THE WORST NME COVER OF ALL TIME

i.e. the notional "sad cases in their 30s still chasing their indie youth" market that meanies like me might point to as the audience clearly isn't much of an audience else they wdn't need the come-ons

I don't mean the names of other bands, which are lined up neatly, but all the clashing Libertines text. It's ugly and it achieves nothing because people who want a Libertines interview don't need six different bits of text.

The Select cover I was trying and failing to post was the one from Feb 95 which is just a picture of the Stone Roses and the single line "So what kept you?"

ach, god knows what that is, it's all effing ugly anyway

(the Libs cover i mean - clearly the Select is better but i think it comes from a more monolithic culture)

Does the world really need a print article about "LIAM'S TWEETS." Really.

not gonna start on my jaded old person's lack of wide-eyed wonder re: what music journalism needs

It's not even "what music journalism needs" - it's more like, what is the conceivable audience for a print piece about Liam's tweets? Someone who doesn't have the internet or twitter and cannot go and look them up for themselves? Is this 80 year old grandfather really in the NME's desired demographic? I guess maybe!

I guess Oasis fans might not know what the Internet is? They must know their demographic better than I do, so who am I to say.

MAN TWEETS!

Front page news.

everybody loves goss in the social media age

hopelessly trying to remember what kind of things i wanted to read about in Kerrang! in 1984

highly promising debut album from New Jersey rockers Bon Jovi.

FISH SPEAKS!

have spent half an hour trying to work out an early 80s equivalent to Twitter just so's i cd do a lame King Diamond joke

xp sadly i did read every Marillion-related tidbit but they felt a bit more substantial at the time

http://i.imgur.com/7YQLgBf.jpg

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Sonny-Moores-sausage-fingers/362286913588

really hate this font they are using for the cover.

oh man enough with this stuff already

http://www.nme.com/images/NMECover101Albums_CMA3_130514.jpg

Doherty almost ruined the only ones for me im not letting him ruin Love.

its going to the pete doherty weekly now that he and carl are back together isn't it ..

LOST CLASSICS and FORGOTTEN GEMS from underappreciated artists neglected by history like Michael Jackson, the Smiths and Neil Young.

look who is on the cover again
http://i.imgur.com/m4OXLhU.jpg

Band name mentioned 3 times

+Pete Doherty

No Oasis tho'

23 page article inside though

the quotes are especially vile

I love the AM and am going to see that show, but good grief, NME needs to shut up about them for a bit.

This thread should be renamed "This weeks NME Cover, you guys"

pls stop with the speech bubbles

Blast from the "noughties"
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-t_LotRcb01c/T5UY9cXdyMI/AAAAAAAAANA/vNmQAEJd_Vk/s400/nme11.jpg

xxxxxxxpost:

I mis-read that band name as 'The Amazing Smackheads' for a second there!

By his cellmate

http://www.lesinrocks.com/wp-content/thumbnails/uploads/2014/08/capture-tt-width-324-height-489-bgcolor-FFFFFF.png

http://stream1.gifsoup.com/view/53500/nuke-o.gif

Gun Club at 7 seems random and Breeders a bit too. I love both those bands though but had not realised they were more 'influential' than say Joy Division. Thankfully the NME has put me right.

if you read the blurbs it appears to be "most influential on bands that the NME has covered in the last six months"

Yeah I love the Gun Club and wouldn't have put them that high. Not sure where they've directly influenced people. Other than expansion of accepted influences or possibly loud quiet loud.
I have a Jeffrey lee Pierce tshirt on as I type.

I don't know what the context for that list could be because I don't understand it at all. Influential is not subjective enough a concept to leave much wiggle room. You sort of have to lead with the people who changed the game to a measurable degree like Dylan, Bowie, Beatles, Velvets, Stooges, Kraftwerk, Stevie, Kate, Run-DMC, etc or go down the contrarian FACT magazine route and say Arthur Russell and ESG. This is just baffling.

Found the explanation:

"When the idea was first floated of an issue celebrating the most influential acts in music today, one question was paramount: where do you put The Beatles? Obviously modern music wouldn’t exist in its current form without them, virtually every facet of NME’s world can be traced back to ‘The White Album’, they’re clearly the most influential act in rock history. End of argument, right?

