In Defense of the New Musical Express
There’s a certain strain of British music writing that’s incapable of criticism. The bylines belong to “music critics,” absolutely, but the criticism is only there as a phantom limb—they know the shape of a review, where the adjectives should go, how this band sounds like this band in an attic with that band’s mother. Except that the content lacks any teeth. It’s as if, before assigning writers to reviews, desk editors make sure they only use seventeen year-old fanboys, shabby, naïve kids who write their reviews out in notebooks with that band’s stickers on the cover.
The main offender of the bunch, or at least the most notorious, is NME, the New Musical Express. It’s the US Weekly of British music mags. Their reviews are famously positive, breathless, with a few sad contenders each week thrown to the wolves, shat upon for a show of objectivity.
The odd thing about them though, is that they’re still tastemakers in the UK. They break legitimate bands every few months. They put together great bills and send them out on tour across the country, university to university, and they sell out everywhere. The magazine is an international joke, and yet people still turn to them to find the next superstar quartet. Weird!
So maybe they’re incapable of criticism and lacking in credibility like a fox?
We’re all so proud of ourselves for being discerning, such informed consumers. We troll the blogs and pay out the nose for subscriptions, and we’re all just so pleased that we can’t be distracted by hype. We backlash, motherfucker! Don’t tell me something’s good, record companies, because I’ll tell the internets that it ain’t!
I don’t know about anybody else, but my own love of music these days feels a little bit hollow. It’s been a while since I’ve been the underage kid with the X’d out hand at the show. I wish I could hear a band without the fifteen filters, just listening for a new sound or a jumpy bassline, regardless of the thousand ooooooobvious influences. “I mean, seriously: Mark E. Smith called. He wants his vocal phrasing back!” (hears self; slits wrist with broken CD).
There’s nothing wrong with being a fanboy! It a pleasure! NME, in its weird, market-tested way, gets that. They cover music they way the kid with the X’d-out hand would, and even when they let a band shine that might not deserve it, they’re still giving us five more that we’ll soon love recklessly.
It’s not a perfect magazine by any stretch (even journalism necessarily), but I bought last week’s issue at the newsstand for way more than I should. The Libertines got back together, for one night, and the cover had Pete and Carl, sweaty and beaming. It was classic NME, and staring at that cover, I could swear to God I was fourteen.
Labels: creeping nostalgia, hype, NME
