The NME are back with their annual roll of absolute bollocks – The Cool List. For the past seven years the mag insists on compiling the list of artists who “look good, sound incredible and live and breathe the essence of cool”. Previous winners include Pete & Carl, Beth Ditto and some badly tattooed ginger lad called Frank.
So what’s in for 2008? Well Crystal Castles front woman Alice Glass is the winner, largely thanks to her “wild” antics at this year’s Glastonbury. Drug addiction is mostly out, with Amy Winehouse being dropped quicker than three pills for a tenner and it seems Pete Doherty’s out of tabloid out of mind. Alex Turner’s still cool, although they claim this is despite Alexa Chung, when we know that in actuality they slaver over the trendiness of the pairing.
On the “latest” genres front, Klaxons have been replaced with their more 2008ish cosmic counterparts MGMT, Lovefoxxxxx has dropped 29 places and can be found DJing at your local Clique whereas Lethal Bizzle is nowhere in sight. Elbow, after being pretty much ignored by the mag for the past seven years, are now cool thanks to the Mercury Music Prize.
If you thought even the NME weren’t low enough to leap onto the Jay-Z bandwagon then think again – he’s second. And can you believe twat of the year Liam Gallagher has made it back into the top 10? After a mad fan dived onstage in Canada and attacked Noel, Liam shat himself and quickly exited stage right, only returning with his hard-man swagger when said fan was fully under the control of security services. Cool? I think not.
Does anyone actually pay attention to this shite? It seems the NME take an “if-you-throw-enough-shit-some-sticks” approach to this list. That is, if you lob enough potentially talented/mildly charismatic artists into the mix, some of them are bound to be successful, leaving their army of teen readers thinking, “hey, they were right!”
We music lovers don’t need some middle-aged, (probably) fat, middle-class bloke dictating what’s cool. Maybe this year’s winner Alice summed it up best. When told of her number one status, Alice replied: “Back in school, the people who held themselves in the same regard were the biggest waste of skin I’ve ever met.”
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