We (Pity?) the Fucking NME.

This song has popped up a few times on my mp3 player recently, and whilst it’s still good fun (I mean listening to Billy Childish deliver an indignant two chord list song about the pricing of veg in his local corner shop would probably be good fun), it strikes me that, for the first time in recent history, the song’s sentiment seems kinda… unnecessary.

Does the NME still exist? I guess it must do, because I see its masthead sometimes, stacked up behind some other stuff in the newsagents, and No Rock n’ Roll Fun gives me the lowdown on its lame awards ceremonies and editorial shake-ups and falling circulation figures and the like, but… I honestly have no idea who’s been on the cover of the NME in the past year. Do you? I have no idea what kind of presumably terrible bands they’ve been hyping recently, or who they currently consider to be big news or who still writes for them, or anything really.

Partially this is no doubt due to wilful ignorance (the same way I have no idea who’s been in the Top 40 for about the past decade), but still – I think it is safe to say at this point that the king-making power of the British music press has long since departed. Whatever variations on the old “build ‘em up and knock ‘em down” games the NME tries out in 2011 will probably be noted by a few thousand people at best. The genesis of seismic hype-cycles has moved elsewhere, and it is probably only a matter of time before NME is put out of its misery, ala Melody Maker.

Back when Thee Headcoats recorded this song in the early ‘90s, the NME was still a publication that right-thinking people would have cause to glance over and even purchase. They still had some good writers, and covered some decent music. More to the point, the position of the IPC papers as sole information distribution system for the British music fan went unquestioned – an eternal part of the industry’s infrastructure, as unavoidable as (ha) the labels or (ha, ha ha) the shops.

By stating their disgust with the paper’s nefarious agenda in song, Thee Headcoats were being somewhat daring and iconoclastic circa the early ’90s – effectively saying ‘fuck you’ to the only game in town, and indeed ushering in a decade during which Billy C’s unstoppable cottage industry was almost entirely ignored by the media after a brief buzz of grunge-era interest.

Move forward to the early ‘00s and the song would be an obvious anthem for any self-respecting music fan. The NME was unquestionably a hateful rag by this stage, and the internet existed as a space for much better communication, but for some reason the paper still packed a massive industry clout that demanded immediate opposition – see their role as the main engine behind the whole post-Libertines landfill indie era, most obviously.

Now here we are in 2011, and the song sounds like a complete anachronism, stimulating roughly the same nostalgic pleasure centres you’d get dancing to Lush at an indie disco. Directing hatred at the NME in this day and age feels like kicking a tramp who’s slipped over in the park because he did you a bad turn twenty years ago – nasty and pointless.

But the great thing is, there is no obvious target you could redirect the song’s anger at. “We Hate Fucking Pitchfork”? Well I mean, of course we do, but it just doesn’t quite the same ring to it, does it? However narked one might get at the indignity of 4.6 could-try-harder reviews and breathless updates on the doings of bearded men, P-Fork is just not in contention for the same kind of monopoly of opinion NME and MM commanded in their prime. Nobody is.

There’s a lot wrong with music-blogging culture, but that’s a diatribe for another day. For our purposes here, the point is that blogs and associated info streams shift things more naturally, blogger by blogger, listener by listener. Trends emerge and hypes explode and careers are created/destroyed, as before, but the central editorial voice laying down the law is gone forever. Who picked up on The XX and James Blake and made them famous? I have no fucking idea to be honest – PRs probably – but it certainly wasn’t a music paper or a webzine.

Where do broadsheet journos go to crib their shit from these days? That might be the crux of it I guess – the Guardian and Independent used to follow IPC’s lead like kittens – do they still? Again, I’ve got no idea, I’ve got better stuff to read. But without wishing to sound too dramatic about it, the fact is that the monolithic structure of “the music press” has crumbled like the walls of Jericho, which is surely something to celebrate. And that calls for some Headcoatees!

Labels: 90s nostalgia outbursts, Billy Childish, rambling, the NME