"I couldn't possibly fail to disagree with you less."
5 May 2006How does it feel?Rolling Stone is past its shelf date, says Daniel Gale-Grogen:
The problems with Rolling Stone can be boiled down to one overarching illness: the magazine does not know what it is supposed to stand for anymore, and neither does its readership. It seems to be whatever publisher Jann Wenner wants it to be on any given week, whether it's a lad mag, a music source, a left-leaning political magazine or a generic culture watch pub. But it has not been an access point for bleeding-edge culture for many years.
And Wenner's not exactly giving his undivided attention to RS, what with the rest of his media sub-empire to oversee. I remember when my subscription expired. Or, more precisely, I don't remember when my subscription expired: it was one day in the middle of the doldrums when I found a copy of RS lying around and thought, "Hmmm. I haven't seen one of these in quite a while." This can't be a good sign for a magazine, if a subscriber doesn't know if he's still a subscriber or not. Maybe the future of the Stone is on the Web:
Rolling Stone righted itself somewhat and has stopped running peg-free "trend" stories on teenage sex addicts and out-of-place features on the latest in hot weaponry, but it still seems adrift, unable to tap into a culture that prefers Defamer over "Random Notes" and gets its record reviews daily from Allmusic.com and Pitchfork instead of waiting two weeks for that tired old thing to plop down on the newsstand.
I suppose one can wait for the second coming of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, but this seems a faint hope at best. Posted at 11:03 AM to Almost YogurtAlso long gone are the days of MTV playing actual music videos and SNL being even remotely funny. Posted by: hatless in hattiesburg at 2:39 PM on 5 May 2006We are doing our senior project on Gonzo journalism and Hunter S. Thompson. And by *we* I mean *me*, in a rhetorical effort to graduate one last offspring from high school. Interesting subject matter, at the least. Serious flashbacks of the hell that is high school, at worst. Posted by: Jennifer at 3:43 PM on 5 May 2006I enjoyed Rolling Stone during the early to mid-70's. I recall feeling it lose its revolutionary style in the latter part of that decade. We lived in a rental house then and one wall in the den was turned into an evolving collage of images torn from the paper (it wasn't a magazine then IMO) and glued to the wall. When we left, it was probably 3-4 layers thick. I like to think someone who could appreciate it, uncovered it some decades later. I never owned a glossy issue. Posted by: MikeH at 8:15 PM on 5 May 2006 |