THE WORST NME COVER OF ALL TIME

I had a quick flick-through this weeks, there are 'only' two large pages on Lou Reed.

I assume that next weeks will be a larger, more fulsome affair.

Right, I don't know if this is new, but..

On the website, there is "100 best songs of the 60s"

Number 100 is "Send me a postcard" by Shocking Blue.

Could this list actually be interesting? Hmmm.....

http://www.nme.com/images/NMELouReedCoverCMA3-091113.jpg

The 'larger, more fulsome affair'..

A long interview by Lester Bangs, the sort of thing people would write in and say "the writer spent three-quarters of it writing about himself", but of course, they won't now : It's Lester Bangs!

.. and an enlarged version of his last interview alongside Mick Rock, about a photo-book.

according to the front page of this week's Kerrang! there is a Lou tribute inside, courtesy of one of My Chemical Romance who isn't the singer. I thought this was very sweet given that there's no real reason why they should note his passing at all

Juxtaposing Lester Bangs and Mark Beaumont like that is the least flattering comparison ever.

0__o

https://fbcdn-sphotos-f-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-prn2/1604449_10152556551359167_525277165_n.jpg

tbf, if nme is fully committed to being a nostalgia magazine now, I'd me more interested in reading about several of the artists on that cover than the nme's usual fare of stone roses/oasis/sex pistols etc

I can only assume the reggae-pop explosion of 93 and 94 is well documented inside

nu metal of course started in 94 with the 1st Korn album and Kerrang calling it "Nu-Metal" because metal was old fashioned and wouldnt sell and was really really bad and they had to make up a genre that would help sell magazines.

amazing how knackered Brett looks. maybe i'm mistaken but you'd never see a relatively big star Indie rock name look so blates wasted on a cover these days.

Were the NME big on post rock in 1994? Seems more Melody Maker

NME briefly flirted with post-rock in 1999 (Mogwai's Blur t-shirt, GYBE! on the cover), I don't recall it being much of a feature before then - though I'd stopped reading regularly by 1994 so idk maybe it was a thing.

i dont remember it being so

Select was quite big on it from around that big Tortoise album - Salaryman, Labradford, Ui etc

Can't remember a big push from NME's direction before this

'94 was the year I started reading the music press and I think quote-unquote post-rock bands would have got some coverage in NME even if that descriptor wasn't in their lexicon yet. MM was definitely a bigger booster of that kind of thing yeah

To be fair that top ten albums list is pretty damn good. Top two are overrated, but ymmv.

94 was the last good year of nme lists probably. It still had decent stuff in the top 10 til the end of the 90s (unless you hate spz/mercury rev)

but i was always a melody maker guy until they gave catatonia album of the year in 96?

http://www.rocklistmusic.co.uk/mmpage.html

http://www.rocklistmusic.co.uk/nmeindex.html

98 it was

Attention, there has been another important list from the NME!

http://www.nme.com/photos/the-500-greatest-songs-of-all-time-500-401/330541/1/1

http://www.nme.com/news/nirvana/75297

I love to hate a list as much as the next guy but no way I'm clicking 500 links to see 500 items.

jan.hansen.9693 said 3 hours ago
"Imagine" - John Lennon at only number 476 !!!! Just after "Crazy" by Gnarls Barkley at 475 !!!! Then I stopped reading !! This is a joke !!!

nathan.king.777
nathan.king.777 said 2 hours ago
Salt-N-Pepa 'Push It' #466, John Lennon 'Imagine' #476..........What the actual f#@k?????

george.pap13
george.pap13 said 44 minutes ago
Imagine no476, above it shitty hip hop no fucking way

Above us only shitty hip hop.

i imagine working at buzzfeed provides more job satisfaction and pride than working at nme these days

The Top Five in NME's list of the greatest songs of all time is:

5: 'Last Nite', The Strokes
4: 'How Soon Is Now?', The Smiths
3: 'I Feel Love', Donna Summer
2: 'Love Will Tear Us Apart', Joy Division
1: 'Smells Like Teen Spirit', Nirvana

okay

valuable, original and much-needed top 5 for 2014

They've only uploaded 500-401 so far. Blur, Arctic Monkeys, Coldplay, Bowie, Nirvana, Primal Scream, R.E.M and The Jam have all had more than one song place already.

The only decent surprises in that first section have been the appearances of Patio Song by Gorkys Zygotic Mynci, Shame Shame Shame by Shirley & Company, Across 110th Street by Bobby Womack and Overload by Sugababes (or just Sugababe as they've called them) Apart from those it's just the usual suspects. No Libertines yet but they've got to fill that top 100 somehow.

i imagine working at buzzfeed provides more job satisfaction and pride than working at nme these days

current buzzfeed uk editor is ex nme online bod iirc

To be fair that top ten albums list is pretty damn good. Top two are overrated, but ymmv.

was in the mood just to dis nme, but had the same reaction

lol onimo

above it shitty hip hop no fucking way

imagine

was very surprised by the Bobby Womack choice yeah.

last time they did this (greatest singles of all time) was 2002. top 10 was

1. Joy Division - 'Love Will Tear Us Apart'
2. Nirvana - 'Smells Like Teen Spirit'
3. The Sex Pistols - 'Anarchy In The UK'
4. The Rolling Stones - 'Paint It, Black'
5. David Bowie - ''Heroes''
6. The Stone Roses - 'Fools Gold'
7. The Smiths - 'This Charming Man'
8. Oasis - 'Live Forever'
9. Massive Attack - 'Unfinished Sympathy'
10. The Clash - 'London Calling'

oh this is songs not singles my bad.

