Wednesday, December 15, 2004
KNOW YOUR ENEMY
There are habits which are hard to break and possibly quite shameful beyond a certain point in life. Mine is always buying a copy of the Christmas NME.
The fact that I am old enough to have bought the paper weekly during the Morley/Parsons/Burchill years obviously points to the fact that I should consider a more dignified publication such as the Oldie or the People's Friend - anything with a bumper story edition and an extensive word game for all that spare time over the festive season. But there is always a belief in the back of my brain that I will get the same thrill from looking at the Best Singles and Albums Of The Year lists that I did for (at the most) about three years in my late teens.
Being a twat from the middle of nowhere, the NME was considered by me to be a bible of cool, which would be extremely embarrassing to admit if I was of an age where I cared anymore what people thought of me. I went through that spell of feeling alienated and loving indie music, thinking it was what, ahem, people in the know liked. A few years later, I read an interview with a white, public schoolboy psuedo hip-hop/dance influenced "collective" (ho ho) where one of them, rather sniffily, nailed it on the head: "Liking indie music is very provincial. When an indie band plays at a venue it's like a farmyard."
Pretty much true, of course, but what else is there to do in a town where there's a bingo hall and three pubs where you can get beaten up for living a mile down the road? And I continued to read the NME through the years when they were banging on incomprehensibly about the politiks of dance, the Smiths years and the indie dance bit at the end of the 80's with an increasing disinterest - even if the music featured was awful, you always used to be entertained by the writing, but the journalists became increasingly pedestrian, so of course I reached that point (still rather too late in life) to stop buying it and put childish things behind me. Except ...
I still love music but, after the narrowing down of music tastes which occurs in the mid teens and which you should have grown out of by your mid twenties, now don't care if what I like is considered fashionable, obscure, whatever. I don't turn my nose up at dance,
r & b, the odd production line pop song, whatever. Some indie music is okay but I've given up the tedium of hanging around for hours on end which is watching bands live, so why could I be arsed to buy the Christmas edition of the NME?
I know just what it will look like - there will be a picture of Franz Ferdinand on the cover self-consciously wearing paper hats, holding bottles of beer and letting off party poppers. There will be a feature inside where a load of bands who are about to get dropped by their record company play a hilarious drinking game and they end up throwing up over each other and mooning at some old biddy in the street. There will be all those mindbogglingly boring one page interviews with bands where they say "the highlight of the year was T In The Park, really" and they describe which zany Christmas presents they want to get. We're all letting our hair down!
And the top of the Albums Of The Year list? I'm probably way off the mark hear, but I bet that Franz Ferdinand will be there or thereabouts. And I think they're pretty good actually. Oh bollocks.
The fact that I am old enough to have bought the paper weekly during the Morley/Parsons/Burchill years obviously points to the fact that I should consider a more dignified publication such as the Oldie or the People's Friend - anything with a bumper story edition and an extensive word game for all that spare time over the festive season. But there is always a belief in the back of my brain that I will get the same thrill from looking at the Best Singles and Albums Of The Year lists that I did for (at the most) about three years in my late teens.
Being a twat from the middle of nowhere, the NME was considered by me to be a bible of cool, which would be extremely embarrassing to admit if I was of an age where I cared anymore what people thought of me. I went through that spell of feeling alienated and loving indie music, thinking it was what, ahem, people in the know liked. A few years later, I read an interview with a white, public schoolboy psuedo hip-hop/dance influenced "collective" (ho ho) where one of them, rather sniffily, nailed it on the head: "Liking indie music is very provincial. When an indie band plays at a venue it's like a farmyard."
Pretty much true, of course, but what else is there to do in a town where there's a bingo hall and three pubs where you can get beaten up for living a mile down the road? And I continued to read the NME through the years when they were banging on incomprehensibly about the politiks of dance, the Smiths years and the indie dance bit at the end of the 80's with an increasing disinterest - even if the music featured was awful, you always used to be entertained by the writing, but the journalists became increasingly pedestrian, so of course I reached that point (still rather too late in life) to stop buying it and put childish things behind me. Except ...
I still love music but, after the narrowing down of music tastes which occurs in the mid teens and which you should have grown out of by your mid twenties, now don't care if what I like is considered fashionable, obscure, whatever. I don't turn my nose up at dance,
r & b, the odd production line pop song, whatever. Some indie music is okay but I've given up the tedium of hanging around for hours on end which is watching bands live, so why could I be arsed to buy the Christmas edition of the NME?
I know just what it will look like - there will be a picture of Franz Ferdinand on the cover self-consciously wearing paper hats, holding bottles of beer and letting off party poppers. There will be a feature inside where a load of bands who are about to get dropped by their record company play a hilarious drinking game and they end up throwing up over each other and mooning at some old biddy in the street. There will be all those mindbogglingly boring one page interviews with bands where they say "the highlight of the year was T In The Park, really" and they describe which zany Christmas presents they want to get. We're all letting our hair down!
And the top of the Albums Of The Year list? I'm probably way off the mark hear, but I bet that Franz Ferdinand will be there or thereabouts. And I think they're pretty good actually. Oh bollocks.
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