If you're not the new yesterday you've missed your chance cos tomorrow is too late

read article in a minute. but i thought it was the other way round with nme and mm?

precisely! Exactly what I thought. Especially 1986-8.

Taking a mid 90s point of view... (too young for the golden late 80s, i'm afraid)

NME was always more obviously eclectic, but boringly written. Isn't it funny how boring so often = serious?

Melody Maker was more conservitive on the surface (I read it for about 5 years and could probaly count the number of black faces on the cover on one foot), but the writing was better and the non- features coverage, i.e. the reviews was always a lot more eclectic, interesting and better written. Obviously it was the case with both papers, but the strangest thing about MM was that, on the whole, the writers taste was so different from the readers. Did your average MM reader really care about the same bands as Reynolds, Price, Parkes, etc... I think its pretty obvious that the ILM 'ethos' is closer to MM than NME.

Interesting thought though - flicking through NME occasionally recently it sems to have improved. The top 50 albums list was decent, and wasn't Jay-Z on the cover recently?

77-85 it was DEFINITELY totally the other way round (adam sweeting was mm's top writer c.82!!!)

85 = year penman was purged from nme

(i was there 83-88)

Interesting thought though - flicking through NME occasionally recently it sems to have improved. The top 50 albums list was decent, and wasn't Jay-Z on the cover recently?

The music it covers has improved, but if anything the writing itself has been a steady progression downhill.

The article is, as is usual with such articles, victim to the dual fatal flaws of when-i-was-a-lad-ism (why AREN'T Atomic Kitten better than the Supremes?) and fear of up-their-own-arse-ism (which undoes all their wishful thinking because that's where journalism turns into visionary art) and therefore itself part of the problem.

The fact is that the printed music press is not required any longer. What can be discussed, theorised, dissertated and passioned over (and if that wasn't previously a verb, it is now) on the Net is far more fluid, florid and relevant than anything you could find in Rough Trade, never mind WH Smith. I certainly find FT/ILx - together with the websites of the likes of Simon R, DJ Martian, Tim Skykicking et al - far more useful to me in terms of discovering new music or re- evaluating old music (incidentally, DJ Martian, 10 million bonus points for spotting Murcof - probably would take even the Wire about two years to get there) than even the likes of the Wire (if I see ANOTHER Coil article in the next 12 months I will cancel my sub immediately - they are to the Wire what Scott Hamilton is to Jazz Journal). Uncut - essentially a resting home for old MM/NMErs and eventually an alt ct specialist mag with name change unless IPC pull the plug. Careless Talk I don't care for much, but to its credit it doesn't really pretend to be anything other than an ET fanzine and will attract the sort of readers it wants (i.e. those he already had who pissed off after he pissed off from MM). But one is still faced (and I'm talking general music media here again) with reviews of months-old records, opinions long since superseded, attitudes (and layouts) which should have been quietly laid to rest circa 1985.

The Morley/Penman/Baker NME was invaluable to me as, growing up in Glasgow, there really was no way of getting to this music other than Peel in the evenings (and Brian Ford's Street Sounds on Radio Clyde) or hoofing it down to Bloggs Records in St Vincent Street (our Rough Trade equivalent) to take your chances with your pocket money. The Reynolds/Stubbs/Owen MM was invaluable to me, not because of lack of access to the music (as by that time I was working in London and it was easy to buy/listen to the stuff), but because of the new perspectives and the new life it brought to music writing, at a time when the whole boat really looked like sinking (C86/Shane McGowan/Bragg/Red Wedge/comatose).

Things are more accessible now, there is more history, we've learned too much and know too much to be startled by things any more. Even if we're 15. So the "next generation" of visionary writers (even though much of it comes, age-wise, from the previous one, self included!) materialises in hyperspace. This IS the future, and we are the people making it. Amen.

DJ Martian has just scored 10 million bonus points.

Has he won?

'But one is still faced (and I'm talking general music media here again) with reviews of months-old records'

Actually, I've always wondered about this. Would the standard of music writing be any better if there wasn't such a code of getting reviews out quickly? They don't use speed-reading students to review books, do they? There is no possible way anybody can say anything interesting about a record (they can about OTHER STUFF, of course) after playing it on the Discman, skipping the boring bits to get to the end, so you can get that review out first thing in the morning. This method of working, along with the pressure to either a) be first on the bandwagon, or b) cultivate a 'writer' identity, must account for the quality of music reviewing, i.e., once you read the first sentence entire article/review can be recited from memory.

interview with (the recently late) ian hamilton here on (among other things) the ethics and stylistics of writing newspaper reviews (poetry in his case), which is kind of to the point, even if his GENERAL aesthetic is somewhat whack (ie he hearts poetry)

i wuz gunna link this on ILE, cuz i wuz intgerested in responses

I agree with MrQ mostly, in terms of quality, although from a 'keeping up with the news' perspective you obviously do want speed. And I think that's where things on the internet thrive (I probably wouldn't have heard of the deaths of some music folks for days if it wasn't for here), as well as opinion sharing.

But I don't think that that the interweb can (or maybe 'should') replace the printed press- the information is too scattered, and I personally can't keep up with thousands of blogs every day. I'm not saying that NME etc are perfect, but I'd much rather skim through that stuff on the bus than make my eyes go all boggin by staring at random facts for ages.

Bit of a tangent, sorry...

