The NME is not dead, contrary to continual Internet rumours, but by gum it certainly is looking a bit peaky:

http://entertainment.time.../music/article3497298.ece

As much as reading the NME was an obsession for me at one point in my life (although I preferred Melody Maker, I would actually buy both weekly) I can't see that there's very much to mourn here. The paper has moved so far from its original purposes and incarnation that it's hard to trace any easy way back. It was also difficult to see it at the time, but the rot really did set in around Britpop - that was the exact point where an obsession with image and sales developed over and above the outsiders they used to champion. Journalists began to talking to bands about "disappointing sales" continually at that point, and by the time The Spice Girls were on the front page, it was all over bar the shouting. The emphasis had shifted irreversibly.

Unlike The Teardrop Explodes, Joy Division, Echo and the Bunnymen, The Mondays, The Stone Roses (whose debut only sold a few hundred thousand in its first year, and at a slow, constant trickle), even in fact the Pistols and the Clash, Blur and Oasis were big, generation gap jumping, tabloid headline grabbing, sellers. "Morning Glory" sold beyond Simply Red levels, and "Parklife" certainly didn't do that badly either. You could argue that The Sex Pistols defined a generation more and are now seen as a "classic band", but they alienated the straight kids and almost all parents completely at the time. Unless you were a certain age and of a certain disposition, they were an utter turn-off. The NME celebrated things like that (eventually, though they were frequently slow on the uptake) and understood that its audience wanted "rebel oddball outsiders" and intelligent commentary rather than world-beating, Bono-threatening champions, and more tedious stories about cocaine use. Unlike their predecessors, though, and probably against the magazine's original expectations, Oasis and Blur crossed boundaries. The uncles and aunts of the stadium terrace chanters who got off on Oasis would have been completely disturbed and alienated by most of the NME favourites from 67 to 77, and possibly well into the eighties too. David Bowie would have been far too effiminate for them to cope with, Lou Reed too intelligent and perverse, the Prog bands far too awkward. Whilst many of these acts crossed over on a pop level, for most of their careers they were truly niche performers with sales propped up by hardcore fanbases.

The one moment in the sun where the NME was suddenly "big news" (on the UK Nine O Clock News for the Blur v Oasis battle) changed the way both IPC and the editors thought about the magazine. It wasn't about interesting, intelligent bands anymore (or at the very least bands with pretensions towards intelligence). It became about giant backstage parties, and coke sniffed off toilet seats and ROCK AND ROLL!!! As soon as those reports began to shift more units, it caused the paper to really lose its way, slowly but surely.

And lest we forget, before we get too weepy-eyed about the death of Melody Maker, we must remember that it too pulled the trigger on itself. The MM revamp of the late nineties (where it became a tabloid sized colour magazine) really wasn't far off the NME of today. That folded as a result of its attempts to get a cool teen market, and you would have thought the marketing folk at Time Warner would have given that a bit of thought before going sexy sticker and poster crazy with its sister paper. Or perhaps they thought what went wrong last time was just that they ran posters of the wrong people... which at least would explain why Sophie Ellis Bextor hasn't featured so prominently this time (unfortunately for me).