NME's Cool List: The only such ranking we know will be a Shit List before we even look at it. To refresh your memory, last year the Brit rag pronounced Gossip girl Beth Ditto to be the coolest rocker in all the land. And the year before that, it was Arctic Monkey Alex Turner. It's a precise set of criteria and formulas the editorial staff works through to generate these lists, of course, and though the Brit rag may indeed be most qualified to give such honors, it's fun of us Yanks to read the list and say ... who? Here's the test: If you can identify this year's Cool King, you probably live across the pond.
[photo via jim's dinner club]
The top 10:
10 Keith Richards
09 Beth Ditto
08 Amy Winehouse
07 Kate Nash
06 Alex Turner (Arctic Monkeys)
05 Lethal Bizzle
04 Ryan Jarman (The Cribs)
03 Lovefoxxx (CSS)
02 Jamie Reynolds (Klaxons)
01 Frank Carter (Gallows)
Burn, Ditto drops to nine. Maybe posing naked on the mag's cover isn't all that cool after all. And yet Keith Richards continues to roll. Up 16 points! If only Kanye had snorted his dad's ashes and appeared Pirates Of The Carribean 3.
As for the champ: Frank Carter's the tattooed vocalist for the Epitaph punk band Gallows. They aren't bad, but Frank's already gone on record (in NME) as saying the band won't last past '09. The lesson? As always, short shelf-life = instant cool.
There's no way NME will abstain from posting the rest of the top 50 whenever it's ready. But it'd be a lot cooler if they did.
