Here's a good article on the current position of NME in the market/music genre/writing/influence interections. Two quotes I liked especially. The first about the generational relativism that makes looking at eras of writing difficult:
“Generations of them, all moaning about how NME stopped being good at the exact moment they stopped buying it,” complains Steven Wells, one of the magazine's star writers in the 1980s and early 1990s. “It must really suck to be an NME writer these days with this bloated Greek chorus of balding middle-aged naysayers on your back.”
This is what I always wonder for cultural institutions that become corporations out of need for sustaining over time. There is an increasing weight of history, and in music criticism this seems to get very cranky.
But commercial success does not equal cultural relevance, argues Steven Wells. For him, NME's fatal error was sacrificing the “rebellious, politicised, energised, anything-is-possiblism” of the post-punk era to become “the house organ for indie, defined as unchallenging guitar music made by white suburban males”. The result, Wells claims, was “cultural incest. A zoo animal eating its own dung is amusing for a while, but it gets tedious.”
Somehow I doubt he's referring to the Pitchfork review of legend, but it is an uncanny reference/piece of wisdom from one aging indie cultural zeigeist-maker to the current.