THE WORST NME COVER OF ALL TIME

Alex Turner has said that his Brit Awards speech was his attempt at teaching people about the importance of rock music.

http://www.nme.com/news/arctic-monkeys/75872

its really really pathetic. Why would any girls buy NME? It's pretty obviously seen as a guys mag now and Kerrang is for girls. I remember when both appealed to boys and girls.

that image cuts of the bottom of the cover, the actual cover doesn't actually have debbie harry's disembodied head floating along the bottom, not to disagree with your more general point.

One of the people in that picture is an innovator, a songwriter and a conqueror... and it ain't Albarn, Cooper Clarke, Turner or Harry.

xp

still looks like an afterthought!

Oh, I just clicked it's not the latest new indie band with members prematurely aged.

iow, that elbow bloke is 40. Like, it's only just happened omg.

this one is just a mess. It's like a bad cover of the old Look-In magazine

http://i.imgur.com/UT9X4jK.jpg

I don't know who Peace, Wolf Alice or Temples are :(

big fan of wool phallus here

All you need to know about Peace
http://fuckyouneilkulkarni.blogspot.com/2013/04/peace-in-love-columbia.html

so, how long have they been doing these small print quotations on the left of the cover ?

not that i care to be honest.

worthiness of featured bands aside, the design aesthetic of this new era is truly dreadful.

some other music mag did that quotation thing didn't it? maybe Q on the spine.

yup.

but seem to recall that they never gave the source of the quote, and part of the 'game' was to figure out the connection to an article in the issue.

a bit like how mojo head all their printed letters with movie quotes and you are supposed to figure out the source.

I had not noticed the mojo letters quotes!

Ugh can people stop linking to Kulkarni's old man yelling at clouds schtick? He has been coming across exceptionally poorly over the last few months.

Someone had to say it I guess... I notice this kind of unbridled bitterness seems to be a prevalent thing among writers of Kulkarni's generation lately. The thing is I don't necessarily think they're wrong - they've certainly got a reason to be antsy, but it also displays an utter lack of consciousness or humility, as if everything used to be wonderful and now it's all commercialised shite etc, and before you know it you're sitting in a cab with Kulkarni as the driver spouting off about how everything's wrong with the world today... Also, am I the only one who finds some of his sentences completely unreadable? Is that on purpose?

as if everything used to be wonderful and now it's all commercialised shite etc

daresay there are a bunch of lol old writers whose spiel fits this description but everything I've read by Kulkarni in years has him going out of his way to *not* be that guy

can't say I much enjoy reading him or anyone else foaming at the mouth about some ignorable indie band or other these days, although not sure if that's more to do with the quality of the rhetoric or the fact that it seems so easy to compartmentalise most rubbish music out of my life, generally speaking

The problem is the gap between the idea that Peace are being forced down everyone's throats by an overbearing, powerful industry and the reality that they're extremely ignorable.

http://fuckyouneilkulkarni.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/funk-singular-page-march-2014.html

kulkarni foaming at the mouth about lily allen was about half great and so nearly the kind of calling-out i wanted to read but he just kept devolving into old-man-shouts-at-cloud-about-younger-writers and wah-they've-run-me-out-of-the-industry. frustrating because the bits about media mateyness protecting her was otm

xposts Yeah i've not heard of any of these acts until now either, but despite considering myself an alt/indie fan, I've long considered the NME universe as distant nebula. Same goes for the BRITs. For his sins, Charlie Brooker recently identified a certain part of British pop culture as 'Bake Off', and I know what he means. It's stuff the media seems to think people ought to be interested in, a big glut of mediocre pap that is neither commercially nor alternately interesting (at least not to me). I'm not personally fussed about Emili Sande, Strictly Come Dancing or Arctic Monkeys, but also I see little reason to get wound up about it because this kind of thing's always been around. To me it's like the people who say music's gone down the dumper because 'everything's just Simon Cowell nowadays'. Hasn't this kind of thing always existed? Maybe it's the perception that the once-irreverent, once-independent NME is joining the ranks of Bake-Off, but reading NK's rhetoric I'm never quite sure what it is he's actually frustrated with - he just comes across as angry, and for someone who doesn't like to be seen as a ranter or a finger waggler or a rose-tinter he sure has me confused.

