. Likewise de:bug:

http://www.de-bug.de/news/images/db_images/2806.jpg

I can only assume that British people like stuff that looks cluttered and commercial. It's an aesthetic preference on a national level, not a commercial or demographic necessity. It's like those cafes which have commercial radio on, pumping advertising into the premises. It's not to sell things, or because anyone pays them to do it. It's because the choice is between a dead, sullen silence and the 'lively' sound of the advertising.

You might want to revise that!

http://www.intro.de/img/cover/cover121_300.jpg

http://www.lesinrocks.com/picts/visuels/200410/44361.jpg

http://viceland.com/issues/v11n9/htdocs/cover.jpg

A parody of the worst apects of style mags, it drips with the kind of vitriol for stupid, lazy media habits not seen since... the 'Death of Media' issue of NME (plain black cover, with words 'Death of Media issue' in white) in 1984.

http://www.rock-net.jp/rockinon/cover/0411.JPG

a) Become a sort of museum curator of the glories of the past.

or

b) Use rock journalism as a platform for political activism.

Actually, there is a c) which can fit with either a) or b), depending on how it's applied:

c) Snake eating own tail solution: use position as rock journalist to make media about media. This can either be self-congratulatory (as a lot of TV is) or self-critical (ie the current edition of Vice).

how great does that LOOk though? gorgeous.

THANKS

JW

Did you find that issue of Vice to be as unreadable as I did? It's as bad as the magazines it spoofs.

While the style mag spoofs in the current issue of Vice don't say anything particularly funny / original / cutting about style mags, the parts where it's spoofing itself (the Dos and Donts, the 'Hot' and 'Cool' articles) actually serve draw attention to how shit Vice itself is (as if anyone needed to have that brought to their attention).

I remember when it was different: the 'Is Ginger Baker joining PiL thing, for instance. It seemed like a spoof, but it turned out to be serious. It was a reversal of punk ideology, but punk then was much closer to the kind of sudden, breathtaking reversals that art or fashion alone attempt now.

For Vice, the pitfall of trying to make an edition that looks naff is that naff is exactly where new fashion is likely to come from. It doesn't stay naff for long. At the competitive and creative end of fashion nothing is off limits, and there's nothing that can't be redeemed if the right people get behind it. So the laughs threaten at any moment to be on them. But, you know, I like their vulnerability. I like the fact that they walk a dangerous line with that. The magazine feels alive for that very reason. And just because the NME might go out of business at any moment, it doesn't mean it isn't already dead, and hasn't been for quite a long time, as far as I can see.

This Week - The Cool List 2004
http://microsites.nme.com/thisweek/

Everyone over 20 prepare to laugh at what the NME thinks is cool.