Blur
Think Tank

either you're really that stupid or you're a soothsayer of sorts

what kind of rod would you recommend?

Dear Skany fellow,

Nice piece of dredged up work. It almost feels like some hilarious piece of thread necrophilia. I'm not sure if you know Malik personally, maybe you've been fishing with him using the popular fly fishing method. Who knows? I don't resent Malik at all, I merely questioned the policy of hiring in people from dance 'zines onto a newspaper than went away from techno and suchlike. Rememeber the dear old Vibes section with (I think) Ben Whilmott? Lovely it was, 12 inch reviews, it brought an element of exciting electronic entertainment to the average guitar kid. NME lost that and doesn't really seem to know what it likes anymore. I'm not questioning Malik's ability to write, I question the sense in appointing someone with such a heavy dance background into a mag that worships the new rock thang so heavily.

Let's take a few lines from here:

"Malik Meer was editor of Muzik when it folded and now finds himself deputy editor of New Musical Express. He says: "The dance culture as a whole got lazy. It came to be perceived as one thing: this cheesy, superclub, larging-it lifestyle, and the magazines ended up representing just the girls, the drugs and Ibiza."

To Meer this tunnel vision failed to recognise that "the history of dance music came from an underground culture and was about being edgy and anti-establishment. At the height of superclub-dom, a club would be £25 to get in and full of slightly-older people, glammed up and wearing crap labels," he says. "If you are young and want to be cool, you are not going to buy into that. The next generation thought 'That's a bit naff, I wouldn't mind skate-punk metal. That's a better means with which to menace.'""

http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/music/features/story.jsp?story=477370

Can the sceptic say that NME is currently very lazy and eager to jump on whatever hip bandwagon comes its way? And give the crowd another laugh by saying that NME is reputable. I'm sure there's countless people here who'd disagree, not to mention the thousands overseas in America who take in the latest great NME hype and shit it back to them sideways.

Incidentally, thanks for the comments, they're taken onboard. My accountant is coming over for lunch later, I'll get him to address the issues raised by your good self. Until then, I have to go and fornicate with myself in a bitter and twisted style.

Pip pip!

" sadly that means reading the shite wanna be writers (YOU et al) insist on posting."

"Don't get twisted and bitter, resenting those that do what you clearly CAN'T"

How do you know Furry's a 'wanna be'? He's using a fookin' pseudonym! For all you know he could be a music journalist of of certain prestige eg John Robb, Nick Kent, Stewart Maconie or even Mick Middles

In defence of all us 'wanna be writers' on here (Furry included, assuming he's not one of the aforementioned), I would argue that this site's forums are an excellent tomb of articulate critiques by a lot of talented young people. If you don't wanna read people's comments and opinions on stuff then why the hell are you browsing these forums in the first place?

Wanting to be a writer is not a bad thing. Even the likes of Shakespeare, Milton, Flaubert, Lawrence and Kerouac were once wannabes (if, as I assume, you take wannabe to mean 'unpublished'). If there were no 'wanna be' writers then there'd cease to be any writers at all.

Also, I feel posting juvenile flames on here aimed at individuals exercising their right to free speech (and for that matter presenting a coherent, structured argument) is completely unnecessary. Furry wasn't particularly criticising Malik Meer's lexical capabilities, he was questioning his rock background (which his cv does not demonstrate) and that is unquestionably, given the lack of evidence, a reasonable issue of contention.

I however would like to call his ability as a writer into question. Journalism today is, as the cliched adage goes, about who you know and not what you know. There are so many adept writers out there (Malik included) that simply being articulate on it's own isn't enough. You have to know the right people and rely heavily on being in the right place at the right time (eg London).

Malik Meer as a young hack will have got into music journalism because somebody opened the door for him not because he had the key (ie he had astounding talent that would be ignored at the peril of all editors worldwide). No doubt he will have worked hard and will always work hard but he ain't no Lester Bangs. He's just compotent and very, very lucky, as all young mainstream journalists are today.

Lets face it anyway, he can't be no fuckin' Dostoyevski working for the NME, because the nature of the magazines current readership (12-16 years) wouldn't allow it. Admittedly there is some great merits in posessing an ability to curtail your diction in order to make your writing accesible to an unintellectual audience (the fantastically skilled journos at the Sun, Star and even Mirror do that to high fruition every day), but surely a writer of great skill and poise would be more at home as a leader writer for a broadsheet or as a freelance with the New Yorker or even as a novelist in their own right? Malik's cv show's that he hasn't done any of these yet. He hasn't done anything at all of substantial intellectual merit (at least not in the public domain, for all I know he could be working on the 21st century 'war and peace' in his 7 figure central London pad!) so he is also a wannabe just like the rest of us.

I would agree wholeheartedly that us mere forum posters on here are quite possibly (at present at least) nothing but 'wanna bes'. But many of us are young with auspicious futures ahead. I would argue that it's much better to be an unknown wannabe than a known mediocrity like Malik Meer.

Firstly, thank you for the support chaps. Secondly, I am bitter and twisted but only toward the Canadian way of life that is my current living environment. Thirdly, I am actually famed restaurant and food critic A. A. Gill in real life. Fourthly, one of of these statements is false. Can you guess which one?