OK, so it’s not dead yet, but God, considering what it’s become it should be. I used to love this magazine then we had a run where they had Cliff Richard, Ronan Keating and the Spice Girls on the front cover and I would cringe with embarrassment walking out of the shop with the bloody thing. At that point the writing was still pretty good so I considered the thing saveable — how wrong I was. On a whim, some two years later, I decided to buy the issue on the shelves — why you ask? Well, it had REM on the cover and there was a free CD — I am a sucker for a free CD. I opened it and, to my horror the whole thing had descended into a kind of Facebook swampiness of polls, best ofs, and gimmicky bullshit that amounted to barely a solid article spread across over a hundred pages. Too many adverts, too much try-hard-and-fail trendiness — it wasn’t even good toilet paper (too fucking shiny and I hate papercuts on my arse). Oh, Q, please just give up the ghost and die!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"