NME Article Analysis

The chosen artist that features in the NME article is Gerard Way, lead singer of the band My Chemical Romance. The bands recent album (released four years ago) The Black Parade was aimed at those who felt misunderstood or alienated by society, mainly teenagers. This suggests that the magazine is too aimed at teenagers as they would be interested in reading about teenager’s main rock icon.
The language used in the article is mainly simple, it’s wrote in a formal fashion but is laced with colloquial phrases such as ‘chucked out their tunics’ and ‘honk the pop fact sirens’. This is because the article is informing the reader about the years that My Chemical Romance have been missing from the music scene but they aim to do it in a way that will keep the reader interested, teenagers don’t want the intelligence level of the writing to be too high because they will get bored or confused and opt to read another magazine.
The tone of the article gives the sense that NME wants the reader to feel like the member of the in-crowd, they are parting information about something that has not yet been released yet. They also want the reader to feel as if they were a close friend; this is demonstrated through colloquial phrases and social words such as ‘Riiiiiiiiight’. However they treat the reader as if they were an informed fan as they talk about tracks from other artists albums like ‘Jenny was a friend of mine’ by the Killers. But the chances of an NME reader actually reading this article is slim as the artist may not appeal to all of them and they may not have the attention span to read such a lengthy article. The text used is a simple black font, which follows the house style of the magazine. There are also few entry points within the article; it seems that you would have to read the whole article to understand what is going on. The article is spread over four pages, the readership just won’t have time to read this amount.
The majority of the article is text rather than images; this is odd for NME as their readership is mostly interested in looking at montages of images rather than reading lengthy articles. The images show Gerard Way now and back on The Black Parade tour, this is to highlight to the readers that the band has changed from what it used to be. This could be a ploy to entice teenagers who didn’t like My Chemical Romance before to give them another chance because they are different now.
The main image for the article is a close up of Gerard Way with the anchored text of ‘This record is going to be a grand failure if people don’t get it’, this is juxtaposed with the image as from the facial expression Gerard Way seems to not care if his music fails, the text however suggests otherwise.
The article seems to only make sense if you were aware of My Chemical Romances previous album and image. Newer readers of the magazine who would’ve been too young to know about the album which was released four years ago might struggle to understand the concept of change within the band. However NME explains the previous album and tour, the rock opera about a cancer patient and the controversy surrounding it, helping recent readers to understand the history of the band.