What does "neither commercially nor alternately interesting" mean? I don't understand the Bake-Off analogy. Sande and Strictly aren't "stuff the media seems to think people ought to be interested in" - they get coverage because millions of people really are into them.

And people are into them because they get coverage. They're not interesting to me, but I'm not denying people like them or anyone who does like them. That's my point, it's not worth getting wound up about.

just taste-tested all 3 of those bands and they're ok tbh as long as i don't look at them, altho the Peace bloke has got the horriblest marble-mouthed yelp voice

like if indie 2014 is having a shoegazy fake psyche phase god knows it's done worse

What makes them 'unholy'? Do they sing about satan?

haha that Neil Kulkarni review of Lily Allen is magnificent me-bait :D I think I might have to listen to all the music he angrily links to

wah-they've-run-me-out-of-the-industry

This is the worst thing about these screeds really, like I have sympathy for him to an extent, but at the same time not that much because this is something that every generation of young music journalists have done, including/especially his own.

"This is a significant moment"
HARRY

Well, I've read it all and I agree with it. I don't think it comes off as particularly bitter about his own career, but I speak as a fellow ex-private-school pupil who (bitterly) rejects the bland & baseless elitism of accepted cultural hierarchies, so perhaps I'm overly disposed in its favour to begin with.

Plus, this Bolzer EP is fucken immense :D

it is!

can't really hate on john cooper clarke getting on the cover of a mag in 2014

JCC does voiceovers for oven chip ads in 2014.

Yeah there's less of that in the (completely OTM) Lily Allen piece and he used to be a great writer but like the much more clownish Everett True it's an approach to writing that becomes less and less edifying as the writer gets older. Also as with all these guys the prose just isn't anywhere near as exciting as the writer seems to think.

Don't get me wrong I'd take Kulkarni over any modern day IPC hacks any day of the week but this is a fight that would be better left to some actual young people, except none of them give a shit about the NME or most of the music it covers.

Timely reminder that more people now buy Horse & Hound every week than the NME.

http://nme.assets.ipccdn.co.uk/images/NMECoverKurt_CMA3_010414.jpg

It's like they are now pandering to this thread as it's the last remaining evidence of interest

oh ffs

"Kurt the musical is very likely to happen..."

isnt that a drawing of Macaulay Culkin?

The cost of stock Cobain photos must have gone through the roof this year.

♩_♩

Forget the drugs and the shotgun
Forget the drugs and the shotgun
Forget the drugs and the shotgun
Forget the drugs and the shotgun
Forget the drugs and the shotgun
Forget the drugs and the shotgun
Forget the drugs and the shotgun
Forget the drugs and the shotgun

http://www.nme.com/images/NMECoverStoneRoses_CMA3_220414.jpg

actually made me want to punch someone -anyone- in the face

Just to remind everybody what the NME said about the record at the time.

That was acid house stormtrooper Jack Barron though. He liked it but was annoyed it wasn't ravier.

I’m thinking of all those baffled 15-24 year-olds who the NME would like to be reading them (rather than the 35-54 year-olds who actually do) scratching their heads about an album released before they were born, the original review of which contained references to Rain Parade and Dream Syndicate (“Whit’s that? Ye whit?”).

If you're young and you like indie-rock I don't think the first Stone Roses album is likely to cause much head-scratching. The Beatles split up before I was born but I wasn't puzzled by people talking about them when I was a teenager.

I naively imagine they'd prefer the NME to be on the case about stuff that's happening now. However, the eighth best album in their 1989 critics' poll was Hup by the Wonder Stuff, so no change there really.

I like that record, and loved it to bits when I was 15, but I am fucking fed up of it now.

Not Hup, btw.