Smash Hits is gone, Melody maker a thing of the past. But digital archivists are giving defunct music mags a new lease of life
In an otherwise perfectly level-headed summary of the current state of Eminem's career, the Independent's Nick Hasted recently reminisced about the fringe benefits of even the most tangential association with Slim Shady at the height of the Detroit motormouth's early-noughties notoriety. "For the first and, to date, last time," Hasted remembers fondly, albeit with a wistful undercurrent, "I was offered sex for my ticket when he flew into Manchester ..."
Hasted does not explicitly reveal his response to this once-in-a-lifetime immodest proposal, but readers with suspicious natures won't fail to notice that the rest of the article makes no specific reference to the (musical) performance in question. Is this the kind of conundrum Slavic literature professor Svetlana Boym had in mind when she wrote: "Nostalgia speaks in riddles and puzzles, so one must face them in order not to become its next victim, or its next victimiser"? It's hard to be sure. But either way, Boym's The Future of Nostalgia ? the classic 2001 study of that backward-looking tendency the author helpfully terms "hypochondria of the heart" ? is a vital source of enlightenment for anyone exploring the guerrilla music-press online archive scenario.
With the competing claims of rival cloud-drives and personalised ether-lockers rising to a virtual hubbub, it makes perfect sense that perhaps the most cumbersome of all pre-digital information storage processes ? the mouldy stack of music mags gathering dust beneath the bed ? should be subject to a digital upgrade. And there's something charming about the idea of communally-minded individuals painstakingly scanning entire copies of Smash Hits and relevant sections of fin-de-siecle Melody Makers and NMEs for the emotional sustenance of their contemporaries. (Apparently, there's also another site devoted to early/mid-90s Britpop bible Select somewhere, but it seems to have gone offline.)
As big Brownie point-earners go, surely saving your peers from that most feared of domestic ultimatums ? "Either that huge pile of Mixmags/Mojos/Wires/Kerrang!s goes, or you go" ? must be right up there with grass-phobic footballer Mario Balotelli handing �1,000 to a representative of Manchester's homeless community?
Also on a karmic note, it's interesting that the person bringing the former of these two philanthropic phenomena to a wider audience should be Sam Delaney, himself a former editor of Heat ? arguably the first significant magazine in the evolution of British popular culture that no one in their right mind would ever want to keep. I found an old copy while cleaning up some dog-sick in the back of the car the other day, and somehow its merciless zoom lens focus on the vestigial physiognomic foibles of a hapless underclass of highly groomed cyber-celebrities made the prospect of disentangling partially digested kibble from ancient crisp packets seem strangely appealing. Factor in unofficial Melody Maker and NME archive supremo Charles Batho's day job as a "digital creative director" and it becomes clear that what we're dealing with here are individual acts of analogue atonement.
In Batho's case, the diminishing frequency and volume of new postings since his website started three years ago suggest that ? in his case, at least ? the urge to preserve Taylor Parkes's live reviews for posterity may be growing fainter. But having set off at a steadier pace, Brian McCloskey's Smash Hits archive seems to be keeping its promise to add a new edition of the magazine every fortnight, "on the 30th anniversary of the original publication date".
Back in the 1890s, Louis, a patient of the great French psychiatrist Dr Arnaud, thought that each event of his life repeated an identical one of exactly 12 months earlier. I'm not saying that fact has any direct bearing on those revisiting the pleasures of their Smash Hits-reading youth at regular 14-day intervals, but it may well be relevant to Boym's quest to "grasp the rhythm of [nostalgia's] longing, its enticements and entrapments".
At this point it should probably be noted that Dr Arnaud's final diagnosis, Louis-wise, was not ? as might, perhaps, have been expected ? of a patient suffering from abnormally intense deja vu, but of someone obsessed with the idea of deja vu itself. Of course, the feeling prompted by looking at old music magazines you haven't seen for 30 years is not in fact "deja vu" (perhaps best defined ? before the term itself had even been coined ? by the US novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne as "that odd state of mind wherein we fitfully and teasingly remember some previous scene or incident, of which the one now passing appears to be but the echo and the reduplication") but its opposite.
Does anyone out there have a name for the sensation of revisiting something you know you experienced first time around and finding it not exactly as you'd remembered? If so, I'd love to hear it. In the meantime, all those horrified by the possibility of drifting off into a trance and waking up to find themselves halfway through a 1995 Blur cover story in which Damon Albarn tells Steve Sutherland "if Kurt Cobain had played football, he'd probably be alive today" are strongly advised to give the excellent online archive of the now sadly defunct Arthur magazine (of which more next month) a try instead.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2011/apr/26/maggoty-lamb-nostalgia-digital-makeover
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