has ilx discussed the new-look Q magazine?

Q editor Paul Rees is a clueless corporate publishing clown, Q has blatantly followed the useless NME this decade, i.e having your agenda set by a rival publisher. Q is useless mainstream mag for 20somethings who are casual music fans.

i thought this in the guardian piece was funny. as if thats changed at all.

Or one letter, even...

OTM there When i hear those bands i think Mainstream Q Shite.

clash is some new indie-ish mag that is neither here nor there.

Foo Fighters, REM, U2, and Oasis - mainstream rock bands from 80s/ 90s

Q offers nothing new it's a mainstream mag for plebs to pick up each month alongside Loaded, and lifestyle celebrity totty mags such as FHM and Maxim.

http://www.clashmagazine.com/

Fran Healey did something interesting?!?

And here was me thinking that he was of no more interest than than a stone on Brighton beach.

How can I have been so stupid?

It seems to me they've been in the process of dumbing it down for the last five years at least.... or maybe that's just me getting more interlekchewal in me old age?

i dont think ilxors will like any mainstream/popular mags, maybe by default.

the ABC figures will be published soon - i predict another massive drop in circulation for Q.

they claim "at last something to read" "the best writers" but what they write about is established artists and Bob Harris type trad songs music. All very predictable and conformist - they know what market they are going for - and deliver what that target audience wants. Remember Radio 2 has more listeners than Radio 1 these days.

still, its worth pointing out that they invited ILX faves
basement jaxx in to compile their favourite 20 dance tunes!
nice article as it goes.

I'm not necessarily going to rush out and buy records by the bands they get excited about, but the writing is full of enthusiasm, the photography is fantastic, and the overall production is pretty faultless.

Which is more than enough to make me look forward to it immensely.

But if you were just thinking of those you can pick up in the newsagents, then I'd probably agree.

Wasn't word count-slashing also a characteristic of the last days of Select Magazine? Q truly deserves to die now. The tedious-but-at-least-better-written-than-its-competitors Word magazine is transparently modelled on the original version of Q, and is also extremely Ipod-centric. Q is just beyond help now, and the comment upthread about it being driven by creativity-free marketing considerations is resoundingly OTM.

I did like the comment in the Guardian feature about the EMAP initiatives driving such relaunches (in this case 'Project Phoenix' or something) having "twattish names" though!

Mojo I enjoy.

Q I stopped buying, no point I found.

Select was just getting good with its free CDs when it stopped.

NME I like more than I did last year, but thats because the music scene is getting better not because the NME is

Uncut is torture in the CDs are rarely worth the bother playing (but on the odd occasion one track makes up for it. One time they had "Dark is Rising" as an ahead of time Mercury Rev dit, and I sat back and went wow. Oh yeah and Dawn liked the Jackie Leven track on the same CD...). But when they say 'americana' I go NOOOH! even if they have Robert Smith in it.

Record Collector has gone 'dumbed down' in a way, but then its covering more stuff and trying to be more mojo like. To be fair the writing was very variable (chech the Jesus and Mary Chain article in the back issues you guys).

Whats left? Only the "Hey isn't the current music scene fantastic everybody" flybynight monthly mags. And Kerrang (nein danke).

I'm treading carefully as an ex-Emap employee, but they do have a frightening level of dependancy on focus groups/ market research. But they seem to ask the opinions of people who don't ever buy magazines. They are a very marketing led company, often to the point when you think they care more about brand extensions than the actual magazine that was there in the first place.

most big mags seem to be headed or run by non-music people, so its no wonder theyre so dissapointing (to music nerds at least).

Q is unreadable. They've gone for the jumble bazaar design look, i.e. nothing's in a straight line, you have to twist and turn around piles of eye-blinding crap to get to the miniscule part you actually want to read. They should drop the journalism pretence and produce issues consisting of nothing but lists, with reviews reduced to track listings, personnel and previous discography a la Music Week with star ratings and no critical comment whatsoever.

Mojo has similarly slashed its review section of late, and again its content is largely to do with its demographic's fixation with old and dead things; dead rock stars, old records, so it appeals to the middle-aged but doesn't have anything to attract the young.

Uncut I'm saying nothing about because I'm not going to slag off people who give me work.

The Wire is like going to school; grim grey lectures on grim grey music. When it sticks to its original improv brief it's fine - and in the case of Henry Grimes, it actually might have helped save, not just a career, but a life - but under Chris Bohn it has turned into a nostalgia mag for fortysomething Goth/industrial heads. More than anything else, reading The Wire provokes me to think that maybe Hornby on "Frankie Teardrop" wasn't so far off the mark after all; so humanity sucks? death stinks? I know. I have watched someone die. I watched a life being slowly destroyed and was powerless to do anything about it. You don't need to tell me about death and horror and gloom. Tell me something about life instead.

Well that's the intention of Mojo, innit?

They should aim for one word.

Or one letter, even...

Pah!!!!! Why not dispense with the alphabet all together, and use a thumbs up/down icon!??!?!?!

;-)

(obv)

:'-(

Also, vague derail, but lookee here, yet another new mag to fill the space left by, er, Bullit or something: http://www.kingsmagazine.com - well, it's got some half-decent bands in at least, even if they are pretty much all from NYC.

Is there a thread for posting things that make you smile knowingly rather than laff out loud?

Someone reviewed David Toop's new book in the latest Uncut and wondered why he wasn't writing about alt.country in it. That's about as close to a definition of cringe as you're going to find in this thread without mentioning the Libertines, I think

Worryingly I haven't seen any reviews of Watson's Bailey biog anywhere, be it music press or broadsheets, which bodes ill for the CoM book.

Oddly enough, the Libertines are Uncut's Album of the Month this month. Five stars (reviewer, James Oldham). About four more than I would have given it, but different strokes etc. etc...

I have a severe fear of flying, but I find that countless articles about Elvis Costello and Steve Earle and reviews of Warren Zevon re-ssues seem to take my mind off the whole 9-mile tin tube thing. Weird.

Nope, you're thinking of Careless Talk Costs Lives, which split into Loose Lips and Plan B -- ET oversees the latter, but apparently more in a guru sense.

Mojo's review section was OK up until a year ago, when they started going the same way as everyone else, i.e. star ratings and 80-word capsule downpagers.

Though the rates may not be as good, I'll say this much -- the AMG does encourage you to write 300-word reviews, which while not essay length or the like still gives you some room to say something.

what with all the IPOD obsession, how far before emoticons are the new stars?

I'm already there! I think.

Disagree. He was fabulous at Kerrang!

Is that Everett True's mag?

Ned beat me to it, but no. ET writes for Loose Lips though.

Mojo has similarly slashed its review section of late, and again its content is largely to do with its demographic's fixation with old and dead things; dead rock stars, old records, so it appeals to the middle-aged but doesn't have anything to attract the young.

I disagree there, Marcello. Mojo's got pretty good coverage of the noisier end of rock'n'roll, they've run big pieces on a band like The Mars Volta, and big-ish pieces on bands like Secret Machines, Icarus Line, and (soon) Comets On Fire... these are not old or dead bands by any extention.

At the moment I think it urgent and key that Mojo do a GIGANTIC piece on Annette Peacock, or at least do a Buried Treasures piece on I'm The One as it might provoke those idle slackers at BMG to reissue the bloody thing on CD.

Who are/is the people behind this? The same who gave us BANG magazine?
(I hope not, unless it's Simon Price & Andrew Mueller)

oh well, that's another £3.50 saved then.

Music really is rubbish at the moment innit?

Nope.

I disagree with people saying Mojo shouldn't cover new bands in depth also; while the mag is misperceived as mostly catering to the cantankerous, rock-died-in-the-70s old fart brigade, it actually attempts to rehabilitate these cynical number of their readership (which also has a huge youth base), showing them that the spirit of the rock'n'roll they loved in their youth still thrives today, albeit in different forms. Bands like My Morning Jacket, Icarus Line and Mars Volta all take influence from the same sources as Mojo's dead-guy canon, but twist these ideas into electrifying new shapes - why shouldn't Mojo cover these bands also? How interesting woulld a magazine that's forever gazing behind it really be? I wouldn't want to write for a magazine that's nothing more than a journalistic wake for all the things I once cared about.

A much better idea for Mojo/ Uncut - would be devote a whole themed issue on the decade so far, with indepth research, analytical overviews from key writers etc

i dont think pete will be dead by xmas. i see him rejoining the libertines right in time for the release of the album, which the PR machine behind the band would absolutely cream over.

as far as mojo, i like it as a mag of musical history. i dont see anything wrong with that in the slightest. at least they stood out from the rest when they were doing that.

I certainly seem to be buying more of it than ever.... unfortunately I'm not entirely sure whether that actually endorses or contradcicts your statement....

(hahah, as a "critic" all the new stuff is sent to me so i only ever buy "old" stuff!)

among the items on this weekend's shopping list: new redux reissue of The Human Menagerie by Cockney Rebel. Up-to-the-mark Carlin, eh?

Q have done something similar to this with their one-shots...

but he'll be straight on the cover the second (or the month) he is - let's say, Xmas issue? "2004 - THE YEAR THE MUSIC DIED: OFFICIAL." "With Doherty went our future. The Libertines promised liberation. He died so that we might be free of Big Brother. But now we are slaves...forever." TOP TEN QUIRKY QUIPS FROM DOTTY DOHERTY!/TOP TEN LIBERTINES TRACKS!/TOP 50 NUT ROCKERS WHO WENT TO THEIR GRAVES EARLY! Etc

i honestly don't think so; i think if it *did* happen, Mojo would treat it soberly and with respect, and be one of the few mags to do so, because I trust the editorial staff there, and know they wouldn't allow such a thing.

the hunches
comets on fire
diplo
hayden
tv on the radio
omar a rodiguez-lopez
mark lanegan band
monkey island
rob sonic
grand drive

I've read one, in - you guessed it! - Wire. I've stopped buying Wire, bored shitless with it.

You're not missing much in the Wire at the moment; it's a bit like a 73 bus - "missed that Coil retrospective? Don't worry there'll be another one along in three issues' time."

They'd put Ronan Keating on the cover if Jim O'Rourke produced his next album!

Or...hyuck hyuck...HIPSWAY!

Or...hyuck x 10/10,000 - SET THE TONE!!

Both Marcello! That's part of the problem!

If ronan keating had an album produced by jim o'rouke he should be on the cover. More laughs to be had on the letters page! :)

It turns me on to more 'new' music than any other publication (Gloria Coates and, er, someone else probably) but that's cos I don't read any others.

Well, they only have twelve covers a year, Keiji Haino releases 12 double-CDs a month

And that is to do with the number of labels, distribution etc.

..... hmmmmmmmmmm, well, yes.

Cecil Taylor was on major labels for most of the '60s and '70s and had maybe 12 albums out during that time. Now he shoves out everything and anything on CD (ten-CD box sets!) and there isn't one I wouldn't exchange for Silent Tongues or Nefertiti, The Beautiful One Has Come.

(that is, if I didn't already have them)

And with ppl like cecil or bailey I have quite a bit but I don't feel the need to keep buying it (not that I could anyway) (I think a few things from each decade -- to see how they've changed, if any).

Come to think of it, whatever happened to that proposed CD of the AMM/Christian Wolff gig @ Conway Hall? Coming on for two years now...

x-post

NME were pretty good at writing about pop as recently as five or six years ago, I thought

[copy and paste x 9]

Q Magazine Albums of the Year 2004

1 The Streets - A Grand Don't Come For Free

2 Keane - Hopes And Fears

3 Franz Ferdinand - Franz Ferdinand

4 U2 - How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb

5 Razorlight - Up All Night

6 The Libertines - The Libertines

7 Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Abattoir Blues/The Lyre Of Orpheus

8 The Killers - Hot Fuss

9 Mylo - Destroy Rock & Roll

10 Interpol - Antics

11 Snow Patrol - Final Straw

12 Dizzee Rascal - Showtime

13 Wilco - A Ghost Is Born

14 Scissor Sisters - Scissor Sisters

15 Danger Mouse - The Grey Album

16 Kasabian - Kasabian

17 Kings of Leon - Aha Shake Heartbreak

18 Prince - Musicology

19 Gwen Stefani - Love Angel Music Baby

20 The Zutons - Who Killed The Zutons?

21 Green Day - American Idiot

22 Happiness in Magazines - Graham Coxon

23 Elliott Smith - From A Basement On The Hill

24 The Blue Nile - High

25 Ryan Adams - Love Is Hell

26 Mark Lanegan Band - Bubblegum

27 Norah Jones - Feels Like Home

28 Usher - Confessions

29 Kanye West - The College Dropout

30 Eminem - Encore

31 The Walkmen - Bows + Arrows

32 Lostprophets - Start Something

33 George Michael - Patience

34 Sufjan Stevens - Seven Swans

35 The Futureheads - The Futureheads

36 Secret Machines - Now Here Is Nowhere

37 !!! - Louden Up Now

38 Devendra Banhart - Rejoicing In The Hands

39 Estelle - The 18th Day

40 Joss Stone - Mind Body & Soul

41 Modest Mouse - Good News For People Who Love Bad News

42 Brian Wilson - Smile

43 Loretta Lynn - Van Lear Rose

44 Jamelia - Thank You

45 The Von Bondies - Pawn Shoppe Heart

46 My Chemical Romance - Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge

47 Goldie Lookin Chain - Greatest Hits

48 Cee-Lo Green - Cee-Lo Green Is The Soul Machine

49 Red Hot Chili Peppers - Live In Hyde Park

50 The Bees - Free The Bees

also,

11. Snow Patrol
12. Dizzee Rascal

*sob*

In such a setting, Q will always lose, as they are all over the place and aren't a one genre mag such as Mojo, MixMag, Kerrang and all those hip-hop mags.

That being said, Q has yet to give a fair review to Travis. :)

Hanna Hukkelberg
http://hannehukkelberg.com/

-- DJ Martian (altmartinu...), November 29th, 2004.

