| INDIE vs. THE BRITISH MUSIC PRESS... |
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| NME journos get a taste of their own medicine. We made them listen to the world's greatest musical atrocities in their padded cells, yesterday. NOW YOU KNOW HOW WE FEEL! |
| The NME. What is it infamously known for these days? Building up indie/alternative rock bands and then knocking them down, jumping on bandwagons rather than digging for new talent and deliberately undermining bands in inteviews that actually sell their paper, that's what. And Kerrang!? Very successful metal mag supporting home grown talent and indeed, those abroad, and is quick to defend all nu-metal bands, thankyou very much. K! occasionally features indie-rock bands such as Placebo, Stereophonics, Feeder and My Vitriol but these bands took a while for the K! team to discover due to metal snobbery, eg. "it's indie and that makes it slow and boring". There we are: two of the UK's leading specialist music publications in a nut shell. So it seems all very well for the metal fans (although at 1.80 a week, K! readers may have to make up the weight of their wallet with an extra chain) but what about the indie fans? A year ago indie/alt rock fans were spolit for choice: Select, Melody Maker and (gasp!) a decent NME, amongst others. Select brought us in depth interviews and musical politics and MM broke new bands, and in it's glossy format, gave us wonderul posters (bar the one of Maz Manson's backside). NME, as part of the same company as MM, took some of these MM-championed bands and stuck them in the first five pages... most notably Terris (where are they now?!), who were plastered on the front page. Unfortunately (for me, anyway) Select and Melody Maker have since folded and I can't find anything decent to read anymore. The NME is full of Destiny's Child, Hearsay and Five these days... sure, if these bands are the 'in' thing then do discuss them. But don't devote an entire page to them: pop fans aren't going to abandon their pop-favouring glossy mags like Top of the Pops or Smash Hits just because the NME have an article on Five, are they? Kerrang! has seen an increase in readers of late, most likely because of the recent 'fashion' of metal and punk. It might also be because, despite slight snobbery at mellow indie, the journalists aren't into backstabbing and backlash. They're happy and willing to support up and coming 'saviours' of the dying true alternative scene. Recently, the NME have considered changing their 'legendary' newspaper format to a glossy one: much like the precious Melody Maker in their final prints, to pull up slumping sales figures. Yep, the NME are losing readers and could well end up just like Select and MM. But hello! Aren't they missing the point here?! The reason why no-one is buying the NME is because the content is pathetic, not because we don't like the format!!! |