NME at the gates (NME)

Member Name: tim_russell

Product:	NME
Date:	22/06/01 (50 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Weekly

Disadvantages: Too mainstream, badly-written, too safe

Christ, what has happened to the British music press? Back in the glory days of the mid-80s, we had Sounds, NME and the gloriously opinionated journalism of Melody Maker. With Sounds & MM now gone, it's left to NME to carry the torch. Sadly however, it dropped the torch around the same time MM went to the wall, and with no competition it's become horribly complacent.

It's hard to know these days which type of reader NME is aimed at. Sadly I don't think it's aimed at a specific type any more, rather it's trying to cover all bases and failing dismally. Its recent jump onto the garage/r&b bandwagon was a shameless attempt to sell more copies, however I can't imagine too many r&b fans buying a paper which still has a largely indie reputation. Likewise its increasingly frequent features on chart artists.

Time was when NME could be relied on for presenting new artists, but these days we could have a new Smiths or Oasis on our hands and NME wouldn't even mention them. The best albums I've heard this year - I Am Kloot, Nick Cave, The Avalanches to name but 3 - received scant coverage in the paper, and it's got to the point where I get all my music reviews and news online.

Equally, the standard of journalism has declined. Gone are the days when journalists either gushed orgasmically about certain records, or conducted fascinatingly confrontational interviews with bands they clearly disliked. Now the interviews are simply PR guff, the reviews dull and safe, the artists featured unchallenging and having little to say. Remember when the paper was a source of great quips and rants from the likes of Morrissey, Chuck D, Ian Brown, Shaun Ryder, Robert Smith etc? Not any more. These days it's Craig David talking about how he admires Cliff Richard, or Fred Durst showing us his house. Fascinating stuff.

What annoys me the most is NME's lack of acceptance of its responsibility, as a source of new musi
c and inspiration to music fans and musicians alike. Without the music press, I would've missed out on an awful lot of good music. I'm lucky enough to have constant internet access, but anyone out there without net access, or without a good local alternative radio station, is going to end up force-fed a diet of mass-produced chart music.

So other than the net, what's the alternative? Q isn't bad, but for every feature on a new band there's 3 on REM or Travis; Uncut, staffed by journos from MM's glory years, is very well-written but too obsessed with American country-rock; Select's gone... It's getting really hard to discover good music, a situation which is contributing to the current dire state of the charts. People are saying that music is terrible at the moment, but that isn't true - there's still a lot of damn good music out there, it's just that, thanks to the decline of NME and the music press in general, you have to make a hell of an effort to dig it out.

Summary: