People really don't like the NME, do they?
Especially when they do things like this: https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=309079932516771&id=19343183144
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stopped reading it a decade ago
and for about 2 years before that I regretted buying it nearly every time.
They're quite hated
Also almost all their reviews are wrong.
It's painful, but everyone makes mistakes.
Just online you can edit them away.
Does it reflect on their overall quality? Maybe, maybe not.
For whatever reason they've long had a photo of The Outfield attached to the band Toto in their CMS, so whenever they mention Toto, The Outfield pop up.
Plus they have a Foo Fighters T-Shirt for sale labeled 'cassette', and it's clearly a graphic of a huge reel-to-reel deck.
They're forever screwing up simple dollar/pound conversions and doing things like simultaneously calling Born to Die Lana del Rey's second album and her debut album. Or debuting their movie column with a list of the top 20 music films of all time and omitting Purple Rain entirely.
None of these goofs individually is a big deal, but it does bother me because I'm a professional editor and would be thrilled to have a shot in music journalism... I'd sure as he'll not squander a resource as precious as the NME.
Very fair comment.
I haven't done more than flick through it in a shop for years, so can't really judge how many mistakes it makes. Obviously content is king, but spelling, grammar and basic fact checking shouldn't be far behind.
ho is NME?
The enemy
Just kidding. New Musical Express, an old British music magazine.
Thanks for the information.
why do the people not like it when you say it is an old magazine. Get over it guys, amirite?
By old I think he means
a long-standing publication that won't f**k off.
:D
I think
it only needs a good editor that 's going to be around for a while.
I think you can do fun and be informative too. True that most music mags are aimed at 30's 40's something.
Shame younger people cannot have the press they deserve.
i have some hope for mike williams
kruger was amazing. and i ran into him at gigs and stuff once or twice and he wasn't remotely cretinous or craven. losing laura snapes and promoting mike williams is good news as far as i can see.
depends how much free rein he's given i guess, vs how in hock to advertisers they are?
the website needs an entire fucking overhaul though, it needs to be destroyed and burned and begun again. by completely different people. it's so ugly and so clunky and so counter-intuitive.
i do care about the nme. it was vital to me growing up in a small village with not many other kids interested in music that wouldn't chart... the nme and (oddly) the chart show (<3) and smash hits, and later, alternative nation.
thanks bro
laughsnort
really excited to see how the gig guide improves now I've left
mang I was really holding that section back
nothing personal, i don't know a thing about you
just always find your writing a bit arch, and for me that gets wearing.
then again i write like a lolcat so maybe i should stfu
True, but since they're probably not prepared to pay for their press
in significant enough numbers, they probably are getting the press they deserve
Can someone show me some examples of how Conor McNicholas completely screwed up NME?
Like some sort of before and after pictures that can justify the hate that he engenders. I'm not defending the guy, but I just don't know what it is he specifically did to earn him such a reputation.
Otherwise this blog from Neil Kulkarni kinda sums up my feelings about a lot of music journalism/broadcasting: http://fuckyouneilkulkarni.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/new-list-from-nme-and-some-thoughts.html
I HATE that blog post
Under no circumstances do I long for a return to the mindnumbingly pretentious music journalism of the 1970s, which is what he's proposing. What a dick.
I wouldn't want that either
...but Kulkarni was mainly writing for Melody Maker in the 1990s and was one of their best writers. Brilliantly funny and with extremely broad tastes.
I don't think today's music, or music audience for that matter
really warrants the pretentious heights (or lows) of 70s music journalism, but I do think he has a point about some journalists clearly lacking any passion in their writing, the kind of people who seem more interested in climbing the career ladder than what they're writing. It's a flawed argument, and one that's hardly unique to these times (or NME), but one I agree with.
Last night I was going through old magazines to throw out
Of which many were NME's and it became extrememly apparent how much NME really lost it during the Conor McNicholas period. He was really trying to make it HEAT magazine with The Libertines, Franz Ferdinand and The Strokes. Every era of NME has created its own scenes and hyped up rubbish bands. But Shroomadelica? The Others, Neil's Children, The Paddingtons and Selfish Cunt? The whole idea that you can quantify, in a numerical order of hierarchy, who is the coolest person right now. It all reeks of extremely whiffy bollocks.
