I walked by other music and in the window they have a large glowing the dears album and in white courier it says "Probably the best new band in the world today -NME". Seems like a lot of research for one blurb.





Oh they said The Vines were "The best new band on planet earth!" 2 years ago. Then their album came out.


le sigh.

somebody told me that kerble wrote:

run joe, run wrote:...Like a shiver, usually accompanied by a rush of blood to the head and a slight vocalisation of your discomfort? ...

Whatever, run coldplay, run. We know you've been zombified by the NME.




Faiz

Sometimes we all stumble and fall, Faiz.

I'd agree with most of the comments above, but I'm a bit ambivalent over damning it completely. The thing is, it certainly used to serve a purpose and I'm not sure whether it is significantly worse than it was when I read it and Melody Maker as a teenager.

If memory serves, the quality of writing was almost as poor 10-15 years ago, and it showed the same bovine tendency to praise frauds to the sky, but I still read it all week on week. I dumped both magazines soon after starting university as they had begun to grate; they had served their purpose.

As a teenager in the UK, I found the two weeklies offered me a way in; I picked up my first copy of NME for details on a Guns 'n' Roses concert and within a few months I had binned the cockrock. I'd guess that most of the bands they were putting on the front cover were as poor as those they browntongue today, but through them I got into the American underground bands that formed the core of my record collection.

It's written by wankers for young teenagers. Crap, but it can act as a starting point for kids to get into the better stuff.

I agree with sparky 100%.

I started reading NME and Melody Maker (I never knew which I was reading, they both seemed identical) when I was 17 and stopped when I was 18.

But while I read them they'd just fallen in love with Mogwai. In that year I found Mogwai, Slint, Labradford and various other great bands through those magazines.

Then in one week they managed to insult the pixies and sonic youth so much that people wrote in about it for the next 4 issues. That's when I realised these journalists just wanted everyone to know their name. They'd only like a band while they were up and coming and turn their back on them once they'd gained some popularity, because it made them look cool.

I don't think I've bought a single music magazine in the last 6 years. Maybe there's some good ones out there but NME and Melody Maker put me off music critics for life.

I've a good friend who before I met him, took a year off from studying chemistry and spent it in the UK indie rock circles (the Divine Comedy's label, heh), which fueled his massive cynicism about everyone therein. At least it focussed him on science. I would name a Melody Maker journalist who I used to like, and he would come up a very well articulated argument as to why they were rotten (teenage groupie fucking and pregnant girlfriend beating being the most memorable accusations). Well, a lot of them. All in all it sounds like a nasty little world which they live in, climbing over each other to get that all important column in the Guardian Guide or The Times.

The Wire isn't so bad, though it is a bit too chin-stroking for me sometimes. Simon Reynolds, one of the few MM writers I still rate features in it fairly often. Discovering this forum has been great for me; I've benefitted from lots of superb recommendations.

I've been looking through some of Simon Reynold's writings and I found this spiel on the old inkies. I found it accurate and it made me feel ever so slightly nostalgic for teenage times when I could get honestly het up over an editorial in Melody Maker's letters page.

His other writing is worth checking out on the page. He's good value, albeit a bit of a know-it-all, thesaurus swallowing over-talker.

hip priest wrote:I know I shouldn't let this wind me up so much but...
It used to be pretty good. Really.

So did the Rolling Stone through the mid-eighties, as well as Spin when it first started up. I read with interest the NME, Melody Maker, and Sounds in the early eighties and liked them a lot.

Nowadays, Rolling Stone and Spin are mostly fashion ads with little interesting content. Rolling Stone infrequently does have something interesting to say, Spin is complete crap. I haven't read the British press for a long time, but if they followed the same trend, I wasn't missing anything.

NME was often wrong and stupid in its writing but some of the bands and musicians that it wrote about are brilliant.

NME and Melody Maker had articles about a lot of my favourite groups and musicians such as Mclusky, Shellac, The Fall, Iggy Pop, Brian Eno, Will Oldham, Slint, Ceephax, Gorky's Zygotic Mynci, Delia Derbyshire, Napalm Death, Low, Joy Division, and shitloads more.

Where did I first read about All Tomorrow's Parties? It was in NME.

There was a great load of bollocks printed over the years. The negative comments in this thread represent the shitness of NME quite well. There's no doubt that NME is a furry shitrag.

I think the editors knew that they had brown shit stains on their hands around the time The Strokes came out. Melody Maker stopped being printed, which meant that NME was next for the chop because both magazines share the same publisher.

The editors realised that there was no profit to be made from writing about good bands. British music fans were starting to get high speed internet access at home, and there was no need for them to buy a magazine like NME any more. People put up with NME because there wasn't much of an alternative, but the net changed that.

The profit and success for NME was in the new generation of "The" bands like "The Hives" and er, well I can't remember the others, but there were a lot of them. NME's publishers were looking to revive the magazines' sales success from when Blur and Oasis were the big thing.

When NME stopped writing about good bands, all we were left with was a piece of shit publication with nothing of interest for people who enjoy music.

Here is an example of how NME destroyed a promising young rock band:

There was a band from South Wales called Terris who were quite exciting, the singer had a weird voice, the guitarist was talented, the bass was played off an analogue synthesizer, and the drummer wasn't bad.

They were playing quite often in a pub in Newport, and people started to become interested in them. NME caught a whiff, and before Terris could get their first album out it hyped them up like crazy, writing full page articles on them like they were the new big thing. Hyping up Terris before it could record its first album was an absolutely stupid idea. Imagine the pressure that was put on these promising young fellas to make a legendary album.

After the hype began they did a joint tour of the UK with Coldplay, and they rocked. Not the best band of all time, but they were rockin'. After their first album came out, they disappeared. Terris had broken up because the band members failed to live up to the hype surrounding them. I think NME fucked their heads by hyping them up so much.

You hear stories about one egotistical band member who fucks up a band because of his dreams and ambition, but the thought of an egotistical magazine which cocks up a band like that? Fucking hell.

P.S. There are good people who have written regularly for NME. Louis Pattison and Noel Gardner wrote for NME and they have done a lot to help and support bands from South Wales.

NME used to be my FUCKING MUSIC BIBLE !
The last issue I had was that cover with Rage Against The Machine showing their fucking LIMPY COCKS.

My girl bitch then had never seen an UNCUT COCK before, belong to one mmber of the band.

I also liked AP (Alternative Press), used to write to many small labels featured in AP.

NOW, ALL music press are fucking crap !
As if they don't have anything to write anymore.
The more they write about a band, the more people will just download the songs off The Fucking Net.