Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been....?

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

One of the battlegrounds in the Hip Hop Wars was NME's "C86" cassette, a tape compiled by some of the paper's writers, later described as "the most indie thing to have ever existed". While many of the bands were later embarassed by it and while it suffers from the usual post-facto "OMG it wasn't a scene" backlash (sure, it wasn't a scene in the sense of bands working and collaborating together, but it captures a mood quite well), its legend lives on.

Here's a poll about it:


[Poll #829524]


SHAMBLE ON.

Comments

THE HIPHOP WARS: a personal memoir pt 2

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

viii. giddyoldgoat says that from outside it seemed like an editoriallly confected debate to boost readership -- IF ONLY!! sadly pye was a weak editor who didn't know how to turn sharp difference of opinion into good copy; we WEREN'T ALLOWED TO MENTION MELODY MAKER, let alone address their arguments; and pye's misleadingly well-orchestrated accession and subsequent appointment of danny k had led to the grumpy exist of a lot of lesser-known but well-experienced writer-editors (danny is amiable and emollient but was at daggers drawn with stuart sometimes; i am fond of a lot of these people but many of them behaved very badly and it fucked up a paper with really good resources)
ix. the DENOUEMENT came with an theme issue on censorship -- i think pye had left, exhausted, at this point -- where cosgrove and designer joe ewart laid out a page which included giger's PENIS LANDSCAPE sleeve of the dead kennedies... IPC high-ups got wind of this outrage and pulled the entire article on pressday; the only available cover pic was the legendary MOTORCYCLE BOY -- a BAFFLINGLY terrible pic for a cover -- cosgrove and ewart were sacked; the LOOK of the paper -- which had been good, if a little precious and arty for what it was -- lurched towards the ABSOLUTELY FUCKING AWFUL, and a young james brown leapt up the editorial ladder to declare the advent of GREBO
x. the one thing that all factions utterly concurred on = no one is allowed to say anything bad about u2

and to be fair to my favourite foe...

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

... robin quotes simonR here (http://robincarmody.livejournal.com/26706.html), summing up the implicit anti-thatcherite politics of the shambling bands -- i think there is an important point here which eg thebopkids is eloquent about sometimes

to restate: i don't think nme OR mm dealt with the politics issue well -- nme basically argued for the assimilation of pop discourse in "mainstream radical politics"; mm argued (correctly) that music contains implicit politics of other kinds, which should be nurtured and valued -- but in the end, the um "aesthetic dimension" they were hioping to valorise was undermined by the boho neo-futurist sonicstorm irrationality they over-favoured (there's a lot more to pop; and more still to the rest of music)

Re: THE HIPHOP WARS: a personal memoir pt 2

[epicharmus.livejournal.com]

You mean this?