I had to break the cellophane seal on this one. It came with Uncut around (believe it or not) the end of 2004, but evidently the CD wasn't a big reason for buying the magazine. It's a sick dynamic: we don't much care about the covermount, but still it seduces us into thinking we're getting some extra value. What we're actually getting is a disposal problem. What do you do with all these CDs. Put them on a shelf until the day when you decide to listen to your whole collection, end to end, and blog about it? Really? Hey, snap! Ah, but what do you do with them then? Unwanted, unloved, yet the physical product comes at a cost to the earth, and the musical product was wrought from the most dear dreams, emotions and ambitions of the players.
And when the music industry rails against covermounts, arguing that they're devaluing music, it's not these that they're complaining about. It's the ones designed to boost circulation of the Sunday papers. These covermounts that are packaged with magazines aimed at specialist music fans, they're a legitimate form of promotion. Oh, that's OK, then.
As for the magazines themselves, I used to browse the shelves in newsagents from time to time, and buy one if it Neil Young on the cover. 2004 was around the time I started preferring Word magazine ahead of Uncut or Mojo, as I eventually sussed that the selection of stars for the cover had more to do with marketing than with the quality of the re-heated reappraisals inside. As you know if you've read any of my weary comments about Word covermounts, it was out of the frying pan and into the fire. Now I just maintain my 14-year subscription to The Wire, which is annoying in a different set of ways, but seems more likely to stumble across something genuinely extraordinary — lord knows how they decide who to put on their covers.
I have now listened to this CD, after keeping it for five and a half years. Sadly it's no C86, or even Sounds of the New West. There's nothing I want to keep for a second listen. Not even, surprisingly, the Tom Waits track.
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