Yanks Go Home!

October 31, 2013 5:36 PM

Select Magazine, 1990-2000. "This is a website dedicated to my favourite 90s music magazine Select. I'll slowly be scanning in features, to give random flashbacks to the 90s music scene."
posted by paleyellowwithorange (28 comments total)

bonus: If the 90s were the 60s. [self-link, scanned from one of my own old copies of Select.] Following on from the kinda interesting derail in the Pearl Jam thread a couple of days ago, this is a Britpop-centric take on which 90s artists reincarnated the spirit of various 60s artists.
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 5:37 PM on October 31, 2013 [2 favorites]

Omg yes. I did a summer thing in Oxford in 1995, when I was in high school, and fell massively for Britpop. Once back in LA all I had was buying Select and NME from Tower Records and staying up late to listen to Rodney on the Roq so I could *hear* the damn singles they were talking about.
posted by dame at 5:50 PM on October 31, 2013

I'm going to see Blur on Saturday, after having seen them for the first time 23 years ago, so a timely post. Great to read a review of Leisure - lots of happy memories - nice post!
posted by jontyjago at 6:20 PM on October 31, 2013

Can't wait! I used to live on Select (stuff about music).
posted by Admiral Haddock at 6:57 PM on October 31, 2013

Be still my teenaged heart! I bought Select religiously for years when I went to stay with my Dad at weekends. I kept them all in my room in piles, as you do. Until he was moving house when I was about 17, and one weekend I turned up to find he'd been doing some clearing and threw them all out. Gut.Ted.

I think my favourite article memory is when the Beastie Boys were making a comeback in their new incarnation. There was a review of a gig they played supporting, IIRC, or at least sharing the bill with House of Pain. It was kind of sneery, given that this was pre-activism and they were still known for Fight For Your Right, and it made a thing of them playing their own instruments. The tone was kind of "bless them, trying to get more credible". Who knew how brilliant they'd be or how revered?

Aw, thanks for the trip down memory lane.
posted by billiebee at 7:04 PM on October 31, 2013

I still have a stack of SELECTs myself. I loved this magazine so much as a teenager in small-town Illinois. It was one of my lifelines to the bigger, cooler world that I knew I'd get to join one day. Viva!
posted by mykescipark at 7:07 PM on October 31, 2013

(And I think I still have some of the cassettes that came with the magazine back in the day...!)
posted by mykescipark at 7:08 PM on October 31, 2013

Post-grunge, and after U2 and Pink Floyd went into hibernation, suddenly, out of nowhere (to this 19 year old here in Australia) in 1995, appeared Oasis, Blur, Pulp, Black Grape, The Stone Roses, Supergrass, Manic Street Preachers, The Prodigy, and all the rest.

Thanks Select, Q and NME (and, later, MOJO) magazines! Kept me enthralled til the decade's end.
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 7:12 PM on October 31, 2013

awesome! thanks. now someone start doing this for zillions.
posted by es_de_bah at 8:00 PM on October 31, 2013

Brett Anderson, April 1993 - 25 years old

4 years, 7 months later...

Brett Anderson, November 1997 - 30 years old

Heroin's one a hell of a drug, kids!
posted by elsietheeel at 8:39 PM on October 31, 2013

Still better looking than I'll ever be.
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 8:44 PM on October 31, 2013

I still have quite a few of their compilation CDs.
posted by betweenthebars at 8:58 PM on October 31, 2013

Jockey Slut, Herb Garden, Magic Feet were where it was at for me. Select and Muzik were mainstream. Mojo and Q were for dead people.

I should really get a scanner.
posted by inpHilltr8r at 9:55 PM on October 31, 2013

It's a matter of perspective, I guess. MOJO and Q made me come alive, after a diet of Rolling Stone.
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 10:02 PM on October 31, 2013

Oh totally. I mean, I was immersed in it, and can only now, imagine what it looked like from the other side of the world. I had a huge stack of Q's at the start of the decade, but by the end they said nothing to me about my life. In ten years I went from hairy rock hippy to shaven headed technoid man. All along the path, the UK music press was there.

Moving to the US was a bit of a disappointment on that front. Fortunately the internet fixed that problem. Which is funny, because right at the end of the 80s, my main source of musical information was rec.music.misc.
posted by inpHilltr8r at 12:11 AM on November 1, 2013

Related: (Some) scans from Neon film magazine, '97 - '99

I really miss Neon. It was a very intelligent film magazine!
posted by DanCall at 3:11 AM on November 1, 2013

I had the odd copy of Select, but being 13 in 1995 and living in a town where Britpop basically didn't exist, I never felt cool enough to read it. I remember one piece talking about how it was a Don't to have teddy bears on the bed, 'because beds are for shagging'. Being grown-up where I lived was about underage drinking in terrible pubs that played happy hardcore and where your friends wanted to cop off with unappealing boys in curtains haircuts, and I didn't want to do that, but I didn't know what other kind of grown-up I could be. I definitely didn't feel that I'd ever be cool enough to go to gigs or talk to boys about how much I liked Marion or the Longpigs.

