“NME” Finds A Familiar Future

anono | May 2, 2008 11:00 am
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Once again, we present Rock-Critically Correct, a feature in which the most recent issues of Rolling Stone, Blender, Vibe, and Spin are given a once-over by a writer who’s contributed to many of those magazines, as well as a few others! In this installment, he looks at the new issue of the British indie bible NME:

This week, Your Boy assesses a publication that saw its first issue in 1952, and is thus much older than all but one assessed in this space; it’s been an irreducible part of the pop music conversation since.

The New Music Express initially fulfilled for the United Kingdom the same function as Billboard in the U.S. until the early ’60s, when British music took the rest of the world by storm and it was changed into a consumer publication. In terms of longevity and influence, NME can only be compared to Rolling Stone, but that’s where the similarities begin and end. It remains a newspaper (a format RS forewent in the late ’70s) and the fact that it can be effectively distributed throughout the UK every week reflects that the British Isles are easier to traverse than the United States: NME could thus report on events pertinent to its readership in a timely manner.

For three decades, NME competed fiercely with Melody Maker (est. 1926) and Sounds (est. 1971). In the second half of the 20th century, popular music was the UK’s most consistently vital culture product, and this vigorous environment supported three weekly papers. But Sounds folded in 1991, and NME subsumed Melody Maker in 2000.

NME has long functioned in the U.S. as a crib sheet for terminally anglophilic music fans and as a pre-blog era example of how writers in their twenties can get comically overheated when they discover an exciting new band. More recently, its Web site has become renowned for running with every music-oriented rumor that emerges out of the murk, often without a shred of verification (in this, the site is kin to the English tabloid newspapers collectively known as Fleet Street). But in the UK, the paper is perennial: there is the Queen, Cliff Richard, lager, chip butties, and the New Music Express.

Your Boy purchased his first copy in 1989, decided he didn’t like it, decamped for Q, and thus didn’t purchase another issue until earlier this week. His efforts to decode NME‘s shifting priorities over six decades would not result in terribly reliable analysis, so he’ll begin ‘splainin’ what he understands as the paper’s traits from when he started started paying attention…

It seemed that in the late ’80s, NME‘s brain trust was keen on “the vanguard” of whichever moment pop music found itself. Being that this was the Thatcher/Major era, there was a keen sense of opposition to established rock stars amongst young turks (the term “rockism” had been coined by various English writers a few years earlier), and so idioms like the English version of indiepop, acid/house/rave, shoegaze, and goddamn grebo music were all championed by writers and editors who were probably just out of university and thus eager to demonstrate their spittle-flecked, quasi-socialist solidarity with this revolutionary musical movement or that.

But then came the Stone Roses and Happy Mondays. Here was a genuine mass “youf” movement, one that briefly seemed to wash away Sting and Dire Straits forever. Then came Nirvana and Pearl Jam, of whom NME could pretend the same. Then, almost as a gift from the gods for English guys who might have regretted advocating American bands that could seem like Boston and Bob Seger with more distortion, came the big summer of 1995.

Blur vs. Oasis was a great story for the British media: its emphasis on the clash of Northern and Southern cultures in Britain made YB think how fun it would have been if Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Talking Heads sustained a red state and blue state-based war of words. England seemed like the center of the universe for NME and its readership, and them with no dog in that hunt would be forgiven for thinking that the paper’s cheerleading gave off a whiff of nativism. By the time the dust settled, NME looked up to notice that Tony Blair was now Prime Minister, and railing against the canon seemed out of step with Cool Britannia. If rooting for the Spice Girls would be out of the question, then promoting the Chemical Brothers and Fatboy Slim would do. NME would now, as English folks might say, be “havin’ it.”

By 2001, NME had recovered from its Britpop binge and found another movement it could go bananas for. The Real Rock bands! The Strokes! The White Stripes! The Hives! That really rather shitty Australian band the Vines! The paper’s advocacy of these artists reflected two essential truths about NME in the last 20 years:

1. When NME gets in the tank for an artist, said artist will be covered with all the thoughtful restraint of a St. Bernard slobbering all over a giggling kindergartner.

2. NME will tip its hat to dance music and hip-hop, but nothing will ever replace guitar bands in its heart; that archetype, after all, is the greatest gift British culture has given the world in the past 50 years.

The Strokes in particular have been key to NME: they could have been made up over the phone by a couple of British rock writers dreaming up a perfect “New York Guitar Band,” and NME has since idealized Williamsburg, Brooklyn (the neighborhood’s rise as a hipster paradise is contiguous with that of Julian Casabalancas and his four fine feathered friends). And the two English acts that NME has championed most fervently over the past five years, the Libertines and Arctic Monkeys, are more or less homegrown iterations of the Strokes.

And so Your Boy comes to the April 26, 2008 edition of NME. There ain’t much to it. Nearly a third of its 66 pages is devoted to ads for festivals and concert venues: YB thinks it would be wonderful if major music publications in the US could subsist on such ad revenue. The front-of-book section evokes NME.com by making hay with what’s evidently the first interview with Paramore since its frontgal wrote a blog post that shook the world and the fact that “Noel and Liam Refuse To Drink Together.” The “Live” section reveals that Staff Writer Mark Beaumont can travel through time to the year 2012, since he reviews a Muse concert at the Royal Albert Hall that’s dated “Saturday, May 12.” Similarly, Alan Woodhouse’s review of a Hard Fi/Carbon Silicon gig near Nashville is datelined “Sunday, April 12.”

The issue is devoted to, as per its big cover line, “The Future 50: The bands, artists and innovators driving music forward.” Editor Conor McNicholas declares in his editor’s letter that “the dominant of skinny-jean, vest-wearing jangly indie boys is coming to end,” and that it’s time for something new. YB wonders if Mr. McNicholas will be putting his money where his mouth is when, say, a new Interpol album is at the ready.

The entire feature well is devoted to the “Future 50.” The list begins with stage-garb and prop designers Nova Dando and Petra Storrs, and whizzes through Spank Rock at 45, perpetual recipient of English-pop-writer-affection Mike Skinner at 37, the guitar-band-subsidizing Canadian government at 19, Canadian cover duo the Crystal Castles (who appear on the issue’s cover) at 10, and the inevitable Alex Turner, Damon Albarn, Radiohead, and M.I.A. at 9, 8, 3 and 2, respectively.

NME‘s pick for the individual who is pushing popular music forward is… Dave Sitek. Why? He’s a member of TV on the Radio and the producer of Scarlett Johansson’s new album Anywhere I Lay My Head, which is comprised of songs by bobo fave Tom Waits, and the Foals’ Antidotes. Anything else, NME scribe identified as “GC” who may be Assistant Gig Guide Editor Greg Cochrane? Well, he lives in Brooklyn (“currently the creative centre of the universe; home to the most exciting bands and artists on the planet right now, all making intellectual music that values creativity over celebrity,” drools Cochrane), thinks most current pop music sucks, and describes his production aesthetic is reached by “sitting in my underwear, doing bong hits.'”

NME thinks this guy is pushing music forward more than any individual on Earth? Of course they do!