OldStand: Q, January 2000
Take our ink-stained hands and join us at the OldStand, where Jon McMillan goes to remind everyone what an honest-to-goodness music magazine is supposed to look like.
Best of 1999. Too soon? Maybe. But 9 years in music is a long time no matter how you cut it, especially when it stretches back to the pre-blog era. So, you ask, who took home the (not so) coveted 1999 Q Award? Short answer: Travis. Long answer: also Travis. Look, I don't have any problem with the Stereophonics beating out Suede for Best Performance (although I maybe perhaps do have a problem with the Stereophonics in general), but can you believe Basement Jaxx won Best New Act? What a joke. Gay Dad was robbed! The moral: as with most lists involving Gay Dad, it's best not to take the results too seriously.
The Top 50 list is underwhelming on first glance, but looks more solid upon closer review. I don't think of 1999 as a particularly memorable year for music, but then you see Midnite Vultures next to Blur's 13, Terror Twilight, The Soft Bulletin, Summerteeth, and TLC's Fanmail (I don't want no scrubs!), and the Top 50 starts to look like a list of "last batch of CDs you actually purchased before the Napster apocalypse/liberation." Good times.
Features include: the "Madness of Guns 'N Roses" ("Meanwhile, there is a new G'NR single in the shops, and an album, Chinese Democracy, to follow in spring 2000" -- one thing that has aged well since '99: Chinese Democracy jokes), a thoughtful appreciation/review of the Beastie Boys retrospective, and a series of articles where Q staffers join bands (Gomez, The All-Seeing I, Coal Chamber) to see what it's really like to be on the road. Nice concept, but the resulting articles don't lend much in the way of true insight beyond a) playing the tambourine is hard; b) wearing fishnet stockings is easy; and c) I have no idea who the All-Seeing I is.
Also: Ol' Dirty Bastard makes a claim on NYC, Morrissey cries foul on some nonsense, and the internet threatens to put the kibosh on record shops.
The rest of the foldout cover.
Surrender? Really?
Check out the list of past winners. Q officially receives the award for "Best Rolling Stone Impression."
Yikes. That's a brutal top 20.
I think the caption says it all.
It was about this time in history when Moz was replaced by a robot who generates ridiculous headlines.
I miss ODB.
Oasis eyebrow jokes = timeless comedy.
Hopefully they fired the intern who cut and pasted the URLs in the "related sites" column.
Posted at 4:02 PM by jon in OldStand
You should make the images clickable into a larger version. The full page ones are tough to read in this size.
Score = 3
Oh man...Blur back in the day...makes me grin from ear to ear.
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quit hatin
surrender is freakin awesome
also, i forgot how to use the letter g
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Wow, man. This article is a blast from the past. I actually had this magazine (maybe still have somewhere... packrat and all that...)
Q was a good magazine. I remember reading Damon Albarn's comment about how light Keith Richards was when they shot that cover.
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'99 is one of my favorite all-time years for music and everything else. Flaming Lips, Magnetic Fields, Dismemberment Plan, Fiona Apple, Bonnie "Prince" Billy, The Roots, bis, etc. And was that an actual crack at Basement Jaxx, or a wink-wink half-insult? Because they probably are the best act from 1999.
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What the hell is a"Steptacular"?
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ha.ha. Steps and S Club 7.
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