A Case Study : The Vines and NME

Just read it for news. It's like watching "Entertainment Tonight."

1. Bad grammar.
2. Corporate promo tie-in between pop group and publication's financial interests makes critical objectivity thereafter unlikely.

Et cetera. Why call yourself a professional writer when you're functionally illiterate?

The same odd 'double is' error again! They must think 'is' needs opening and closing, like brackets or quotes or summat.

I is the NME, I is anarchee!

body after body flow over the security barriers

and

this is a band that matter

This is a paper that don't.

;-)

Actually, from now one consider that intentional - I am exploring an exciting Burrough-like world of typos. And having many literary adventures.

Or consider that last night, whilst ill, I watched Space Odysessy, The Chippendales with Adrian Zmed and Selena in a row. Anyone is bound to be a bit disoriented after that.

And, Momus, would you have accepted "this is a band who matter"? I've always thought that plural verb with collective singular noun was forgivable, so long as it was clear that the members of the collective noun were being referred to.

I really dislike the habit of referring to an opinion expressed by an NME journalist as "The NME" - I've never got the sense that there's a hive-mind musical consensus among their writers. But the constant "it's an NME show! the NME is Fundamental To Your Life! the NME is Saving Modern Music!" they seem to be trotting out at the moment really gets on my tits. It's like really bad propaganda, and who exactly thinks it's convincing?

All it does is make you think you can't trust reviews as being the actual opinion of the writer - if it's an NME-awards-related or NME-backed show, is the journalist going to be expected to fawn and coo in order to justify the NME's having booked this band?

And the Vines are boooring. But we knew that.

Spot the NME cover without Oasis, Radiohead or Coldplay. That's right, there isn't one.

http://microsites.nme.com/thisweek/img/cover_310503_L.jpg

http://microsites.nme.com/thisweek/img/cover_240503_L.jpg

http://microsites.nme.com/thisweek/img/cover_170503_L.jpg

http://microsites.nme.com/thisweek/img/cover_100503_L.jpg

http://microsites.nme.com/thisweek/img/cover_030503_L.jpg

http://microsites.nme.com/thisweek/img/cover_260403_L.jpg

http://microsites.nme.com/thisweek/img/cover_190403_L.jpg

http://microsites.nme.com/thisweek/img/cover_120403_L.jpg

http://microsites.nme.com/thisweek/img/cover_050403_L.jpg

Week in, week out! The same bands! No risks, ever! Is this any kind of 'arbiter of taste', even a 'self-proclaimed' one? No longer, dear friends. This is one terrified, timorous little tiddler of a tepid, line-towing, corporate boot-licking, herd-following toe-rag with a market research robot on autopilot at the helm. I really hope their next editor is a Microsoft Word spell-checker, it would at least improve the grammar (and maybe Bill Gates could suggest some different bands for the cover).

it makes sense to put the same bands week in week out bcz they must be seeling copies.

Tis an english thing to hate the MEN. Suppose that is why it' named the N.M.E.

And then, having lured the unsuspecting masses, you can do something subversive inside, right?

whatever suits ya but you are unsatisfied with those covers in the first place.

''My Lomax review consisted of nothing but French Situationist slogans! Hooray!''

will the kids know? will they google them?

That said, Julio, you're right - you put Radiohead on the cover and people will buy, and there's nothing wrong with that. It's good commercial sense. Select used to have a manics poster in the photo-pullout every issue just so the fangirls would buy, and no-one complained about that.

I've never hated the NME, and at this rate I doubt I ever will. My fangirldom is too ingrained. I just wish they'd, you know, live up to my mad adoration. ;)

I throw in some funny stuff - and if you are clever - you'll get it - if not - it's there - subconscious, like.

No robes. Though robes would be cool. I had lunch outside the Pantheon last week and saw robes. I went blind.

fair enough. but to be fair, when i used to read it, I never looked at the grammar (well english isn't my first language but still)

And all the grammar problems Momus so helpfully transcribed for us were corrected in the physically-published piece - I just resent the fact that they couldn't be arsed to do the same on the website. (I've given up on my ideals about people having the self-respect to check their own grammar before they let anything they write be read. The internet has proven me very, very wrong.)

'IPC is known to favour developing its magazines into cross-media brands and NME in particular offers huge scope for the company to use audio and video to develop it into TV or radio property.'

Media Guardian, 2001.

It could also make a very interesting ringtone property if you shoe-horned the whole paper into a tinny, irritating MIDI file and uploaded it to cell phones.

A Brief History of Word Processing (Through 1986)

(What a great title, I will write a song called that and get on the cover of the NME!)

Did the "death of media" issue sell proportionally more than other issues of NME at the time, or just more than any given Oasis-cover NME of now?

(I cannot believe I am arguing this. Every obvious-artist cover of the NME makes me want to invade Kings Reach Tower with flaming torches, silver bullets and, uh, other stuff. Especially when it's Oasis, because, for fuck's sake, who cares anymore?)

Fun arguing with you; cis and Momus! Have a brilliant Saturday.

...brand management? Steve Sutherland's going to have to move on sometime, after all. Unless he's tenured to IPC for life.

Same to you, doom-e!

Ah, you've caught me red-handed and rhetorical there. In fact, as you suspected, the 'Death of Media' actually sold rather poorly by the standards of 1984, meaning it sold double what the 2003 NME sells. It's cited by some old hands as the paper's nadir, the moment it disappeared up its own fundament. I, of course, disagree. That was the moment when the NME was closest to a paper like Germany's exemplary de:bug.

As for where to lay the blame, I can only quote Mark Thompson's McTaggart Lecture. He's talking about television, but I think it applies just as well to the NME:

'I lay most of the blame on two kinds of conservatism: the modern, technocratic risk-aversion of the schedule; and, lurking in the shadows, an older cultural conformism. We have to overcome them both.'

I'd love to see the NME of today come out with an issue like the death-of-media one, but I'm not sure that's what the NME is about. Not nowadays, anyway. You can have a death-of-media issue when you've got a strong core following - they'll maybe be interested or maybe dismiss it as pretentious wank, but they'll read it. The NME, right now, doesn't have that - and it's not getting a new readership in, not just due to the internet and whatnot but because there is not the interest in indie there once was. In my experience, people at gigs are getting older, not younger (unless I'm only going to gigs for old people). This New Rock Revolution thing has been hyped for all it's worth, but it's not pulling in the fourteen-year-old-girls the way Britpop did.

Seeting aside the fact that the NME has to survive as a commercial concern as much as a cultural one, don't you think the use of established artists on covers could be the NME's own way of combating cultural conformism? I probably bought my first NME because of one. Often the mention of an artist on the cover is disproportionate to the amount of coverage (hah!) they get inside: it's a buzzword to make people buy, in the hope that they'll find something else inside that will keep them interested, make them interested in other music.

You can't overcome conformism just by being non-conformist, after all, can you? Can't subvert the masses if they take one look at the front and move straight on to Q.

(and now I, too have to abandon you. This does not mean you have won the argument, alright? ;) Was a very enjoyable way to spend the morning!)