It has gotten worse. Not bought it for almost 8 years and the level of journalism has sunk to new lows. 12 year olds could do better

Originally posted by robbie
It has gotten worse. Not bought it for almost 8 years and the level of journalism has sunk to new lows. 12 year olds could do better

The NME's been going downhill fast since aound the mid-90s. I hardly ever bother to buy it now, whereas in the early 90s it was required weekly reading.

There are a lot of good bands around at the moment, so it can't be due to lack of inspiration, there's plenty of bands worth writing about.

Perhaps it's got sloppy as there's no competition any more, since Melody Maker went to the wall.

Also, it has dumbed down greatly. I've noticed there are a lot of pictures now rather than text. I hesitate to say it's because today's teenagers have the attention span of a gnat, but this is the impression I get from reading today's NME.

I've got quite a few old NME's from the late 70s as well as the early 90s, and they're all a 'damn good read', whether or not you're particularly interested in the bands featured. You might not agree with everything Paul Morley or Nick Kent said (and they could write some right old pretentious twaddle), but at least they were interesting and provocative and you needed to have a degree of intelligence to read them.

Music journalism - a lost art? I fear so.

StarSparkle

Rock journalism - people who can't write, 'writing' for people who can't read.

Zappa said it all. Evidentally its not improved in recent years.

Originally posted by LordChaverly
Rock journalism - people who can't write, 'writing' for people who can't read.

Zappa said it all. Evidentally its not improved in recent years.

No, I think that's overly harsh, Lord Chaverly.

It helped to be literate, both to write for, and to read, the music press at one time. I remember reading "Sounds" was one of the highlights of my week in the late 70s.

The NME as well. Nick Kent's prose was so over-the-top and pseudo-intellectual it veered off into farce at times, but at least he didn't pander to the lowest-common-denominator, and he certainly expanded my vocabulary! :D

I doubt there is anything around today that could be called 'rock journalism' in anything like the same way.

Personally, I couldn't stand Lester Bangs (of almost "Almost Famous" fame), but at least he genuinely LOVED rock music and was almost on a mission to publicise great bands. I don't see that today at all. Maybe the passion has just gone out of music.....

StarSparkle

I hate to break it to you but the NME was always crap. I foolishly bought it every week for years in the view that, well, they knew what they were talking about. But advancing years and the attendant increased wisdom taught me that the people who write for NME were largely either a) pretentious art school w*(&^$s or b) frustrated musicians who never made it.

It was the biggest pile of pseudo-intellectual pretentious bulls*&t I have ever read, and the last time I flicked through it, it it was nothing more than a slightly older version of Smash Hits. It should be closed down for the good of music journalism and all records of it's existence should be wiped from history.

Death to the NME!

but at least in the old days they would try and right pseudo intellelectual pretentios b/s. Now they ahve the tablod curse of just trying to be funny instead of asking the bands questions. tey are also incredibly smug. The reviews are beyond pointless.

Originally posted by limpetboy
I hate to break it to you but the NME was always crap.

No, the NME has NOT always been crap :rant:

Like I said, in the late 70s it was a great read, and was still valuable in the mid 90s.

The publication that sadly bears its name today bears no relation.

I believe I was the first person in this thread to say that Nick Kent et al wrote a lot of pseudo-intellectual pretentious twaddle, but at least it was GOOD, literate pseudo-intellectual pretentious twaddle!

StarSparkle

Originally posted by robbie
but at least in the old days they would try and right pseudo intellelectual pretentios b/s. Now they ahve the tablod curse of just trying to be funny instead of asking the bands questions. tey are also incredibly smug. The reviews are beyond pointless.

Ah yes, the smugness I almost forgot that - the glee with which the NME reminded everyone You Read It Here First, Kids, only to shoot the Next Big Thing down when they dared to sell a few records.

Anyone remember Menswear? They were hailed as the saviours indie/pop (or whatever the b/s three sentence equivalent that NME invented to describe them). Oh how they loved them. But then people bought the album and thought, well actually, dear NME, they're a bit pants. So what happened? They started to criticise them - outdatd cliche I think is the abridged version of what Johnny Cigarettes (I think) decided to call them in his regular pile of b*&^%$s on the letters page. Before you knew it, it was as if NME had known all along that they were pants. Thank you NME for showing us the way. The same happened to Longpigs (who I thought were actually quite good), Sleeper, and a whole host of other bands collecting dust in my CD collection.

