Most complained of at either paper at the time were the NME's Paul Morley and Ian Penman. Morley infuriated the readership with his passionately conceptual embrace of pop and style. Penman, his prose less frothy than the extravagant Morley's, was given to elegant strings of obtuse argument that were nonetheless provocatively positioned.

Melody Maker frowned on punk rock and its variously arty offspring a little too long; it lost some credibility in the late 1970s. When it revived and sought new direction in the 1980s, it embraced some of the styles that Sounds and the NME had ignored. It championed goth bands and a particular kind of bleak, pre-grunge rock that was quietly growing up outside London, giving the Sisters of Mercy and Red Lorry Yellow Lorry a good home.

The NME threw itself into promoting dance, rap and populist lefty rhetoric. A natural polarity evolved. Melody Maker scoffed at the earnest folkie Billy Bragg and NME skewered the gloomy Mission. The disputes probably sold more copies of each paper. Ironically, Melody Maker also harbored a group of young post-Morley/Penman theorists who out-NME'd everyone. One night at the bar of the Mean Fiddler, a fellow NME-er and I were pleased to find ourselves in the rare company of Penman, who had since moved on. My colleague nudged me just in time to witness a couple of those word-conscious young MM writers furtively peeking around the corner. Wide-eyed with wonder, they were staring at Penman as if Santa Claus himself had put in an appearance there in distant Harlesden.

The weeklies provided a paid alternative to Speaker's Corner for a handful of obsessive enthusiasts. At NME and, I'm sure, at Melody Maker as well, pink-cheeked 25-year-olds would stand in the middle of the office shouting excitedly to themselves about R.E.M.'s third album, which was either vital or redundant, depending on whether or not one felt Roxanne Shante deserved the front cover instead. Day after day, week after week, the fever burned ever hotter and whiter at the Tuesday morning editorial meetings. Those ruthless conceptual trouncings that so many PR activists and bands complained of were not the product of jaded strategists.

At that time, I was holding the popularly despised position of being a writer who also had a band. Being both an artist and a critic who wrote in judgment of one's peers made for a slow-boiling dissonance of self. This syndrome is probably not so common in the United States, where critically vandalizing the tenderly crafted wares of other people is not considered mainstream entertainment.

Naturally, on several occasions I was to find myself on the receiving end of a critical trouncing. My work and stage presence were mercilessly cataloged by the style hounds at Melody Maker. My band was called Miaow; had I been a kitten, one writer said, I would have been drowned in the Thames and we'd all have been a lot better off. I should note that the magazine was occasionally kinder as well; I didn't take any of the comments too seriously, since I appreciated the need to entertain as well as the duty to vent one's truth.

Harder, though, was being hissed at and tampered with while buying low-end groceries in supermarkets by self-styled anarcho-punks hissing, "the fuckin' NME!" -- as if we freelancers, the micro drones of the IPC empire, were some sort of regal oppressors of the masses. Adjusting my raincoat, I wondered anew at the power of the weekly word and the enormity of the illusion that I too once held.

The reality was that I had just returned from a trip to Record & Tape Exchange, where I had sold a big bag of gaily packaged 12-inch remixes and other dubious review product, the food stamps of the freelance weekly contributor. I also wondered why was I never accosted in more artistic environments, which would have provided a much more noble context for the insult.

I easily justified my hyena-like occupation by inventing my own ethical code: You could make fun of someone's fashion sense but not the size of their ass. One day I thoughtlessly regurgitated a story about a musician's drug-induced psychosis, considering it an unremarkable music-biz pitfall along the lines of a tax audit. My friends asked me what on earth I was thinking. The horror of long-lost perspective began to dawn, heavy and grim. And hardest of all was hearing the voice of that deputy editor barking excitedly that I had ceased to "go for the jugular."

It is possible that the over-thought journalistic hotpot that produced those three papers and their attentive readers will never be seen again. It was truly a singular privilege to be allowed to rant about music in this forum and to such a tolerant audience. Sometimes one forgot, though, at 4 in the morning, crying bloody tears over a faulty typewriter, sentenced by that deputy editor to a third rewrite of an interview.

"Write about the bloody music!"

"But it's boring!"

"I know! Say so! And say so before tomorrow, for Christ's sake!!!"

As music fans leaned less and less on the printed weekly music media for news, the papers readjusted. NME broadened its brand name, endorsing everything from music awards to knitting patterns (OK, they stopped short of knitting patterns) and securing a strong online presence. Melody Maker redefined itself as an "entry point" for teenagers interested in in-depth musical analysis. It went glossy and tabloid-sized. It even went hard rock. It did everything except embrace Scientology, but it still had to close.

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