Marion........Marion.
I know I've heard that name before and now I remember where.
From a "Your Band Sucks" article, in which he was reviewing NME.
Here's what he wrote about it.
NME (New Musical Express)
The NME is a weekly music rag from England. England used to have two major weeklies, the NME and Melody Maker, who always had a friendly rivalry. Melody Maker went under a few years ago, and was incorporated into NME. I don’t know why you need to know that, but there it is. Perhaps I’m just disarming complaints from people who hadn’t realized that Melody Maker was no more, who might otherwise e-mail me and complain about its absence from the list. Perhaps I’m paranoid and insane.
Their Opinion of Themselves: These cats have never been shy about proclaiming themselves “the world’s greatest music magazine.”
Public Opinion of Them: Pretentious, bombastic British tabloid about bands that America will never care about.
Cultural Importance: They’d have you believe that they are single-handedly responsible for discovering every single band that has ever gone on to do anything even remotely good. To some extent, the jerks might be right: they’ve been around since about 1820 and since it’s a weekly paper, they have to come up with four times as much crap to write every month. Therefore, they will do features on any band that so much as trips over a guitar in a darkened room, often proclaiming them to be the saviors of rock and roll and the greatest thing since The Smiths and the one band that you MUST see before you die. They’re wrong ninety-nine percent of the time, but they never fail to gloat like the drunken bastards they are whenever some band they wrote about first breaks into the mainstream. Answer me this, NME: what the f*** happened to Terris or Marion or any of the other shitty bands you proclaimed to be the successors to Joy Division? Yeah, I bet you thought I’d forgotten about them, like everyone else. They operate on the same principle as psychics: they rely on the fact that you’ll remember when they’re right and forget when they’re wrong. Our best defense is to write them letters every week asking them why Terris never made it big, in order to embarrass them into more responsible journalism.
Cover Story: Oh, apparently the guy from the Libertines is still stumbling around in a drunken haze, like he’s been doing on the cover of NME for the last two years straight. What a jolly surprise. This time he’s in a band called Babyshambles, which is maybe the worst band name I’ve ever heard. I guess I can’t blame him, since “Hootie and the Blowfish” was already taken.
Other Features of Note: NME is convinced that all of their readers have elaborate shrines to NME covering their walls; therefore, each issue must contain at least a few Tiger Beat-style glossy pullout photographs of hot bands. This week’s glossy photos are of live performances by such historical heavy hitters as The Jam, Nirvana, The White Stripes, The Ramones, and… Razorlight? Oh yeah, wait a minute, this is NME and they’re not-too-subtly trying to canonize some shitty band of nobodies by placing them alongside The Ramones and The Jam. Do they think we’re stupid? Yes.
Interesting Music News: “An ORGY of burgers, HOTEL PORN, and Harry Potter-baiting: it can only mean NME is ON TOUR with punk-pop boyband McFLY” Yeah, that headline just about sums up the trashy rag that NME has become. Oh, and this is the last time you’re ever going to hear about McFly.
Review System: Every week, NME reviews not only the albums but the singles, which is a major advantage of having a weekly music paper. Unlike Rolling Stone, they’re actually not afraid to pepper their reviews with a little variety; on a one-to-ten scale, the albums this week go as high as nine (Frank Black) and as low as zero (Good Charlotte). You know what, I think I’ll stop making fun of NME now, because at least these jerks had enough presence of mind to give Good Charlotte a zero.
Nadir: You already read the part about the McFly headline, right?
NME gets a five out of ten. Ten points for giving Good Charlotte a zero, five points docked for still being a sensationalist tabloid rag.
http://www.somethingawful.com/articles.php?a=2475