As for the reviews - indeed pointless. I read a review of (What's the Story) Morning Glory, which gave it 5 stars. Hailed as genius. On a par with Definitely Maybe. Oh how they must have masturbated over their Macs writing that review. Then when it was released to luke warm reviews by other notable publications, what happened? Oh yes, thats it, it suddently became Oasis' mediocre second album and, along with the rest of the musical press, decided to focus almost entirely on the fact the Liam liked a beer and getting a bit lairy. The truth is that, rather than being a paper that commented on music and sticking to their beliefs, they decided week to week which bands they liked and which they didn't based, not on educating the reader, but on how many units they thought it would sell. Shame on them for trying to tell us otherwise.

Then we come to the Blur v Oasis 'battle royale'. Remember the issue where it was plastered all over the front page and about 20 pages inside? Remember the issue a few weeks later that criticised both bands for cashing in on the media circus that the NME started!?! Hmmm, maybe they should look up word hypocrisy in their thesaurus.

You will have to forgive me if the references are only from the mid-90s but it's my frame of reference. That said, my dad's back copies from the 70s were also pants. Sorry.

I hate the NME with a passion I can't even begin to describe.

Julie Birchill first made her name in rock journalism. She was even more outrageous in some of her comments than she is today. I remember that in one article she wrote (I think it was about the Ramones or it could have been about Patti Smith) she compared a performance to 'like watching God jerk off'. She got a lot of flak for this comment, but it certainly got her talked about. Her 'rock journalism' voice was also a total contrast to her high pitched, squeaky little voice and rather nondescript appearance also.

How many other rock journalists of this period have achieved success in the mainstream media?

Ooooh, Limpetboy, getting yourself into a right little Tiswas :loopy:

Some of us loved our music, both the late 70s and mid-90s (and maybe one or two even in the 80s). As a true music fan, I appreciated the information on my fave bands that I got from the NME and similar publications - information I literally couldn't get from anywhere else. The music press was a source of nurture to me, and many like me.

It's very easy nowadays when everything is on tap via the Internet to forget how much of a lifeline these publications were to kids in the 'old days'. People are so spoiled now - everything to hand with a click of the mouse. You don't have to wait or search hard for anything. You have no idea what an EVENT getting the weekly music papers was. They were the only place where you'd hear from like-minded people, or even be aware that similar people existed in the world.

The older I get, the more priviledged I feel to have been a kid in the days when music actually meant something in people's lives, when we weren't spoiled and jaded through an excess of choice.

There's still power in the old NME yet though, if it's affected you to the extent you 'hate it with a passion you can't even begin to describe' ;)

StarSparkle

an example of a typical interview in the NME involves talking a load of rubbish about a band and then asking them questions like.

"so, does it annoy you when fans call your girlfriend a whore?"

At least in the late 70's and 80's they had some intellegent and interesting reviewers. It may have been pretentious rubbish but some of our best journalist came through their ranks.

Now it seems the reviewers would struggle to outfox a childrens tv presenter

Tony Parsons
Julie Birchall
Paul Morely
Andrew Collins
Danny Baker
Danny Kelly
James Brown

Maybe that's part of the problem starsparkle. Back in the 70s the NME probably was one of very few widely available means of finding out about music. I imagine that it was a lifeline to a lot of people but there is no excuse for the tripe contained within it's covers now. Perhaps this past importance has made the NME complacent - the attitude being We are the NME, everyone wants what we got so it doesn't matter if it's not much cop.

I don't think being spoilt for choice is necessarily a bad thing. I imagine that in the 70s, if you didn't get the NME you either didn't know what was going on or you had to rely on the independent fanzines/magazines which were hard to get hold of - as you say yourself it wasn't readily available so you had to look hard. Nowadays, not only is information readily available but the internet has created an instant global community where people can get the information they want and find like-minded people easly and quickly.

If you're passionate about your music you don't have to rely on this bunch of arses to tell you what's good and what's not. A quick surf round the internet will tell you exactly what you want, give you access to the music you want to listen to (sometimes even legally!), and more importantly, give you access to the opinions that matter - those of people just like you. And you won't see longwinded guff from some frustrated musician, you'll hear from someone who actually cares about what they're talking about.

Even if it were a quality publication, the NME is becoming more and more irrelevant and unless it pulls it's head out of it's arse and reconnects with it's readership it is going to die. And rightly so.

Originally posted by LordChaverly
Rock journalism - people who can't write, 'writing' for people who can't read.

