Just checked in to make sure it’s still a fully packed and steaming Shit Suitcase. It is.
I think when you gave up on NME largely depends on how old you are. The late 90’s and early 2000’s were the absolute nadir of music in recent times for me, every week the NME was championing a band as ‘the next Nirvana’ and it was like the boy who cried wolf, this week Cay are the future of music and it just sounds the same as everything else. I actually missed decent bands because I got so bored of them saying “no this lot are the next Nirvana - no this lot!” but I gave up when I finally relented and got The Strokes first album. Never a more appropriate album title in the history of music than ‘Is This It?’ because that was exactly what I was thinking all the time I was listening to it. I’ve got into loads of great bands since but that was when I gave up with the NME. So I missed the Libertines hype, seeing them now just makes me laugh really because it comes across like an attempt to create an aura around a band like with The Clash / Smiths / Stone Roses or whatever, but with a much shittier band.
Just to stress again that I’m not just an old git who says ‘it was all better in my day’ because I am still buying new music but it’s been a long time since I bought anything because the NME said so. It just seemed so transparently trying to create a new scene so often they ran out of names to give them, New Wave of New Wave and all that nonsense.
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I think the NME was bad in the early 00s but it was influential. For teenagers in particular
This actually sprang to mind earlier today. It was pretty desperate stuff.
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Yeah that’s sort of what I was saying it does depend on your age a bit; I don’t have any memory of that Libertines era because I’d given up on it by then. I think we do all have our period where we think of it fondly though.
^This…
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Paraphrasing a comment written by someone else from years ago: When did the NME turn shit? When you turned 18.
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I kinda agree but the NWONW was early 90s (I still remember that SMASH cover) and the Strokes were 10 years later and I read throughout that period so there MUST have been something good in the meantime, surely…
But I definitely remember the first time Strokes appeared in it and I thought “this is odd” and I definitely remember the “new Nirvana” thing… Hello, the Vines…
Sounds was still always the best anyway (old man alert)
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I can remember Jet being on the front cover and being touted as the next Oasis. Real bottom of the barrel scraping stuff, they had this desperate scatter gun approach of proclaiming every new band as the next big thing. They were petrified of missing out on something so everything had to be hyped to the max. Proper haircuts, proper tunes and all that shite.
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The Strokes and Libertines debuts are both great though
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The thing around the late 90s is that even if that stuff was in there, all the covers and lead articles seemed to be going to the likes of Travis, Stereophonics and Keane. Same went with Melody Maker of that era and even Kerang were putting Travis and Stereophonics on their covers on occasion.
It felt like an era of the music press being led by whatever guitar music was in the charts rather than seeking out and championing anything.
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I actually read it like this first
this article is getting quite the rinsing on twitter
but I’ve gotta say, Zane Lowe & MTV2 are just as much to blame
NME/CMcN overinflating their own role in what 100s of kids were doing without their approval or permission
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It’s kinda mental that they did this. The bands that my mates were in were basically aping this stuff, and it was kind of awful - one of my mates got kicked out of his band for not dressing up enough for a gig. The press really have a lot of power over us, don’t they
Literally making headlines out of links to Pitchfork’s sideline video stuff, wow
And yet there were actually a fair number of “The” bands in the late ’90s who looked great but the NME wouldn’t feature them at all because they’d be deemed too retro or something.
And the “garage rock revolution” was mostly bands who weren’t garage rock at all, just slightly more punky sounding indie.
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The NME is the one thing where it is permissible to say ‘it was better in my day’
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I actually went to what I think might have been the Libertines’ first ever gig, in 1999 at the Hope & Anchor. Obviously I wasn’t there to see them. No one was. They were first on and no one had heard of them. They had this 70-year-old on drums. And they were a lot more jangly, kind of Stone Roses with a bit of the Byrds, that kind of thing. Pete spoke to me at the bar between the bands and I told him I’d like them better if they were a bit more punky. What the fuck do I know?
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