The sad thing is that the concept of NME is good - I learned a lot about music and discovered a lot of music through it - but one that is less essential today and it doesn't help that indie/alternative music has a lack of interesting characters that also sell magazines. And while everyone thinks it was best when they started reading it, it was particularly good when I did (1990/1991).
the singer of one of the bands i'm in
was described by the NME last year as "an Australian Nick Cave"...
also who decided to say Lana Del Ray was like "a gangster Nancy Sinatra"? her dad had mafia links, doesn't get anymore gangster than that surely.
"an Australian Nick Cave"
this is gold
who was it please? (band and journo)
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10150385587491988&set=a.405363216987.182290.204896021987&type=1
beautiful
thank you
fucking
hell
I can't understand why people long for the NME's demise
It's like really wanting Heat magazine to collapse just because you're not a gossip-loving middle aged woman.
And as someone said, why don't Kerrang! and Q get the same criticism?
Though, if I was a cynic, I'd suggest that maybe the reason that NME gets so much hate on these boards is because so many people on here used to buy it themselves, and NME-bashing is just part of a "I'm SO over NME I read much better music journalism these days NME i'm dead mature honestly" rite of passage, people embarrassed about their teenage years as they were a casual music fan, rather than the SERIOUS music fan they now like to present themselves as.
But, of course, I'm no cynic, so the above paragraph is surely bollocks :)
I like the NME
I also quite like the NME.
I'm not ashamed, sort of.
Preferred Melody Maker personally.
That went shit too
I read MM- it was designed better than NME. They did start to piss me off though when Suede came along, they developed a really sneery attitude about the music I was listening to.
To be fair they predicted and nurtured britpop beautifully but y'know I hated britpop and walked away from guitars. Stopped buying either paper as they were both absolutely hopeless at covering dance music. And believe me, they tried.
Select was better.
They used to do a good line in free posters, still have my PJ Harvey
To Bring You My Love one.
seems like as good a place to ask any:
who the fuck is fiona apple and why has pitchfork been posting almost exclusively interviews, live reports and reviews of her album preview tracks recently? litz never heard of her before she played that gig for them.
Danny Apple's little sister
she's like a big cult musician in the US
had a bunch of critically-loved but modestly selling records in the 90s, then a bunch of scraps with her label about her "artistic integrity", and now has a new album for the first time in about five or six years I think.
so she is basically just amanda palmer then?
I think people like Fiona Apple
Personally I think Q is far worse these days
So painfully bland and safe it makes my teeth ache.
always despised Q...
...so fucking smug
I think we're mightily close to introducing the hammer to the nail here
NME has a reputation because, as much as the sneerers wouldn't dare use such an expression, it used to actually stand for something. No one's ever loved Q, and therefore no one really cares about its standards. It is what it is and it seems almost unfair to hate them for that, like the journalistic equivalent of Snow Patrol.
Their website is terrible
Really piss poor spelling, grammar, even basic fact checking - as in, even something that would take about 5 seconds to google search - has gone out of the window these days.
struggling to understand how this happens
surely in order to get the picture you have to have the name, which they do.
I grew up on Smash Hits in the early 80s
then moved onto MM in the mid-late 80s. Occasionally I look at my back issues and the quality of writing when compared with today is astonishing - even Smash Hits was written with a lot more intelligence & humour than today's NME.
Worth remembering that back then there was no internet, we only had 4 TV channels & video gaming was pretty basic so music didn't have as much competition for our attention as it does now, and as such there was a market for 3 weekly music papers as well as the likes of Smash Hits & Record Mirror, so each mag was able to carve out its own niche without having to pay to much attention to circulation. This meant MM was free to put the likes of Skinny Puppy, World Domination Enterprises & the Young Gods on the cover, & run often barely comprehensible articles by the likes of Fred & Judy Vermorel.
Also music PR was in its infancy then so writers had free rein to slag off bands if they felt like it, & MM often sent interviewers to interview bands they actively disliked - I remember the Stud Brothers doing a superb hatchet job on Deacon Blue for example.
MM in those days had David Stubbs, Stud Brothers, Steve Sutherland, Simon Reynolds AND Chris Roberts writing for them, and they were later joined by Paul Lester & Neil Kulkarni - the FC Barcelona of music journalism basically.
Today's NME is operating in an entirely different environment and as such has to appeal to as broad an audience as possible, which is why it reads like it's been written for 8-yr olds most of the time.
I used to love NME before the 80s
like I loved Creem before they started writing about punk rock 2 years after it happened. Here was Ramones and Clash, they were still going on about J Geils and Blue Oyster Cult. Yet in retrospect they're revered. And Lester Bangs? Ever try reading Psychotic Reactions? What a load of shit! That was before we were aware...or was it? Sorry I went off on a tangent, I don't get out much.
Lester Bangs was an incredible writer.
I can read pieces by him about bands I've never even heard of, and I still appreciate the quality of his writing. Maybe I'd feel differently if I all I wanted was to know which was the best track on Album X or who produced it, but he had a broader remit.
This exchange kind of sums things up really
One of you thinks Lester Bangs is a load of shit, the other thinks he was incredible. Are there any writers currently working for NME or Q or Rolling Stone or whatever that are going to be polarising opinions, or even being discussed, in 30 years' time?
Steven Wells was the last
I could see Didz Hammond doing this, were it not for the fact that nobody really gives a shit about music reviews or music reviewers any more.
I DID dig him then...
But when I read some of that stuff nowadays, I think he was just up his own ass. And that's OK, but I wonder if people like him because they're SUPPOSED to. I think I prefer Nick Kent, or even Richard Meltzer. Although Bangs v. Reed is pretty great. Aw, who cares?
I enjoy having a music weekly
and I discover bands through their album reviews just like I do here. I think at least 50% of the bands they cover in that magazine are bands that are often liked and discussed here so I can only assume it's just some music snob, trendy thing to hate it.
and Q isn't?
music is lifestyle nowdays, I'd argue.
IPC Sub-editors dictate our youth
to which NME replied with something like
IPC Sub Editor Writes Mildly Amusing Headline
... which is probably the funniest thing they ever printed.
are you 12 years old?
Youth culture has been almost instantly commodified since the 1960s, of COURSE a nationwide magazine funded by advertisements is going to assist the commodification of its content! You could say exactly the same about music programming on Channel 4 or something. The NME doesn't have a monopoly- far from it. What you're saying doesn't make sense.
also
"NME creates a symbiotic relationship with youth culture, where they cynically dictate it and then throw it away and pretend it never happened."
Have you never read ANY other magazines?!
Yeah
Think of some of those 'greatest flops' threads, or bands remembered as jokes: Campag Velocet, Terris, Gay Dad, The Others, Brother, Glasvegas... etc. All pretty much handpicked by NME to hoist up the ladder, and snorted at by the same magazine, as if it was the bands fault they didn't make it.
oh yeah, Pitchfork didn't do that with Black Kids or anything, did they?
is this why bands like
Viva Brother and the Enemy think they can get away with being dire and peddling bog standard indie rock, because they have 'attitude' and the NME have given them the impression that this is all one needs to be a great band?
The Face was a much a fashion magazine as anything else.
And no worse for it. It's music coverage was easily better than most solely-music-centric mags.
For many of us, the reason we hate it so much is how much we used to love it
When I was growing up there were precious few ways to find out about music. No internet obviously, but also no coverage of popular music in the mainstream media, no alternative music radio before 10pm at night. NME, along with John Peel, was my musical education. For twenty years I would never of dreamed of not buying it every week.
Because I owed it so much I carried on buying it long after it got shit. Key landmarks I remember on its downward path include a double page spread of 'hot new artists' where every single person pictured was a young white male with Hoxton hair and front covers for The Darkness - music that was a shit pastiche of other music that would have been ripped to shreds by NME in its prime.
The deal breaker for me, as for many others, was the dreaded 'Cool List'. The concept was awful enough but then when Pete Doherty appeared at the top after a year in which he had done nothing cooler than piss away whatever talent he had on heroin, make increasingly embarrassingly poor singles with Babyshambles and step over corpses on the street I'd had enough.
