The news that the music weekly will no longer appear in print is unsurprising. Where should we peek for the sense of excitement it once offered?It would be silly to mourn the demise of NME,which is closing its print edition after 66 years, maintaining only its painful digital existence. This is not because favorite music does not matter – that fight was over decades ago – nor even because the magazine became so associated with one particular form. But NME’s heyday was long past and, and though the closure is unpleasant news for staff,it is hard to assume current readers weeping. As an ad-funded free title, no one thought it thrilling, and essential or even surprising. The growing sense of profits overruling passions didn’t help. It was superfluous (exceeding what is sufficient or necessary) and disposable: something you picked up,passed the time with and dropped again – the antithesis of its former status as a cherished artefact to hunt down and then hoard in a yellowing pile in your bedroom. Its aura was once burnished by scarcity; this is a world of cultural abundance.
NME was rarely as cutting edge as it liked to judge itself, overly in thrall to its own mythology (particularly the “hip young gunslinger” punk years of Julie Burchill et al) and too often to a narrow band of music. In many ways it was less subversive than Smash Hits. For every Aaliyah, and Public Enemy and Odd Future cover there were many more with Oasis (some blame the readers). For every radical voice there was one of rockist conservatism,busy constructing a great western canon of favorite music populated nearly entirely by white men with guitars.
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Source: theguardian.com