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IT is now an established axiom that the NME Carling Awards, the gongs given out by the music weekly in an attempt to provide a spunky, insubordinate alternative to the Brit Awards, are becoming less of an alternative. The relationship between the two has increasingly come to resemble that between the pigs and humans in Animal Farm, and in the wake of this year's ceremonies you can only wonder how long it is before the oppressed wipe their trotters on the doormat, step beyond the porch, and merge effortlessly with their oppressors. The winners of this week's NME Carling Awards were almost interchangeable with the winners of last week's Brits: if the names weren't the same (and most of them were), the message their nominations sent out - "Sod the artistic value, how much did it sell?" - certainly was.

The NME seems to be in denial about this. Last week in The Mirror, NME editor Ben Knowles raged against "the sound of backs being slapped, own trumpets being blown and cash registers ringing" that could be heard at the Brit Awards, without stopping to explain what mysterious factor justified Kylie Minogue's NME nomination (and, in the event, victory) in the best pop act category, or made it so different from her Brit Awards for best international female and best international album.

The NME Awards' one redeeming argument is that they reflect a decision made by readers, rather than record company judges, but evidently NME readers are not the wilfully esoteric tastemakers they once were, nor perhaps the people who the creators of their favourite music weekly want them to be. The results of the NME Awards suggest a readership with no noticeable differences from the core audience who make an annual date to watch the Brits on television: people who have probably never thought of their musical taste as a badge worth wearing.

The NME Awards provide the perfect barometer of where the NME is at the moment, in its 50th year. That, judging from this year's winners, is floundering somewhere between the bull-headed, high-octane tastes of teenagers who would rather read Kerrang! (the weekly heavy metal magazine that recently surpassed NME's circulation for the first time), the one album per-year market, the whims of public relations workers, and some long-deceased indie ideal. Where the NME Awards might once have deflected attention from the Brits itself, its pointlessness now deflects attention from the criticism surrounding the Brits. The Brits, at least, can be written off as a bit of fun - something much too childish to get properly vexed about.

The hypocrisy surrounding the NME Awards, however, can't be dismissed so lightly, since the ceremony is purportedly put together by cultural renegades who view music as a matter of life and death, yet still don't have the guts to hold their awards on the same night as their rivals, for fear that, given the choice, most celebrity guests would opt for hanging out with Zoe Ball and Dido over a bunch of socially awkward men in Black Rebel Motorcycle Club T-shirts.

Somewhere amid its own cowardice, the well-oiled cogs of marketing and the shifting priorities of teenagers, the NME - and, by extension, the NME Awards - have squandered the iconoclastic reputation that made them a place to be seen. These days an NME-hyped band such as the Strokes - whose mix of youth, professional retro cool and punk-by-numbers melodies has proved equally palatable for the Brits and the NME Awards (where they won in three categories) - are going to remain the exclusive property of the publication for about four seconds.

The NME needs the Strokes so much more than the Strokes need the NME. Likewise every other one of this week's nominees. And that, for anyone who once thought of the NME Awards and the NME itself as anything more radical, is what makes the whole thing so embarrassing: the fawning nature of the slide into obsolescence, so at odds with the "better to burn out than fade away" philosophy the NME has always asked for from its cover stars. Here, becoming what you detest isn't a by-product of success after all, but one of failure.