I almost bought the last ever issue of Smash Hits magazine today. In the end I didn't, but am sad at its passing. The first issue of Smash Hits I bought was in about 1981 - when it still had the enticing first verse of lyrics (I can't remember which but it was something like The Belle Stars remake of Iko Iko) on its front page as a selling point. It was 25 years ago, so I guess it's okay to feel like it was another era. After all, it was only 25 years before that that Elvis cut his first sessions at Sun. Imagine the transribed lyrics of pop songs being a reason to buy a magazine. These days you need the promise of four or five semi-naked photo shoots of Rachel Stevens and at least one free CD just to browse it in WH Smiths.
Throughout much of the 1980s Smash Hits was delivered to my house. For those who think that I wasn't cool, I also got the NME, in the days when it was anti-Thatcher radical and the original indie-kids' bible, and The Face, which was the touchstone of Metropolitan style.
What I loved about Smash Hits was its playfulness. The magazine unashamedly celebrated POP music, without having to hide its enthusiasm underneath layers of intellectual analysis and pseudo-coolness. Okay, so the Belle Stars or The Joboxers were crap, but they were what was happening that week. SH was Top of The Pops on paper, beholden to whatever was popular and treating every act with the same importance and affectionate irreverence. I look at something like Q and they worship at the feet of U2, Colplay and Radiohead, creating and promoting a canon of 'important' music and intellectualising it in order to appear serious. Smash Hits never did this. During its heyday from about 1984-89, it made me laugh out loud and developed a silly but clever writing style that still hangs around in the London written media today - which is not surprising since so many SH alumni are now big-shot magazine editors or write for the Sundays.
Smash Hits was never snobby. I remember feeling great pride in 1986 when my little known local Indie Goth band (I knew someone who knew someone who was the bass player and they were 'our' band) The Rose of Avalanche were given single of the week ahead of Papa Don't Preach. The indie papers only started taking Madonna seriously in return several years later when she started courting controversy and it became clear that she wasn't going away. Even then they examineded her from afar, as a case study.
Smash Hits reflected what was great about POP. The transience, the energy, the bizarre yet totally logical mix of deeply serious and deeply superficial. Yet it was never naive. Nor was it cynical and mean-spirited like much of todays popular media. It archly celebrated its subject with more depth than a million reflexive, linguistically clever Paul Morley essays. After all, celebration is probably the only legitimate response that you can have to POP. What can you really say about great pop music? It defies analysis. You can't say anything - it's not On the Genealogy of Morals. Just get up and dance.
As a magazine it has been in decline for a while. POP consumers got younger and the bands they are fed are , I think, more formulaic and interchangeable. Nobody wears silly hats anymore. In its time Smash Hits was unique, but it got overtaken by TRL, Cat Deely, the internet and crucially, its own influence in breaking down the barriers between 'serious' and 'frivolous' music.
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