Post by Captain Snark on Apr 2, 2015 20:03:25 GMT -5
Rolling Stone magazine is the prostitute of the counter-culture. It's basically about marketing products to college boys and teenagers, and everything else is minor. Some of us remember the "perception/reality" ads the magazine ran in the 1980s in Advertising Age, a magazine aimed at advertisers, to show the true tastes of their readers. These ads would run two pictures under the headings "Perception" and "Reality." Under perception, George McGovern; under reality, Ronald Reagan. Under perception, a keg of microbrew; under reality, some upmarket beer brand. Under perception, a Volkswagen Beetle painted with flowers; under reality, some upmarket car.
Things got even worse ten or fifteen years ago after the "lad's magazine" (I prefer "loser's magazine") Maxim spun off the music magazine Blender. The Rolling Stone people must have been scared of the new competition, because they hired a new editor who took the magazine in a decidedly laddish direction. I have a feeling that they deliberately go for bad taste to grab the attention of teenage readers! Thus we got a Hot List that included "homeless beards" (with a photo of George Clooney with a long, unkempt beard) and Monaco royal Charlotte Casiraghi as the Hot Fantasy.
The writers? The magazine once ran a story on eccentric actor Crispin Glover whose author listed off the five things Glover was most famous for in one long sentence, punctuated by semi-colons. That's high school writing! (I have a theory that some journalists deliberately write in overlong sentences in the hope that their writing will be harder to edit down...)
I'll admit that the magazine has run an honorable (if predictable) campaign against the War on Drugs. Yet as I said, it's the marketing that dominates. I remember when they ran a cover story on Angelina Jolie to accompany the release of her second Tomb Raider movie. The cover was accompanied by a big overleaf Jeep ad that showed Jolie as Lara Croft driving... not a Land Rover. Some years back they started running an annual TV issue. The sad thing is that it didn't surprise me!
About fifteen years ago Rolling Stone interviewed Britney Spears and gave her a big cover photo (in her undies, of course). So what BS line did they quote in their big cover story's big headline? "Don't treat me like a little girl." (I say treat her like a businesswoman.) As the great Frank Zappa once said, "Most rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read."