I did read Q and Vox a lot, because they were pitched at the over-30s and I suppose having something written for an audience that clearly wasn't me meant they didn't make me feel uncool. I used to read Neon when I could get hold of copies too, and also Hotdog. Mainly because I hadn't seen many films, our local cinema mostly did blockbusters, and it meant I could make lists of things I hoped to get hold of on video at some point.

Google Books has about 15 yrs worth of Spin magazine on there - but I really wish someone would digitise Sassy and Smash Hits. The former was exactly the kind of thing I needed as an awkward misfit teen (our equivalent, Just 17, clearly tried to emulate it) and the latter...well, I'm still pissed off at my mum throwing out the few copies I've been able to find second-hand.
posted by mippy at 3:25 AM on November 1, 2013 [1 favorite]

Also, The Face. I wanted to subscribe for years, and by the time I could afford to - and wasn't living at home so could avoid awkward questions as to why those kids looked so weird - it had folded. I know iD and Dazed are still about, but what I liked about The Face was the quasi-sociological aspect of many of their articles. The others were more like corporate Vice magazine.
posted by mippy at 3:30 AM on November 1, 2013

I graduated to Select after I reluctantly realised I was too old for Smash Hits. I knew I was in a musical backwater - boarding school on the Irish Sea coast - where everyone else's musical taste seemed to be formed by the last two songs on Top of the Pops or by what their dads had on vinyl. There was a lot of Hendrix and the Doors kicking round there even in '92, '93. I loved Select, but thinking back I can barely remember anything about it. I never read Melody Maker or the NME aside from occasionally flicking through them in libraries because I was definitely not cool enough for them. I can still be intimidated by meeting people my age now who read the NME when they were growing up; I definitely won't be the sort of person they'd want to listen to. Which is eighty-two shades of ridiculous.

So I identify with what mippy's saying even though it sounds like our experiences were very different. I moved to London in '94, lived there through the height of Britpop, at one point a minute's walk from the Shepherd's Bush Empire but still never went to gigs until I was in my late twenties because I honestly thought I'd be spotted as not cool enough for the bands I wanted to see if I did.

YOUNG PEOPLE: GO TO GIGS! MOST PEOPLE THERE AREN'T AS COOL AS YOU! YOU'LL THANK ME LATER.
posted by calico at 5:01 AM on November 1, 2013 [1 favorite]

My friend wrote to the NME letters page every week (roughly) and never got one published. I wrote once - slagging off Placebo - and they put it in. He always bought it first and when he saw it he was LIVID! That still makes me laugh :)
posted by billiebee at 5:28 AM on November 1, 2013

Six more regulars: Knowledge, Miles Ahead, Wax. DJ, MixMag. The Wire.

Straight No Chaser? Was that US or UK? Something vaguely Jazzy I think.

Record Collector, although that was right at the trainspotter end and only if they had an article on something I cared about. The ZTT issues ended up particularly dog-eared.

Of course the inkies were ubiquitous , NME, Melody Maker, and Sounds.

Never did the Smash Hits thing. I had friends who bought it religiously. Likewise I knew people who loved Kerrang and Metal Hammer but never bought into the scene enough to need the information storm that these magazines provided.

..and that's just the music magazines from the UK.

These days I only read the Economist, and that's mostly because I don't trust myself with a tablet in the bath.
posted by inpHilltr8r at 7:56 AM on November 1, 2013

Select was my preferred music magazine in the mid-’90s, and I must have accumulated a pile of them at one time, though now, looking back through these, almost nothing is ringing a bell… I do vaguely recall reading this story: sadder in retrospect.

I’d be curious to see some scans of the classified & personal ads in Select—it was by means of one of the latter I connected with a couple of pen-pals I kept up correspondence with for a few years: I hope Anne-Marie, then perhaps Regensburg’s biggest Suede fan, & Jamillah, are out there somewhere, well & happy.
posted by misteraitch at 8:26 AM on November 1, 2013

Vox! That was a direct Select competitor. Fairly short lived I think though.
posted by inpHilltr8r at 8:39 AM on November 1, 2013

Also, The Face! I have forgotten about that forever, and yes, it was so very cool when I was 15.
posted by dame at 10:53 AM on November 1, 2013

Smash Hits online archive, you say?

Well, get happy.

God, I loved Smash Hits. I can still remember some of the headlines - "Byrne In Bush" for the My Life... announcement - and some of the letters, "I've seen Gary Numan's important little places, signed A Q-Tip".

No journalism since has come close.
posted by Devonian at 10:59 AM on November 1, 2013

I have stacks of Select, Neon, and Neon's successor Hotdog. Every time I move and someone watches me pack and lug around these big heavy magazines in big heavy boxes, they suggest I get rid of them. These people are philistines.
posted by jess at 12:18 PM on November 1, 2013

Select was a godsend to me stuck in Burnie, Tasmania in the first half of the '90s and just wanting to get out.
posted by Tasmanian_Kris at 12:49 PM on November 1, 2013

mippy and others, prepare to fritter a few hours at Like Punk Never Happened, the Smash Hits archive. I still bitterly regret chucking my collection (1979-1987), so much so that I bought a whole bunch of them back on eBay.
posted by vickyverky at 1:45 PM on November 1, 2013 [1 favorite]