In my efforts to keep up with what the all the kids are hip to these days, I fished a couple of magazines out of the airport garbage when we were traveling last week: Esquire and Spin.
Voilà. And by “the kids” of course I mean, The Boys, and whichever of The Girls is hearty enough to wade through a longish profile of Angelina Jolie written by Tom Junod, a man apparently baffled to find that Ms. Jolie is a woman of actual character and not a 24-hour-a-day sex bomb. Esquire is all about taking half-naked women seriously. I let my subscription lapse several years ago when their admittedly annoying “we’re better than you” editorial voice slipped into the chasm of casual lad mag sexism — they also weren’t submitting to my demand that they replace their editor with David Sedaris. I have to say, though, at least they’re equal-opportunity sexists. They did a piece on Kevin Spacey a few years ago that was relentless in its speculation as to whether Spacey was gay or not. High-minded fashion lit apparently goes down a lot easier with a big helping of What’s In Your Pants?
Spin, on the other hand, is exactly the same. They would have us believe that all Amy Winehouse wants to do is smooch on her fiancé, get drunk, and humiliate the man they sent to write her profile for them. There’s more to the article, sure, but it’s a personality piece, and as such tells us one heck of a lot about the writer’s personality. Editors of music magazines want their writers to write about a musician’s personal life because writing about the music they make is, in my estimation, flat-out impossible. To quote former iconoclast Laurie Anderson, writing about music is like dancing about architecture — in the venn diagram of arts, there isn’t a lot of overlap here, because even though language is used in pop music, music itself is a language that can’t be put into words. In other words, they always get it wrong.
In conclusion I would like to say that magazines are full of crap, but they sure do have a lot of pretty pictures of half-undressed ladies in them. The end.