I've never regretted stopping buying it. I think, sadly, it belongs to a time that no longer is.
IT HAS CHANGED
Lots of people hating here seem to be relating back to the Libertines bumming era - I agree, it wasn't good back then but for at least 2 years now it's been fairly respectable. I always have old copies lying around my room which I have re-read and seen they've reported about bands for example - Eagulls, Mazes, Gross Magic, Japandroids - way before certain blogs said anything about them. It's not bad for a magazine that relies quite heavily on appealing to relatively mainstream music listener. I'm sure someone will rip me a new arsehole now on how wrong I am...
Sorry Sean
but starting a thread simply to DiS a rival paper is worthy of the Sun. Bad effort.
yes
i did notice the let's-not-piss-on-nme's-chips policy seems to have changed...
Here's a good example why.
Their review of the new Place to Bury Strangers album:
The main guy out of APTBS also makes FX pedals. They’re called stuff like ‘Total Sonic Annihilation’ and make guitars sound like kittens being murdered. He’s good at this. The problem with his band, three albums in, is that they just sound like an excuse to demonstrate his products. We all love a fuzz pedal, but it’s what you play through it that’s important. Were you to strip away the face-melting™ noise from the lazily titled likes of ‘Alone’ and ‘Slide’, you’d swiftly realise that all APTBS do is mask a lack of ideas or something to say by inventing louder volumes than everyone else.
Half-arsed, lazy writing. "The main guy out of APTBS" for example - couldn't even be arsed to research the name.
And then giving The Enemy album a '6' in the same issue
as that APTBS review...
also, great use of the (tm) thing
That was the entire review BTW
not just an excerpt. And that's in an issue with Cuntford & Sons on the cover, & the 3 headline stories on the website about the Beatles, Stones Roses & Green Day. Case closed methinks.
I would imagine
that it's more an attempt to be curtly dismissive than a lack of willingness to 'research', which is kind of a grand word for 'looking at a press release'
not presenting that as a robust defence of the review btw, although whoever write that is entitled to think that about APTBS
*wrote
Very possible
but just reads like it was written by a 12-yr old. Surely we can expect better? If you're going to slag something off, do it with a bit of style like Mr Kulkarni below did with the new Enemy album.
I'm sorry, I ordinarily would try and stay out of this BUT
I am sick to death of that blogpost I did about the NME being characterised as calling for a 'return to the 70s' or some such horseshit. Read it. At what point do I say that? I don't, because I don't want that at all. Sorry but this notion that the piece was in some way 'anti' young writers is utter nonsense and has been bugging me massively.
literally amazing scenes.
Neil, whatever made you enter this debacle? :)
No
You're calling for a return to the 'zine-esque purple prose that characterised the worst excesses of 90s Melody Maker.*
*
(also the best of 90s Melody Maker, and I really enjoyed the blogpost, though I thought some of it was unnecessarily mean-spirited.)
No I'm not.
I'm wondering why it has to be entirely eliminated from the music press. Why is 'zine-esque' a pejorative if the alternative is the tedium of all that 'quality reportage'? Just asking questions.
You either let people lie about what you've written
or you don't, and this morning, sorry, wasn't in the mood for such bullshit: "Under no circumstances do I long for a return to the mindnumbingly pretentious music journalism of the 1970s, which is what he's proposing" - this person has clearly not read what I wrote at all.
hey Neil, I liked your New Nineties articles
compelled me to dig out the Pram album I bought when I was seventeen and have only listened to once since.
hey Neil,
(that fucked up)
I think you're trying too hard with your description of Unfinished Sympathy. I'd balk at reading an article/review full of nonsense like that and it immediately put me on the back foot when reading your article.
Weakest part of the blogpost yr right. I'd rewrite that bit if I could be arsed.
But it's odd . . . i know it's no excuse, people have read that post like it was a carefully hewn bit of writing. It wasn't, it was lashed down in about half an hour during a particularly piss-boring Wednesday afternoon and I've been absolutely astonished at the occassionally hysterical response to it.
anyone know if Terrorizer is still any good?
was excellent last time I bought a copy.