Rolling Stone, Covered With Moss

I’m going to give you a list of names, and I want you to see if you can guess what they have in common: Nicki Minaj, Marilyn Manson, Cat Stevens, Fall Out Boy, Sleater-Kinney.

Stumped? That’s okay, because it’s a trick question. None of these names have anything at all in common other than belonging to musicians that breathe oxygen, and the fact that they were all featured on the cover of Rolling Stone that somehow infiltrated my mail slot a couple of weeks ago.

Have you checked out Rolling Stone lately? It’s a pretty sad affair, a far cry from the 10″x12″ glossy broadsheet it used to be, a quarter-inch thick and packed on every page with cool stuff. It used to feel important, like a constantly updated Bible of pop culture. Now it’s more like a pamphlet, something you get for free out of a rack by the door at the pizzeria.

The next one I got had Stevie Nicks on the cover. It showed up yesterday. Nothing against Stevie Nicks — I was listening to Fleetwood Mac just the other night and “Rhiannon” stopped me dead in my tracks for like the thousandth time — but how do you go from Nicki Minaj to Stevie Nicks? Who is the audience for that? No wonder they’re resorting to sending this thing to people who didn’t ask for it.

It’s not that any of the stuff in Rolling Stone is particularly terrible; it’s no worse (or better) than any other mainstream entertainment magazine. (Okay, it’s better than FHM.) It’s just that leafing through it feels like a schizophrenic identity crisis on glossy paper. Look at that list of names again: Nicki Minaj, Marilyn Manson, Cat Stevens, Fall Out Boy, Sleater-Kinney. Is there any person on Planet Earth that’s interested in more than one of those? And imagining for the sake of argument that someone out there likes, say, Marilyn Manson and Sleater-Kinney, any one of those other bands would be a dealbreaker, right? Nobody who likes Cat Stevens likes him enough to buy a magazine with Nicki Minaj on the cover, and nobody who likes Nicki is going to read about Cat Stevens’ 30-year process of coming to terms with both his ’70s hits and his love of Islam.

I’m too young to have been a Rolling Stone reader in its ’70s heyday, when Cameron Crowe was interviewing Led Zeppelin on the way from the Starship to the Riot House. I was reading it in the ’80s and ’90s, the era of Van Halen and Guns N’ Roses and Nirvana, and though it never stopped giving every new Bob Dylan or Neil Young album four-star reviews (Under the Red Sky, This Note’s For You, Oh Mercy, masterpieces all) they at least kept the focus on the present, on whoever was big at the moment. But at some point, the generational spread got too wide. In their eagerness to represent every generation, they’ve ended up representing none of them.

At some point Rolling Stone had a choice: keep its aging audience and keep breathlessly tracking Joni Mitchell’s every move; or do what MTV did and put the old fogies in cold storage and wheel them out only for special occasions, and focus instead on whatever’s hot at the moment. for a while, it seemed like they were doing that, because ‘NSYNC was on the cover and I stopped buying it. But sometime after that they started rolling out the wrinkled old faces again, but alternating them with Bieber and One Direction and all that crap I’m so uninterested in I don’t even know what it sounds like. They didn’t make a choice, they just kept all the old stuff and chasing the new stuff, as though everyone is interested in everything. That is plainly not true; most people’s musical tastes permanently coagulate right around college age, and everything after that becomes background noise, only occasionally of any interest.

At some point in the late ’80s or early ’90s, MTV realized that its first audience, an audience of which I was a devoted part, was growing up and had better things to do than sit around all day and wait for “Hot For Teacher” to come up in the rotation again (for example). They decided to move forward, coldly, relentlessly, like a shark, and leave that audience behind before it left them. As a consolation prize, they created VH1, which stayed focused on the audience MTV was abandoning. I can’t speak for a whole generation, but I jumped on VH1 like it was the last lifeboat off the Titanic in the mid-’90s thanks to three little words: Behind The Music. Eventually of course, VH1 followed MTV whole hog into the crappy reality show game, but for a while it was a great solution: MTV fired Martha Quinn, Nina Blackwood, and the rest of the original VJs and brought in Carson Daly and TRL and VH1 turned itself into a 24/7 nostalgia machine for the people MTV left behind.

There’s nothing on MTV for me anymore, but that’s exactly why MTV is still a going concern. (VH1 is a different story.) Rolling Stone, on the other hand, feels like a 55-year-old dude in leather pants, wearing sunglasses indoors. Maybe The Pinkprint is the greatest album of the decade, but is anyone going to believe it coming from that guy?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *