Blender: One Year Later

Let the carnage begin!

2. No.

3. Funny like Vice (it is a Maxim spinoff).

4. Creem magazine to thread. The Source also.

5. See FlyLife, Tricia Romano, Village Voice, this week. See also: newsstand sales.

6. Writing for Blender is no different than writing for Rolling Stone or Spin, better than writing for Alternative Press, CMJ, or Magnet, much, much, much better than writing for Pitchfork or Penthouse.

7. No. Again, see newsstand sales.

8. No. Blender does not publish Peter Travers. Rolling Stone will not steal this idea.

9. Alan Light to thread. In other words no. Thank God.

10. No. Blender doesn't steal ideas from Rolling Stone and Spin.

Re the 500 albums list -- wasn't it weird that the list omitted the Flaming Lips? Especially b/c Wayne Coyne has a blurb about the Wizard of Ox.

Are you sure the list omitted the Lips? I could swear that the Soft Bulletin made it.

2. If they took the tits off the cover would the mag be more legit?
Um, no. The writing needs a bit of work.

3. Is this mag funny like Vice or funny like The Nose or not funny?
Of the phony captions on all the pictures: 60% are lame, 40% are apt and close to witty. Which isn't a high as those in Q (which seems to be 40% lame, 55% witty and 5% you-have-to-be-a-Brit-to-get-the-obscure-pop-culture-reference). The mini-articles aren't as agressively and painfully lame as those in Spin (or those in Q on a bad day), but they sometimes inspire flinching in pain.

4. Can a magazine dwell in sophomoric humor while retaining credible criticism of popular music?
Not sure. At what point does Lester Bangs/Chuck Eddy breeziness devolve into Mad Magazine piffle?

5. Can SPIN dwell in NY-centric humor while retaining a modicum of superiority over Blender?
As hopelessly broken as Blender is, it is *still* better than Spin by leaps and bounds.

6. If you write for Blender are you whoring yourself, raising the level of discourse, or resigning to the fact that it pays well?
A well-paid whore who is trying to raise the level of discourse only to have their peice "punched up" by the editors into something worse than average.

7. Does Blender care that Rolling Stone out-porned them with Xtina?
The question should be: does ANYBODY care what Rolling Stone does or says anymore?

8. Will Rolling Stone steal every good idea that Blender has a la FHM stealing every good idea that Maxim had? ("good" being relative here.)
yep, as desperately as a drowning man.

9a. If Blender is truly the wretched, lowest common denominator trolling book that many of my snobber friends say it is...?
(Tentatively) Nnnnnnnno....
But it needs work.

9b. ...is there hope for a good, general interest music magazine in the US? Or is pop culture the problem?
There always is, it just hasn't happened yet. As for pop culture...isn't pop culture ALWAYS the problem?

10. Will a fashion feature show up in Blender and out it as the whoring creature it is?
I'm sure that already happened with Issue 1.

I combed it pretty thoroughly & didn't see it.

Oh, and it ends up that all of the parts of Blender that I like are nicked from Trouser Press. Which makes sense, I guess?

Johnny Walker Black doesn't get enough love for his Best Songs Ever column.

Given that, I don't care what's in the rest of the magazine, be it "thoughtful insightful essays" or internet trolls given 40 pages every month to ramble like Andy Rooney. A year later, five years later, ten years later, I'm not going to give a damn whether it was Christina's tits or Gonzo's travelogue in my mailbox, but I'll still have the CDs I bought.

-- EIC Craig Marks, being bestowed with the helm last September.

I should be so lucky if they get back to me.

-- Forksclovetofu (forksclovetof...), July 13th, 2005.

haha the one thing about Blender I always remember is the singles or "download this" or whatever column that has little cartoon icons next to each song and one of them is an ass in a thong and the icon key says it means "CRUNKY".