I have. I'm going to start posting my lists this Wednesday, starting off with the top 50 reissues/comps, and then the top 50 new albums, in reverse order, ten a day (i.e. 50-41 on Wednesday, etc. etc.). A bit earlier than normal, but I want to get it done before I go off on holiday on the 18th.

Snow Patrol - Final Straw (Polydor)
release date: 4 August 2003; re-released: 2 February 2004
http://www.musicomh.com/albums/snow-patrol.htm

the type of dull rock music that 6 Music plays on auto-pilot

I hate lists.

Kevin Shields: You made me realise...
Bilinda Butcher: Woo!

How many early '90s members of the NME staff are writing for Q currently?

Keane at no.2? Jeez!

What's with all this Franz hatred? Of course they're not as good as Orange Juice or Josef K, and the album doesn't really have huge staying power, but they've got the tunes, the moves and the grooves. Next to the likes of Razorshite and the Libertines, they seem impossibly exotic, stylish and cool.
Sons & Daughters are better though!

I agree with Stevie on Mojo - it's nowhere as fuddy duddy as some think. Tends to cover far more interesting areas of the past than Uncut and the new bands coverage has been pretty good. I've been reading Mojo since my teens, when it was a nice complement to NME or Select, and it's always covered a far wider range of music than Uncut, what with wonderful indepth pieces on Marvin Gaye, Sly Stone, Krautrock, Joy Division/New Order etc.
Don't let Uncut put you off all alt.country. There's a lot of boring AOR stuff out there, but Songs:Ohia, Giant Sand, Handsome Family, Gillian Welch are genuinely great.
Some of my pals swear by the Wire, others hate it with a passion. I'm somewhere in between. The industrial/goth obsession leaves me cold - how can anyone take Current 93 seriously? And I wish they would do more hip-hop and have a bit more fun.

This is exactly why Q are better than other mags. They are all over the place, and don't play with those fanatic purists that tend to go for mags such as Kerrang, Mixmag or The Source.

*Plus Keane don't even have guitars. So there ;)

There have been plenty of ace melodic white guitar (or non guitar)records this year (The Shins, Delgados, Wilco, Elliot Smith) but Keane's Hopes And Fears ain't one of them mate. ;)

My favourite thing about its relaunch as a Digitally Aware Mag Of The Future was when they published a letter which mentioned Ogg Vorbis and replied "that sounds like something out of Star Wars!". My smaller ball knows more about Teh Digitals than that.

I still read a lot of Mojo. I feel at least that they understand how I'm going to read it, whereas NME and Q seem desperate that I might put the paper down to play San Andreas, or to masturbate.

But I'm still really disappointed in Mojo for the change in the Reviews section (especially as it now reads "these ones at the front are the ones you have to know about" as opposed to the level field before which encouraged you to explore -- and read more). And was it my imagination, or did Hidden Treasure, or whatever it's called, switch a few years ago from records which needed reissuing, and start focussing on records about to be reissued? Even when that record is Nina Simone And Piano!, the feeling that might be true is one of the sickest a music mag has given me.

I suspect no-one else likes it, but once I ignore the daft corners of Observer Music Monthly, I'm surprised it's not featured properly in this thread.

(Sometimes I read Rolling Stone in Borders. How can a magazine so surprisingly good on Bush be so terrible on, um, rock music?)

I can't imagine what it must be like to have heard fifty albums released this year, with a month to go. I'll be lucky if I get to 46.

NME house style? There are actually some decent writers at the NME, who would probably jump at the chance to write about more interesting artists, but there are also some complete eejits who see Mark Beaumont as their mentor. The review of Kama Aina a few months back was pretty offensive. Mr Aima's pretty folky doodles and sketches didn't conform to the writer's superficial and patronising view of Japanese pop culture, so he went on about bukkake, karaoke, hello Kitty etc etc. It was like criticising Franz Ferdinand for not wearing kilts, singing about deep fried Mars bars, or being called Hamish. Or Missy Elliot for not going on about fried chicken and watermelon. Grrrr.
That NME holographic cover is a really bad idea, cos it makes the magazine almost impossible to hold and flick through casually. A tacky gimmick, made all the worse by the mobile phone hologram on the back.

.. until a few months ago i never flicked through it .. now its becoming an essential lunch hour regular.

and i've heard great things re the Jan'05 issue. but thats another story ..

xpost - nme cover .. yup - tried the quick flick yesterday to completely give up on it.

thats fucking disgusting.

http://img.thesun.co.uk/multimedia/archive/00952/cherylcoleQ_380x520_952931a.jpg

who dat ho?

THE BEST NEW ACTS WE INTERVIEW THE WHITE STRIPES COURTNEY LOVE U2 PAUL WELLER BIFFY CLYRO AND A HAMSTER