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

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)