Zappa said it all. Evidentally its not improved in recent years.

I realise you were paraphrasing, but here's the correct quote from Frank Zappa:

He described rock journalists as "people, who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk, for people who can’t read."

That was probably far more true in the US than it was in Britain, where our rock mags were on the whole, pretty good (especially during the 70s-80s).

The inky music mags (Sounds, Melody Maker, NME etc) ruled supreme in Britain for decades when pop music really was worth writing about.

Then along came the glossy monthlies like Q, Mojo, Uncut, Vox etc and pulled the rug out from under them in every respect (presentation, standard of writing etc). The weeklies were forced downmarket and their target audience became younger and younger.

That's probably that's why you find them unreadable now, because they're catering for a market where music is more disposable than it used to be. Let's face it, who wants to read an in-depth feature on boy bands or rap.

Originally posted by limpetboy
Maybe that's part of the problem starsparkle. Back in the 70s the NME probably was one of very few widely available means of finding out about music. I imagine that it was a lifeline to a lot of people but there is no excuse for the tripe contained within it's covers now. Perhaps this past importance has made the NME complacent - the attitude being We are the NME, everyone wants what we got so it doesn't matter if it's not much cop.

I think you're slightly misunderstanding me, Limpetboy.

All through this thread I've been agreeing with Robbie's original premise that the NME is not the quality publication it used to be. That is obviously the case, and I was agreeing that it's little more than a kiddie's comic nowadays, full of pictures rather than words. Compare a recent issue with a copy from, say, 1991 - photos take up a much greater percentage of the paper today.

I was saying I hardly ever buy it now - there's nothing to get your teeth into. There's no excuse - there's plenty of good bands to write about.

Perhaps the NME should have died when Melody Maker did, and not become a complete embarrassment to its former self. Perhaps it should close now, and leave the world with the memories of its days of greatness.

StarSparkle

Originally posted by robbie
It has gotten worse. Not bought it for almost 8 years and the level of journalism has sunk to new lows. 12 year olds could do better

Agree. It's turning into Smash Hits!

Originally posted by StarSparkle
I think you're slightly misunderstanding me, Limpetboy.

All through this thread I've been agreeing with Robbie's original premise that the NME is not the quality publication it used to be. That is obviously the case, and I was agreeing that it's little more than a kiddie's comic nowadays, full of pictures rather than words. Compare a recent issue with a copy from, say, 1991 - photos take up a much greater percentage of the paper today.

I was saying I hardly ever buy it now - there's nothing to get your teeth into. There's no excuse - there's plenty of good bands to write about.

Perhaps the NME should have died when Melody Maker did, and not become a complete embarrassment to its former self. Perhaps it should close now, and leave the world with the memories of its days of greatness.

StarSparkle

If I misuderstood Starsparkle I apologise - couldn't agree more with what you're saying here. I used to buy NME religiously every week ( although this was more to look at the gig pages) than anything else. I tend to think the true beginning of the end was when Melody maker closed, it seemed to go even further down hill after this.

If I wanted to actually read about music I would buy Q each month, but even that isn't as food as it once was. Can anyone reccomend a decent magazine that I can read when I'm travelling about?

Has the NME gone downhill? Probably.

Taking off the rose-tinted memory specs, I doubt the standard of writing has changed all that much over the years, but the explosion in the media means that it's no longer as relevant as it once was - anyone who wants to find out about a particular band only has to log on the the internet for ten minutes, rather than waiting excitedly for the latest NME to drop on your doormat. There are also any number of specialiased satellite channels devoted to all kinds of musical genres.

Thus, to attract attention the NME has had to constantly switch focus to try and attract a new kind of readership - one that perhaps isn't really all that into the music, but wants a good read on the train about well-known bands they've heard on the radio.

I'm sure this argument has being going on for the past 20 years, and it would tend to co-incide with the point you reach when the hot new bands sound a bit like the hot new bands of ten years ago. It's called "getting old". :)

Originally posted by limpetboy
If I misuderstood Starsparkle I apologise - couldn't agree more with what you're saying here. I used to buy NME religiously every week ( although this was more to look at the gig pages) than anything else. I tend to think the true beginning of the end was when Melody maker closed, it seemed to go even further down hill after this.

