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WHY DO AMERICAN MUSIC MAGAZINES HAVE TO SUCK?

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By Stephanie Zacharek

August 2, 1999 | Full disclosure and a confession: I've written for Rolling Stone in the past, and I write the occasional book or record review for Spin -- but they're magazines I never read. I've been a fan of pop music for about as long as I can remember, but I no longer have even a passing interest in either of the two major music and pop-culture magazines published in this country.

To get what I want as a music fan, I have to look to the United Kingdom.

I don't know exactly how it was that I started to pick up Q and Mojo religiously (especially considering that they cost some $8 apiece at the local Barnes & Noble or Borders). But even before I discovered them, I realized I'd come to feel almost completely detached from both Rolling Stone and Spin, two publications that used to meet most of my requirements in terms of healthy irreverence and comprehensiveness when it came to music.

It's not that, as a woman in my 30s, I feel that I'm no longer their target audience. (I don't like to think of myself as anyone's target audience: I read what attracts me, period.) It's just that when I pick up Rolling Stone or Spin, I don't feel the least bit tempted by the bulk of their content: all that minute-by-minute pulse-checking and temperature-taking of pop culture is admirable in a desperate sort of way, but ultimately it's just facile. Their tireless efforts to get to the bottom of Limp Bizkit (How deep is a thimble? the wise man asks), their all-too-"Random Notes," leave me cold and, worse, bored out of my skull.

In trying to be all things to all people (its target audience seems to be every wanna-be hipster between the ages of 17 and 55), the once-great Rolling Stone has turned into the People magazine of what's left of the counterculture -- a homogenized cultural smudge. And if Rolling Stone has become People, then Spin (whose coverage of music, not to mention cultural and political issues, seemed like a gift from heaven when the magazine first appeared in the early '80s) has become Urban Outfitters, a place where the progress of every "youth" trend seems charted like a stock price. Spin is loaded with attitude, as a youth rag should be. But you have to shake it down, hard, to sift out the real intelligence there. Mostly, Spin seems to have crowned itself the king of forced bons mots and stagy wisecracks. One wag recently wrote of the Chicago punk-pop outfit Showoff: "Because every couple of years the world needs another bunch of kids who sing like they need to blow their nose." If only magazines had noses to blow.

But Q and Mojo have a way of luring me in, sometimes against my better judgment. I can sit down for hours with either one and get completely lost in their strange little features (Mojo's interview with Love's long lost Arthur Lee, which he conducted from his jail cell) or opinionated extravaganzas (Q is big on opinionated extravaganzas, the most recent being "The 100 greatest Stars of the 20th Century": Radiohead's Thom Yorke rated higher than Pulp's Jarvis Cocker? Bollocks!). Recently, I read an entire feature in Mojo about the Grateful Dead before I realized that never in my life have I had the faintest interest in them or their music. I felt cheap, used -- almost like a target audience. But I'd also had fun. How had this happened?

The answer seems to be that as a pop-music fan -- and I continue to be one, even after so many of my contemporaries have dropped by the wayside, buying the occasional Elvis Costello record but not much else -- I'm not interested in connecting with a particular generational audience. I want music: "old" people's music, "young" people's music. I could buy Rolling Stone simply out of habit, since it's what I grew up with and I know that it will never fail to pay attention to the new Tom Petty record. Or I could buy Spin because I want to keep up with new bands, and I know that Spin will get to them first, whether I like the magazine's approach or not. But mostly, it's the music that I'm interested in -- and that's the front on which the major American music magazines fail to deliver.

Next page | Spin's "90 Greatest Albums of the '90s"