Books: Rolling Stone 1,000 Covers

nobody@vox.com(Jason) — Sat, 06 Jan 2007 18:26:06 -0800

Rolling Stone 1,000 Covers: A History of the Most Influential Magazine in Pop Culture

Rolling Stone

Rolling Stone 1,000 Covers: A History of the Most Influential Magazine in Pop Culture by Rolling Stone (2006, Abrams). I've masturbated to a Rolling Stone Magazine. RS 526 from May 19th, 1988. Lisa Bonet is on the cover of "The HOT Issue" barely clothed. Her sheer white shirt or dress or whatever it was was strategically placed all to put my 13-year-old mind on fire. There was a full nude to accompany the story about her (not that I read the story) and, yeah, I totally indulged my growing sexuality with that one.

That said, Rolling Stone hasn't been my pop culture magazine of record throughout my life. Going through all 1,000 covers featured in the book there are distinctive covers I remember and periods of time when I know I was regularly buying it (there are several 4-6 month patches in the early nineties -- my high school years -- when I must have been stopping by Waldenbooks in the Fashion Square Mall or the newsstand on Victory and Van Nuys to pick up every issue or every other issue) but in my formative music years of the nineties, I was up on Vibe and URB and occasionally The Source. Currently, I look to The Fader and Wax Poetics and online to take the pulse of pop culture.

I imagine I would have loved the magazine in the late 60s to early 80s, though. There's an energy to the covers they produced and the people and sounds they wrote about that isn't duplicated often currently. This collection seems to notice this as well. Broken down by decade, the 60s, of which the magazine was only in publication for 3 years, takes the longest to get through. Jann Wenner's introduction, a love letter to his creation that sends you searching through the book to find the iconic covers he notes, gives a great primer to the mag and what they were trying to do creatively and how the best covers, most in the early years when Annie Liebovitz was behind the camera, came about.

After the deaths of John Lennon and John Belushi in the early 80s and as the magazine gets more glossy and polished and as their pop culture subjects become increasingly less like people and more like commodities, there are fewer articles they publish that matter and fewer covers that can be considered inspired. The 90s, in particular, are so vapid that it is only when Clinton or anything associated with Kurt Cobain that the icons they are creating or following seem relavent. There are something like 4 or 5 seinfeld covers over the decade. Is that really necessary?

When Rolling Stone is good, though, it is really good. I'm not sure another publication eulogizes better. They have also done some pretty great investigative journalism over the years and pulled some inciteful quotes from people long before we knew how spot on they were. I was struck by this quote from Jon Stewart on the significance of the Clinton/Lewinsky Sex Scandal (RS 799, 11.12.98):

In the end, something really terrible is going to happen. Truly catastrophic, like some guy is going to get anthrax in a bottle and put it in our soft drinks or something. We will look back on these days with the kind of nostalgia that people have when they talk about nickel movies. We'll look back and go, "Oh, remember the days when all we worried about was the president blowing his load on someone's dress?"

Hmmm. Whether it's my president or my 7th grade sex symbol, Rolling Stone is best when it's about getting off.

Recommended.

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Best Music of '06: Girls Rock

nobody@vox.com(Jason) — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 09:42:15 -0800

My Best of '06 answer in two parts. This is the second in a series of extended entries about those parts.

Rabbit Fur Coat

Jenny Lewis with The Watson Twins

"I didn't intend to write a bunch of songs about God," she says. "I was surprised when I had all of the songs completed and there were so many God references throughout. I guess that's what happens when you're about to turn 30... I think being broken-hearted is not the only thing you want to sing about."

- Jenny Lewis Questioning God on 'Rabbit Fur Coat', All Things Considered, 02.22.06

Standing in the Way of Control

Gossip

Gossip's third album was partly produced by Fugazi's Guy Picciotto at the studio (Seattle's Bear Creek) where Lionel Richie recorded "Dancing on the Ceiling," which is all you really need to know about the band's new direction. Brace Paine's dirty guitar lines grind in the Olympia, Washington, tradition, and the addition of drumming powerhouse Hannah Blilie means the trio's unvarnished blues punk now strides confidently onto the disco tiles. The change suits Beth Ditto's Poly Styrene-meets-Patti LaBelle belting just fine, especially when the martial grind of "Keeping You Alive" explodes into a floor-filling chorus.

- Review by Peter Relic, Rolling Stone, 02.06.06

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Books: Rolling Stone 1,000 Covers

Best Music of '06: Girls Rock