That 2002 list: so many of those choices are really challenging, weird and new in their original context, but so boring in this context

493. Sugababe – 'Overload' (2000, London). Many's the harried hack songwriter has tried to capture the pain and thrill of young womanhood; they all ring hollow next to this innocent-but-sexy, slinkily irresistible hookfest of a track.

What a sentence!

You should check out the Best Albums Ever thing they did last year. Some of the writing in that makes what you just posted read like Joan Didion.

Man, maybe I should start writing, because I sure as hell know I can do a better job than that already.

Oh no, you’re on a hiding to nothing if you do that, unless you have a day job. I don’t think that good writers are being sought out at the moment; editors would rather have “bratty 20yr olds who take the piss out of everything” mainly because they’re cheaper and provide handy yelpy clickbait. Which is all that people seem to want these days.

I've no problem with bratty young writers, or "hip young gunslingers" as they were once known, taking the piss. It's been part of the fabric of music writing since before I was buying music.

It works about as well as that other long outmoded model, the “adversarial” Westminster Parliamentary system.

It depends who they are and how they write. Age isn't the issue. A 20-year-old wouldn't have stuck me as a bratty young writer when I was 15 and devouring three music papers a week.

Not that I have a dog in this fight, I got old and stopped reading.

The problem isn't whether or not a writer is bratty. It's whether or not they can write well. Dull, inept writing is far more common (though less annoying) than snarky gobshites.

bratty young writers who are good = classic
bratty young writers who are also dull and inept = cringe

like, brattiness by-the-numbers is like...what even is the point of being bratty and obnoxious if you're saying things we've heard before again & again & again

Morley and Penman were on the NME by the time they were 20 (so were Burchill and Baker) and they had a lot more to offer than the recycled PR blether with hyuk-hyuk lolz sauce on the side you tend to see these days. I find it immensely dull and inept, wherever I find it.

Marcello, as someone born in 1990 I - obviously - wasn't around for Morley et al. I read read every issue of NME between 2002-2006 but couldn't pinpoint a single WOW! article in that batch from memory...what was it about the paper at that time that allowed Morley/Penman to write the kind of stuff they did? Why has that changed now? Aside from advertising/internet attention spans etc.

I can't think of a single place to pitch longform, considered music writing to in the UK, maybe outside of the Quietus. Someone please please tell me if I'm wrong.

and don't suggest noisey/thump because the noisey editor went psycho on me and now im banned from contacting either place ever again.

Rest assured, I wasn’t going to recommend the noisy/thump option.

The only reasonable answer I can find to your question is that in the seventies publishers hadn’t quite worked out what was what, so if a magazine was ticking over well enough in terms of circulation and/or reputation it could more or less do what it liked. Because, I suspect, editors at that time tended to throw anything at the wall to see what would stick, greater chances could be taken and there were greater opportunities to be had.

You could say that Q Magazine etc. in the mid-eighties onward did for long-form thinkpiece-type writing but that doesn’t explain the incredible creativity at work in, say, Melody Maker from the mid-80s to the mid-90s. But then IPC gets bought out by multinationals, the internet starts muscling in, and it all ends up becoming about demographics; giving its readers, and "more importantly," its advertisers, what they think they want.

I don't mind young writers having a small degree of "attitude" in their writing style, but over the last couple of years I've been reading "pieces" in places like NME Online and I've often come away with the feeling that the writer is just being snarky for the sake of it, without offering anything else in terms of substance regarding what it is they're writing about. By that, I mean that there's room for a degree of "edge" within a thoughtful, balanced and factually accurate critical piece, but what I feel some of these writers are offering is all snark and not a lot else. I just come away from reading some of these "pieces" feeling that they've been designed to get a negative reaction out of whoever reads them. It's a shame, because when music writing is at its best, it can be insightful and informative and make you look something from an angle you've never considered before.

I don't want to sound like a kiss-ass here, but one of my favourite examples of music criticism in recent years has to be Dorian Lynskey's review for Embryonic by The Flaming Lips as published in Q Magazine. To cut a long story short, DL found the album didn't do an awful lot for him and gave the album two stars. However, I still ended up buying the album anyway on the strength of the review. Why? Because even though DL didn't really rate the album very highly and gave his reasons for doing so, the way he described the album in his review made me think "fair enough, he concedes that the album isn't for him but the album still sounds like something that I'd very much like to hear and may even love". If he'd went the "online journo" route and wrote something that basically read as "this is complete bollocks", without giving much of a reason behind his critical stance or taking the time to describe the albums content, I probably wouldn't have checked the album out.

I think you’re right in your first paragraph; the stuff they write, or are told to write, is essentially clickbait, posted to gain the greatest number of hits possible, with no real underlying wisdom or insight (which you got from Burchill and Parsons back in the day, even at their snarliest and punkiest; you had the feeling they were fighting for something else, maybe something better – who knows?).

As far as your second paragraph is concerned; well, that’s how I try to structure Then Play Long when I come to an album that I know I don’t like – because it is the easiest thing in the world to say “this is complete bollocks, who are these morons who bought this crap?” and the hardest thing in the world to be less than complimentary or even enthusiastic about these records, but to try one’s best to listen hard and find out what was in these records, in this music, which attracted so many people, so that readers might be tempted to give them a chance even if I don’t.