"there is more history, we've learned too much and know too much to be startled by things any more"

Very true with rock and pop anyway. From 1990 on we started to became educated about the past in a way that never happened in the 80s. The monthly rock mags were like history books, big 30 pagers on T-Rex, Pet Sounds, 1977 ...... This at first all seemed very juicily appetising but a lot of the writing became too factual and stale. To a large extent the past became demystified (a bad thing) and knowing too much minor detail blemished the dream, like meeting your heroes! As David Lynch said when referring to all the extra stuff on DVDs, it doesn't really matter how a film gets to be the way it is in its final form, whatever overlay you put on a film that an audience takes into the theater can putrefy the experience and cause so much trouble. Same can be said about all the retro writing in the mags. Too much trivia and "making of" side stories while sometimes fascinating can spoil the enjoymnt of the end product. Not that I know, but it seems there wasn't much looking back at things throughout the 70s and 80s - the culture was always moving on. Any early or mid 80s music paper I've flicked through in second hand shops always seems bereft of articles about the past. Was this true. I suspect there wasn't too much looking back on the 50s and 60s during the 70s, at least not to the same extent as today. I don't remember many nostalgia shows on TV when I was a teenager in the 80s. The massive CD reissue industry was probably the main instigator of the 90s nostalgia boom. Everything past was reviewed and reassessed alongside current releases and gradually features on the past became the norm, to the extent that they now dominate rock magazines. No wonder record collection rock was the main rock movement of the 1990s!!

Well, as far as the UK music press was concerned, there was a fair amount of looking back in the early-to-mid '70s - indeed Chrissie Hynde quit the NME in '74 after being asked to write a retrospective about the Velvets - although perhaps a bit more of an attempt to be "iconoclastic" (e.g. Charles Shaar Murray's slating of Sgt Pepper - also '74, which at that time was enough to induce a fatwa; or Mick Farren's state-of-the-nation-things-must-change manifestos '75-6).

When punk got off the ground the music press became almost neurotic about not looking back, but as a kid it was great to know that all this was happening right there and then while you were living through it (in contrast to elder brothers, etc., harping on about the bloody sixties). There was a need, an urgency to cover (and maybe anticipate) what was happening. The past was acknowledged but did not weigh criticism down. Like you say, this was the pre-CD age and apart from current stuff and immediate/stalwart back catalogue, "classic" albums were nigh impossible to get.

There certainly was none of it in the early '80s except for useful things like Richard Cook's consumers' guide to post-Parker jazz ('81) which you would never find in NME now. After New Pop, though, the ripped-Levi's ethic took over again and writers (and musicians) started digging back into "ver roots" - Kent reissues, even Ramones reissues - with the unspoken subtext "we cannot compete." So MM, courtesy of Reynolds/Stubbs/Owen, seized the gauntlet and started to define new territories (Albini to Marshall Jefferson, Beat Happening to Mantronix, AR Kane to Phuture) - and again, the immense feeling that things were going on, the fact that if you wanted to hear this stuff you had to go out and seek it - it didn't come to you via demographic radio/internet/mp3s. In this frame of mind, it wasn't worth obsessing oneself into the ground over "the past" apart from those hitherto-off limits genres which were ripe for rediscovery (e.g. smashed-blocked '60s psych, '70s folk-rock). Elvis Costello was famously sneered at by Dave McCullough as representing the "Camden Good Music Society." Archivism was laughed off the stage. Get on with the future!

Well, you know what happened in the '90s. Sometimes you don't want to know how something was put together - I think of David Thomson, who taught Citizen Kane to film school students for ten years until a point when he could watch it no more as the continual dissemination was driving him mad - the work of art should IN ITSELF inspire you. Stories can sometimes bring out new angles to the music (e.g. the Temptations string of mid-'60s ballads culminating in I Wish It Would Rain were written by a jilted man who soon afterwards killed himself) but are in themselves not vital to its appreciation. In any case, the listener/musician responds to a piece of music (or any work of art) from what they themselves feel - the only perspective you can truly know. So you can now go and theoretically, between CD reissues, E-Bay, mp3s, websites and whatever, have in your collection every piece of music ever recorded. Nothing is off limits; you can discover everything. But do we really want to know how many punch- ups Brian Wilson and Mike Love had while trying to record Smile? Do we even want to hear a "finished" version of it? Wouldn't it just disappoint, fail to live up to what three generations of writers have fantasised about it in their heads? Isn't its failure, and the subsequent trickledown of art backwards through Pet Sounds and forward to Surf's Up, what writers need to accept? Some things are best left alone.

So *that's* what drove him mad.

Well put. Yes, during the New Pop/New Romantic era of 81-84 the looking back aesthetic was at it's lowest, both in music and the media. As you say, the "ripped jeans" and white t-shirt phase of 86- 87 got the past going again (bloody Deacon Blue, Brat Pack movies Joshua Tree LP cover, The Wonder Years, Levis adds......).

Rock books also only really started emerging during the 90s. The vast majority of Beatles books ever written appeared post Live Aid. Now the shelves of Waterstone and HMV are collapsing under the weight of superfluous rock and pop tomes. Looking for a 500 pager on Dumpy's Rusty Nuts? It's probably out there somewhere. Every month Mojo or Uncut review another 20 or so new rock books!!

Everything Marcello says here = absolutely spot on the target

mark s. please refrain from adding an aitch to the word "wack" thankyew

Don't promotional releases sent out ahead of the full public release give reviewers more time, or are they still rushed to compete with other people recieveing and reviewing the promos?

I think I would have to disagree with some parts of the statements above: ("Some things are best left alone. ") I see where your coming from, but for me I often like the demos/bad quality/outtakes/unfinished works that would otherwise, without the many rereleases, not be available. They have a more rough/ raw aesthetic (similar to lo-fi music). I think these should be put on rereleases, even if it's not what the artist originally intended.

I also think, that no matter how much history or stories you know about a particually piece of music, it is possible to listen to it and not have these affect the enjoyment of the piece during that listen. I think this would also carry into movies. Of course, this statement doesn't justify the many articles on old material, but it isn't anti-retro writing.