If I wanted to actually read about music I would buy Q each month, but even that isn't as food as it once was. Can anyone reccomend a decent magazine that I can read when I'm travelling about?

mojo is worth a read consider it the eldest brother of q:)

I agree that the NME is useless these days. In the early nineties I bought it regularly, when I see the odd issue these days it really is indie Smash Hits.

The best magazine I've come across recently is Word - there is some very decent writing in it. It covers books, movies and TV as well and is a consistently interesting read. Cover CD is usually pretty good too.

http://www.wordmagazine.co.uk/index.cfm

Perhaps, because indie is very big again and there are lots of young teens into bands like Kaiser Chiefs etc, the style of writing has altered to cater for a younger audience. Much like Kerrang and Mixmag did.

NME is crap now, stopped reading it about 5 years ago.

Originally posted by Greenback
Has the NME gone downhill? Probably.
to attract attention the NME has had to constantly switch focus to try and attract a new kind of readership - one that perhaps isn't really all that into the music, but wants a good read on the train about well-known bands they've heard on the radio.


That's precisely the axis along which the NME has swung. The Internet is now where the edgy discussion of new music is to be found, along with the odd, usually short-lived but bright-burning 'zine that websites spawn. I was around one or two early ones about 10 years ago, when the Internet was an exciting new toy for Independent music lovers. Yesterday I put the name John Loder into Google, to check on how people were reacting to the recent death of this legendary producer, engineer, mentor and founder of record company Southern. I was amazed by the diffuseness of music and counter-culture sites. And the funny thing was that much of the forum chat and writing resembled prose you would have seen in NME until the late 1980s. Half inspired, half utter cock, but always passionate and pointed.

Meanwhile, out on the news stands the only ground left for poor old NME to cover now is that which was formerly occupied by Smash Hits, and is now shared with Hello. It has been banned from the Roxy, okay. But then there's no point in it playing there anyway. There remains however, a market for vacuousness. It's just that those with fond memories of rebellions fuelled by NME, beer and roll-up fags have to log on nowadays instead of shuffling along to the news stands.

Which of course, is what we're doing right now. That and listening to Radio 6 online.

Originally posted by joyphil
Meanwhile, out on the news stands the only ground left for poor old NME to cover now is that which was formerly occupied by Smash Hits, and is now shared with Hello. It has been banned from the Roxy, okay. But then there's no point in it playing there anyway. There remains however, a market for vacuousness. It's just that those with fond memories of rebellions fuelled by NME, beer and roll-up fags have to log on nowadays instead of shuffling along to the news stands.

Which of course, is what we're doing right now. That and listening to Radio 6 online.

So very true, Joyphil - you're spot-on.

StarSparkle (fondly remembering, nay, nostalgically reminiscing about those rebellions fuelled by the NME..... ahhhh, happy days)

Originally posted by StarSparkle
The NME's been going downhill fast since aound the mid-90s. I hardly ever bother to buy it now, whereas in the early 90s it was required weekly reading.

There are a lot of good bands around at the moment, so it can't be due to lack of inspiration, there's plenty of bands worth writing about.

Perhaps it's got sloppy as there's no competition any more, since Melody Maker went to the wall.

Also, it has dumbed down greatly. I've noticed there are a lot of pictures now rather than text. I hesitate to say it's because today's teenagers have the attention span of a gnat, but this is the impression I get from reading today's NME.

I've got quite a few old NME's from the late 70s as well as the early 90s, and they're all a 'damn good read', whether or not you're particularly interested in the bands featured. You might not agree with everything Paul Morley or Nick Kent said (and they could write some right old pretentious twaddle), but at least they were interesting and provocative and you needed to have a degree of intelligence to read them.

Music journalism - a lost art? I fear so.

StarSparkle

But the sort of bands that feature in NME: The Strokes, Coldplay etc are not bands that teenagers like, in the main. They're more lilkely to read ToTP magazine, or something that features bands to their genres - namely: McFly... ...that's all I can think of.

Originally posted by kentboy119
But the sort of bands that feature in NME: The Strokes, Coldplay etc are not bands that teenagers like, in the main. They're more lilkely to read ToTP magazine, or something that features bands to their genres - namely: McFly... ...that's all I can think of.

So what's the reason for the dumbing down?

The focusing on photos rather than words is typical of 'writing' for a younger or generally less sophisticated 'readership'.

StarSparkle

The NME - The unthinkable has happened, i thought you was going to say they like Radiohead again. Two faced the NME are (did i sound like Yoda then?) When Radiohead first came out the NME loved Radiohead then the second cd they slagged them off.