Reshaping history, one indie music mag at a time

You guys, TELEVISION IS BACK. Dirty Sexy Money! Chuck! Gossip Girl! The Office! It's been a v. enjoyable couple of tv-having weeks for me. (Also, I guess now EVERYONE I know is getting engaged, even fictional people on cinema veritae television shows.)

But Jim and Pam or Chuck's awesomely evil machinations or Other Chuck's adorable quirky grin aren't the subject of this post, more's the pity. I just thought I'd mention it.

You guys! I'm totally famous and influential! After years of slogging through hipster crowds and having drunken adventures with rubbish musicians, I've finally made it into the NME. Not for anything people normally make it into the NME for (in order: having homosexual love for one's bandmates; releasing an album for which the NME will hail a band as the vanguard of indie music, only to come back three weeks later and proclaim them tired, once they become too popular; or being slagged off by Lily Allen), but rather for this:



No, I'm not in that picture. That's not me; that's Dirty Pretty Things, and they just dissolved their band. In typical garments-rending fashion, the NME have devoted their online picture gallery to "The life and times of Carl Barat," as if Carlos has died or something. There are many photos of both DPT and Carl's former band (the much-missed Libertines) on NME.com, and that's one of them. But dig the caption at the side, in which the NME explains that Dirty Pretty Things was the band's second choice in band names, after the far more amazing "The Bearded Clam Lovers' Experience."

Except, um . . . I made that up. Like two years ago, as a joke about the band's charmingly rubbish homosexual love for one another. (Courtney: "I can't tell if they're gay, or just English.") I even made up that story about there being another band with that name, and that's why they had to change theirs to the slightly less offensive "Dirty Pretty Things."

Part of me thinks I should email the NME (who are obviously not the world's best researchers . . . unless one of the staffers I met at sxsw is giving me a shout out) and correct them, but let's be honest: having my creation in a magazine, even if it is something as stupid as a joke I made on the internet once, is essentially like being published, right?

Next step: rewriting Wikipedia. Soon, I'll be able to exert a Colbert-esque level of influence on the internet.