I am obsessed with the advertisements in the old music papers - the New Wave era is particularly rich for the semiotician and lover of graphic design trends, but then so is the Old Wave era. For a historian, it's almost as rich material to draw on as the actual journalism.
However that is not my subject today - my subject today is advertisements for the music press.
I'm going to start looking for the ink-and-paper versions, which I suspect are clueless in the extreme.
But for now here are TV commercials for weekly music papers, going from the early '80s to the 2000s.
These were posted by someone at ILM.
I wonder to what extent they were actually showed on TV. Perhaps some were used as cinema ads.
I remember a radio advert for Melody Maker during my early years of being there that was a really irritating jingle and the chorus went something "Read music, read Melody Maker" in a sing-song sort of matey voice. Or was it "love music, read Melody Maker"? Can't recall but the jingle is lodged in my brain like an indestructible tapeworm.
There was also a T-shirt floating around that said something like "Melody Maker - Tomorrow's Music Today".
In the actual music papers, you would get adverts for other music magazines sometimes - The Face advertised in NME regularly.
Monitor actually bought some micro-ads to run in the NME and also The Face, I think. We had come into some funding.
I can feel this post already extending itself towards future posts, including 1/ music journalists on television and 2/ fictionalized depictions of the rock press on television and in film.
There's quite a lot of the former - as a taster, I give you this ruddy marvellous clip of the Stud Brothers being callously anti-humanist in 1989
That ad for Melody Maker reminded me of this ad from the 2000s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leKzds32otc
ReplyDeleteIt feels rather telling that the last NME ad is so matter-of-fact, just speedily informing the viewer what the NME is, whereas the other ads seem to aim for some personality, some wit, some artistry (the Sounds ad quotes Nietzsche!). I guess the proliferation of TV channels, the rise of the internet, and the inkies starting to die all meant that the NME couldn't afford any ambition for a creative ad.
Oh you are right - it's the same pitch: this mag's for lads.
DeleteI thought the last NME one was better in a way insofar as it didn't try to conjure up some bogus cool, just a straightforward 'tons of stuff here for the indie music obsessive'.
Didn't one of the Stud Brothers go all sloppy humanist in the end? Failed to kill his inner liberal.
ReplyDeleteThere was a Scottish ultra-right wing guy who used to flit about on Twitter who coined the term "bioliberalism" - the idea that we've been so marinated in liberalism it has become instinctive, almost impossible to overcome.
No, but he was very much in the anti-Corbyn faction of the Labour Party.
DeleteI was slightly surprised that he voted Labour because he did have a Nietzschean worldview in the 1980s.
DeleteBut then I think everyone at the paper, even the most dandyish decadents, were Labour voters. You couldn't really correlate the music taste to the electoral preferences. Some of the most frivolous-seeming Maker writers from back in the day would go on to be fervent Corbyn-ites.
So, ultimately, the Nietzscheanism and and dandyism were poses. Or maybe rhetorical stances, correlated only to music specifically.
DeleteThe Melody Maker ad (something has happened to Thursday) is superbly shot and works as one of those ads where you would never guess what it was for up until the last frame.
ReplyDelete