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)

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