imomus

Momus assimilates The Wire with the 1970s NME, but the difference is that what the NME wrote about was popular. If it more often wrote about experimental music then, it was because such music was or had the potential to be popular and cross over to the mainstream (even then, the NME devoted a full page or two to the charts). Potential mainstream credibility is simply not a criterion for The Wire. Negatively, you could say that the mainstream has turned its back on the experimental; more positively you might consider that experimental music has found ways to survive in a niche environment that it never could have in the 1970s. And that in turn means there's less pressure to bow down to the mainstream (I mean, look what eventually happened to all those experimental acts in the 1980s?). I think it's possible to put a positive spin on the decoupling of the mainstream and the experimental.

H.