Is NME paralysed by suffering from middle-class, English white-boy guilt ?

Yes, but this was recently proven by science.

Oh, it happens here in America too, Liliya, trust me! The general standpoint being that 'dangerous' music provides a touch of excitement, of supposedly being 'raw and real,' etc., and that those who play such music should act accordingly. The flipside is all the complaints about 'that wimpy shit.' What's 'raw' and what's 'wimpy' changes over time, though -- a dialectic that inhabits new forms as music itself changes, as new styles come to the fore.

Fritz

I just don't get the nature of the argument. We can all pick a great artist from one genre then a bad one from another. What does it prove?

Yes, I'd rather listen to Steps than the S'phonics. I'd also much rather listen to Migala or The High Llamas than Westlife. I can imagine what kind of reception I'd get on ILM if I tried to present the latter as some kind of conclusive evidence that indie is better than pop per se.

p.s. yes I am neurotic, I've rarely been worse

In doing so it tries desparately to make that news into 52 different scenes per year in some sort of quasi-Bangs/Thompson attitude. Nobody has a clue anymore because music is too old and too confusing to write about conclusively and with any great authority.

Music is - on the whole - rubbish and only a few brights lights make pursuing it worth while. Dust down your Ivor Cutler and fuck fashion!

http://www.nme.com/reviews/10949.htm

My BIGGEST complaint about NME, and this is coming from an outsider in the U.S., is that they are so much more concerned with retaining their ability to dictate taste in the U.K. as they are about good journalism (defined as an objective stance and reporting). Other than perhaps Rolling Stone (which is equally shitty), at least most crummy music mags make no pretenses about their status as tastemakers. So, you get them on these stupid bandwagons where music has to fit in perfectly with what they believe to be the IT bandwagon of the nanosecond. I just know that if I were still 14 or 15 and I lived in the U.K., I'd be blinded to a lot of good music because the NME sez it's not in vogue at the moment, and that's the real tragedy. (rant mode off)

I had a friend who used to freelance a bit for NME as well... they would add the word "brilliant" several times to every review he wrote. I bet they have a hyperbole matrix they use (1 word of hyperbole in the form of adjective or adverb for every 9 "regular" words).

nah - personally i like pat long's writing and well, my own!

No it doesn't - it loves them. Any "simmering resentment" comes out after acres of praise and is probably rooted in the fact that large indie bands sell the most papers even though they're mostly really fucking dull. They own NME's "ass" and they still get way more than their fair share of coverage and hype.

A more charitable view would be that writers who wade through so much indie sludge on a daily basis might reasonably get frustrated with readers' "know what I like" attitudes and want to push more interesting music to the fore. The one welcome development in NME-land over the last few years has been its attempt to push Hip Hop, R&B and electronic"a" to the fore. It's just a shame it's done so with haiku-length reviews and features written in the style of a sulky 13-yr-old boy from Twickenham. Most of which contain the editorially-imposed phrase "punk as fuck" (y'know, to explain Electroclash to people born in 1985).

I've recently stopped buying NME for the first time in 11 years, mainly because there's not much of it left - it's more of a tip-sheet than something you actually *read* now. There must be less than half the word count of an NME from 10 years ago, and they blow most of that by printing four pages of emails from people who saw the fire at the Leeds festival, or by taking up half the issue with news stories you can get free on their site. Plus there's a palpable fear of writing anything intelligent or analytical in case it puts off the imagined "young people" (who are obviously all stupid and would never think of pop music as being important enough for that kind of thing anyway). It's kind of creepy and embarassing.

Like its legendary "hip-hop issue" from a few years back? That was when it truly jumped the shark, when it started assuming that its target audience wouldn't actually know who Nas was.

I think it was tokenism but tokenism defined by the end-of-year-poll format as much as anything else.

(PE and De La Soul are no big surprise as NME vote winners as they define two ways hiphop was received by indiekidkultur in the 80s... as THE NEW PUNK and as THE NEW BEATNIK)

Are you hinting that he may have been scretly knocking off Julie Birchill on the side all the time?