But how many bands today turn up to a rehearsal room plastered with posters of Ringo, neck a load of brown acid and plug in planning to write a 21st Century ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’? Far fewer, we reasoned, than want to write their own ‘Seven Nation Army’ or ‘Crystalised’. Ditto Dylan, The Stones and The Who, et al. These are acts whose influence is written in stone, the very bedrock of the form, but who aren’t necessarily directly informing the music being made today any more than Chaucer is influencing Buzzfeed. Influence is a fluid concept, so rather than simply tipping our caps to the legends (again), we set out to quantify which are the biggest influences on today’s music scene. "

I mean

6. The Flaming Lips. Whether full of light and colour on 'Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots' and 'The Soft Bulletin' or dark and tormented with 'The Terror', The Flaming Lips were the band that made psychedelia look like an undated, still-potent musical force, and from which all modern psych sprang. Without them, there'd be no Tame Impala, Pond, Temples, Toy or Jagwar Ma.

5. The Strokes. The Strokes remain one of the major touchstones for modern indie. Were it not for them, there would be no Arctic Monkeys, no Franz Ferdinand, no Killers, no Libertines and no Cribs; and their ardent pace, Julian’s no-fi yowls and Albert Hammond’s high-end twangs can still be heard in Palma Violets, The Orwells, Parquet Courts and Twin Peaks.

It's just embarrassing.

I think those two examples above are fine, though I'd imagine Parquet Floors would vomit at the thought that they were influenced by The Strokes.

Like, there's direct lineage from Lips to Tame Impala, or from Strokes to Libertines. Whether these are good things or not is up for discussion, but the line of influence is there.

Libertines and Strokes were practically contemporaries, weren't they? In my head, at least.

Yeah, those examples are fine imo. Flaming Lips did inspire a new wave of psych-pop and the Strokes absolutely kicked off an onslaught of skinny guys with guitars, Libertines included.

Now that I realise they're narrowing the scope to what's influenced bands in the last few years it makes more sense. You could say that a lot of the minimalist leftfield R&B is Aaliyah + xx and countless female singers sound somewhat like Kate Bush. If we're talking recent I'd throw in James Blake - I constantly hear him cited by people like Lorde and FKA twigs. And Daft Punk should be in there because Alive 2007 basically triggered EDM and Discovery rehabilitated plenty of 70s/80s influences that are now de rigeur. I seem to hear Four Tet's influence everywhere as well. But electronic music doesn't appear to interest whoever put the list together.

de rigueur

Libertines and Strokes were practically contemporaries, weren't they? In my head, at least.

I first saw Libs when they were touring UK with The Strokes in 2002, so its very close - but let's say that the Strokes definitely had an effect on the Libs and where they were going, or how they presented what they were doing.

It's just amazing to me, how 14 years into ILM, people are still discussing "influence" as if it is a real thing.

Because Band X "sounds like" or even "looks like" Band Y, that does not mean that Band X were "influenced by" Band Y.

Influence is this thing that was just invented by record companies or music journalists, to explain how they create and dismantle, and more importantly *sell* bands - 'The' bands with skinny ties are selling well right now, therefore we will say they are all influenced by The Strokes. Did The Strokes invent suit bands? No, they fucking didn't. But after The Strokes had some success, every record company decided they wanted a Strokes, so that's what they go and look for, so that's what they find.

It's almost never artists citing other artists as "influence", it's music journalists saying "X sounds like Y" and then suddenly people remember that as being attributed to the artist, not the marketing mechanism. Music journalists decide what your influences are, and then tell you.

I mean, maybe the NME did go into a bunch of stinky studios around the country and polled the assholes with gig bands they found sitting waiting for rehearsal. Maybe they just asked their readership, who are all in shitty indie bands. If you asked the readership of Guitar Player Magazine, who would they decide were the most "influential" bands? How about the readership of Future Music? Or Resident Advisor? Or Sound On Sound? What fucking "game" are we even talking about? God this is so fucking dumb.

If The Strokes did not exist, it would have been necessary for the British Music Press to have invented them.

It's almost never artists citing other artists as "influence"

I don't think this is true. It's normal to name artists who inspired you, even if you don't directly sound like them (eg Disclosure and Burial). Then you get the journalist-suggested ones, which are sometimes artists that the bands supposedly influenced haven't actually heard, but there's usually overlap between what the artists say and what journalists assume. So The xx hadn't heard Young Marble Giants, true, but they were open about being influenced by Aaliyah.