Rock media goes posthumous

Here's the cover of this week's New Musical Express (the last weekly rock magazine published in London):



I'd like to apologize to those with sensitive eyes, because it's probably the ugliest thing I've ever put up on Click Opera. It hasn't always been this way, though. Here's an NME cover from when I was a kid:



As you go back in time, the covers just seem to get better and better. This one is a work of art:



And here's a cover featuring reggae band Steel Pulse, 1978. The photo departs from the bland promo shot of 'band in studio' seen in today's NME. This has real artistic merit as a photo:



(Note the absence of 'look out, we're three black men standing in your path, staring at you menacingly'-type imagery.)

Here's Brian Eno on a 1976 NME cover:



(This magazine does still exist, it's just called The Wire now.)

Some questions:

1. When did the NME begin to feel that good graphic design was incompatible with its survival, and why?

2. Was NME's artyness in the late 70s and early 80s the result of New Wave etc being inherently more 'arty' than what's around now, or an attempt to differentiate itself from competitors Sounds and Melody Maker?

3. 'Good NME' seems to express divergent values -- 'let's expand the definitions of what music is, and who makes it, and what its values are' -- whereas 'bad NME' expresses a hysterical convergence on 'rock values' which nevertheless seem further away than ever: parodic, post-modern, Spinal-Tappish, Golden-Ageist. Does Britain as a society no longer believe in 'the future' and 'the other', but only 'the past' and 'us'?

'Your bigger, better NME starts inside', says this week's edition of the NME. Now this is a parody of cliched marketing-speak, right? And yet it is also cliched marketing speak. So is it ironic or sincere? A joke or a plug? Have the inverted commas around a moronic phrase sort of melted away, leaving a kind of sincerity?

The weird thing, to me, is that this sort of ironic-moronic marketing-speak is not even necessary for actual, effective marketing. Here in Berlin we have free mags which rely totally on marketing for their existence, like Intro. They look arty and their design is good. Likewise de:bug:



I can only assume that British people like stuff that looks cluttered and commercial. It's an aesthetic preference on a national level, not a commercial or demographic necessity. It's like those cafes which have commercial radio on, pumping advertising into the premises. It's not to sell things, or because anyone pays them to do it. It's because the choice is between a dead, sullen silence and the 'lively' sound of the advertising.

Here's the current Intro, with an attack on the Bush administration on its cover:



In Paris, the rock and culture weekly Les Inrockuptibles leads this issue with the death of Jacques Derrida:



The current Vice in New York is the Worst Ever Issue:



A parody of the worst apects of style mags, it drips with the kind of vitriol for stupid, lazy media habits not seen since... the 'Death of Media' issue of NME (plain black cover, with words 'Death of Media issue' in white) in 1984.

In Tokyo, the latest edition of Rockin' On shows it in Q and Mojo territory:

I think the message of all this is clear. Rock music is dead. Those involved in rock journalism in 2004 have a clear choice. Either

a) Become a sort of museum curator of the glories of the past.

or

b) Use rock journalism as a platform for political activism.

Actually, there is a c) which can fit with either a) or b), depending on how it's applied:

c) Snake eating own tail solution: use position as rock journalist to make media about media. This can either be self-congratulatory (as a lot of TV is) or self-critical (ie the current edition of Vice).

The NME is basically a pre-Q publication. In other words, it's got the attitude that rock is dead and finished, but it's using new bands to promote that ideology. It presents the new bands in terms that refer back always to the glorious past. There's no notion of progress, of expansion, of experiment or adventure. Readers constantly told that The Beatles and The Stones (or Bowie and Lou Reed, or whoever) can't be bettered in the old template, and that no new rock templates are coming along, will turn to retro 'classic rock' sooner or later, becoming Q and Mojo readers and shifting from buying the work of new bands to buying back catalogue of old artists.

In other words, if rock music is the British Museum, the NME is the gift shop at the entrance, where you can buy postcards and ingenious little plastic models of the antiquities on view inside.