Memories Of Zings Past With The U.K. Music Press

Michaelangelo Matos | September 10, 2008 12:30 pm
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As its name suggests, the blog Archived Music Press is a collection of scanned pages from the British weeklies NME and Melody Maker from 1987-1996. The scans up the nostalgia factor of reading this stuff again (Simon Reynolds has been doing the same thing on his archive blog, ReynoldsRetro), but the main reason I’m posting is a recent addition: “Dear Backlash,” David Stubbs‘s omnibus response to Melody Maker reader letters, and one of the flat-out funniest things I’ve read in an age.

Stubbs skewers his targets so cheerfully it throws the premature jadedness of most current Web-based music writing into ultra-sharp relief, and he’s irresistibly funny, especially when he quotes reader poetry. (My .sig of choice these days is “Oh flowers, flowers / you are so flowery / as you drip in the rain / that is so showery.”) It’s hard to imagine someone writing this today. Comments boxes (hi, guys!) have replaced the letter to the editor with immediate-impression “TL;DR” wankery; back then, you had to commit to voicing your displeasure with a magazine or newspaper. Not to get too golden-age on you, but today, it’s hard not to miss this kind of thing.

“Dear Backlash,” [Archived Music Press]