Whatever happened to giving people what they didn't know they wanted? The question is prompted by more grim news surrounding the fate of the New Musical Express. Whereas the odd glossy magazine, the occasional newspaper and some stubborn periodicals continue to keep metaphorical heads proudly aloft, internet convulsions have been particularly unkind to the music "inkies".
Indeed, the decline set in some time before the current panic. Melody Maker "merged" with the NME in 2000. Older music fanatics may be surprised to hear that Sounds and Record Mirror both perished as long ago as 1991.
The NME, first published in 1952, was always the most influential and it managed to keep juices flowing well into the new century. Last week, as the paper prepared for its annual awards ceremony, the Guardian reported that discussions were being held about turning the NME into a freesheet. That might work.
Evening newspapers throughout the world have made sense of the gratis model, but it can’t be denied that the UK music press is now barely a shadow of its former hemp-scented self.
Targeted at younger audiences, traditional rock papers were always destined to suffer particularly savagely from the digital assault. However, the NME long ago lost the attribute that set it proudly apart: a refusal to give the readers what they already knew they wanted.
The paper was at its most powerful during the creative renaissance that followed the rise and fall of punk.
Anarcho-syndicalist kazoo collectives
This is the period when the likes of Danny Baker, Paul Morley, Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons stalked the offices. Anarcho- syndicalist kazoo collectives from Camberwell elbowed tediously proficient geriatrics such as Eric Clapton out of the
NME
’s pages and back to the rest home that was
Rolling Stone Magazine
.
This interview with Clock DVA (itself concerned with Thatcherite social engineering) would be separated from that review of Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft (much taken up with anti-fascism) by an article on the Greenham Common protest. Indeed, political stories that had no connection whatsoever with music sometimes made it on to the cover.
Did the readers like it? Some did. Many did not. It is an amusing irony of those years that although the writers would to a man or woman have called themselves socialists, they were quite happy to exploit the hierarchy between writer and reader.
In the early 1980s there was a hilarious disparity between the writers' end-of-year polls and those compiled by the readers. What was the writers' top album in 1984? Might it have been The Smiths' debut LP? No, that was at number nine. Surely, Ocean Rain by Echo and the Bunnymen challenged? Not a bit of it. The Liverpudlians' fourth LP could only manage number 32. That year the NME writers voted Bobby Womack's The Poet II as their favourite.
We would now describe much of the NME's readership as "indie kids". (At that stage "indie" still referred to a class of record label rather than a type of music.) That audience called out for endless features on white boys singing lyrics culled from Penguin Modern Classics.
The NME gave them that, but it also argued incessantly for soul, dub, jazz and avant-garde music. The paper was, to the fury of its readership, an early, enthusiastic adopter of hip-hop.
Creative arrogance
At some point in the 1990s, that exciting creative arrogance was pressed down by the demands of marketing and, as so many had wished a decade earlier, the
NME
became the in-house rag for Caucasian suburban guitar jangle.
Kerrang! wrote about heavy metal. Country Life wrote about fishing. The NME wrote about Oasis.
Be careful what you wish for. The readers ended up with a magazine whose contents rarely offered anything close to a surprise. The doings of (oh, please) the Libertines and (spare me!) Kasabian were reported with an assiduousness that James Boswell rarely brought to Dr Johnson’s perambulations. Few publishers would now countenance its writers annoying the core demographic as Morley and company did in 1981.
Something similar has happened in film journalism. For years, many movie fans wondered why critics droned on about foreign films when they wanted to read about action movies and space operas. Now, many publications (some still printed on paper) devote themselves entirely to Marvel Studios' emissions and news about Star Wars.
All this is, I suppose, less elitist, less hierarchical and (insofar as the word makes any sense in this context) a great deal more "democratic". It is also deathly boring. It took about 15 years, but I came to love that Art Ensemble of Chicago record the NME recommended in 1982. I already knew I liked The Clash.