I read somewhere (probably I Love Music) that more records have been released so far this decade than were released during the entirety of the 70s. At first this struck me as being like the meme that “more people are know living than have ever died”, but after a few moments of consideration I reasoned that actually, I’d be surprised if there hadn’t been more records released in just 2001 and 2002 than the entirety of the 70s.

The means of production, at least in terms of musical endeavour, has been firmly wrested from the hands of the big labels and studios. Anyone with a laptop or a minidisc deck and a microphone can now create something, plus the proliferation of small record labels and the increasing profile of the internet (not just MP3s systems like SoulSeek but mailorder collectives like Post Everything and Net Sounds) mean that anybody can push their music into the public domain without having to do the whole sweaty-toilet-gigs and A&R attraction thing, even if that public domain now appears smaller than it used to be.

It’s not anyway- it’s larger; we’re almost fully into a realisation of McLuhan’s ‘global village’ now. The thing we perhaps didn’t expect fully was how specialised and microcosmic it would become. The thing that’s daunting about the brave new musical world we’re living in now isn’t the vastness of it, it’s the intricacy, the fine, gossamer lines of interconnectivity and relation, the instant splintering and division of asexual cells as they cross-pollinate, spawn, and reproduce. Hypercommunications means that the splinter groups now get commented on almost before they’re born. It is, to say the least, a struggle to keep up.

And in the midst of this NME is still scrabbling to get a foothold on the vast mountainside of it all by pushing bands into certain scenes, even going so far as to help create and nurture groups in test-tube conditions so they can fit these artificial scenes they’re so keen to promote. Fact is that there hasn’t been a huge, definitive, (and here’s the key) media-friendly scene since Britpop, and even that was spurious. Print publications (and those online too, maybe?) need scenes to give a uniformity to their coverage, to entice people in and to spread their audience. Plus it’s easier for writers to cover material if it’s all nicely linked and pigeonholed into a unified group.

There’s not going to be a “new punk” or even a “new baggy” or “new shoegazing”; those running around looking are rather wasting their time; it killed Melody Maker. But that’s not to say that there aren’t scenes out there; they’re just smaller, more localised, more specialised, less likely to sell magazines. Anticon, Def Jux, the Four Tet / Manitoba / Prefuse 73 axis, UK Garage, dancehall, ‘grime’, “Yes New York”, even, *gasp* reality pop, as well as hundreds (thousands) of other micro (and not so micro) cosmic scenes exist, unfabricated, unforced, and a dozen times more vibrant than the New Rock Revolution being pushed in certain sectors.

We’re alright, really we are.