DISCUSS WHY SPIN MAG FAILS

When I first started getting heavily into music, there was Stone, and it was already firmly establishment at that point, and the chances of getting into something truly edgy was next to nil. Thus I trudged around thinking that liking Journey and Billy Joel was just about the height of cool. When Spin came along there was the sudden realization that there was more out there. Looking back at it, Spin was only a little bit edgier than Stone, but it sure SEEMED like a revelation at the time...you couldn't find some (...SOME) of these bands in a small town on the prairies, so it seemed really dangerous. So Spin was a gateway to other things. And it still is. It's like Tiger Beat for a slightly older crowd. I can't stand to read Spin any more not because it necessarily sucks, but because it's not really aimed at me any more.

The major problem being, while it did pop certains musics from the "underground" into a more specific light, it also brought along it's agenda...which is corporate funboy dogma.

Like any publication which is trying to essentially out-hip itself, it often bites it's own ass, on numberous occasions.

The other question begged by this thread is - what could a mass- market US music mag do to be better than Spin?

anyway the problem with spin is that it has no identity at the moment because the notion that propelled it to success doesn't really mean much right now - hence their constant placement of dead people on the cover.

Yes, I've wondered if Spin was trying out the idea of mutating into a US Mojo? There are a lot of retro articles and best-ofs. I hate best- ofs as a rule, and while retro articles can be done well they're not terribly interesting to me if they're going over ground that's pretty well known already.

I've not seen the new Spin, but the fact they've put Jimmy Fallon on the cover makes me wonder if they're wandering into Rolling Stone territory, trying to blend basic entertainment/showbiz stories with music stories.

I liked to read Spin a lot in the late 80's/early 90's -- there were some good writers and they tended to cover a lot of artists a kid like me with no access to fanzines, etc. wouldn't have heard about otherwise.

Don't forget Byron Coley wrote a column for them, too... in fact, he's the one that wrote about the former two.

Must admit I like it alot because it features relatively obscure Canadian artists.

Magnet's focus on indie guitar rock is so rigid, it's hard to imagine them "selling out" like SPIN or Rolling Stone. I don't think they're capable of running articles about Destiny's Child, Jimmy Fallon or drug trends - they wouldn't know how if their publishing life depended on it. When the fateful day comes when nobody wants to read about Superchunk anymore, they'll simply have to shut their doors.

Superchunk still exists?

I heart the impulses behind both these questions.

I vote for Merge

Besides they got the field of magnets and their 69 different love songs.... Y'all.

oh if only they DID!

Magnet only has a couple of employees, they are hanging on by a thread and it's hurt the quality a bit, I'd say. They do what they do well enough, but the bulk of the mag is taken up by those reviews and, like everyone else is saying, those are wishy-washy and useless to the reader, esp, with fresh writing on the Interweb. (I assume this tit-for-tat -- we'll review everything and not distress potential advertisors -- is its lifeblood.) Come to think of it, the rest of the copy is too PR-driven, too, but that's not its fault by a long shot, the indie PR has a bit of a stranglehold on print mags. More timeless writing and the end of x-has-a-new-album-out features would be refreshing.

The other problem is that it did not made the leap away from indie guitar rock, while most of the "indie community" (as best described by Nitush) has, in a way. You'll get your post-rock and alt.country, but there has been no attempt to cover any non-guitar based indie-friendly music. It could be a 'zine/The Wire blend, as unsavorable as that sounds to many, but I'd guess there is no ad revenue from bands/labels championed in The Wire.

And you can set your calendar to its cover star (If it's May, it must be Guided by Voices!). The other cover stars in a given year are five of: Sleater-Kinney, Superchunk, Wilco, Malkmus, some elder inconoclast (Waits, Wilson, Eno or Reed in their dreams), Elliot Smith, Built to Spill, Mercury Rev, or the Flaming Lips. Whichever has a new album to promote.

I should mention that Fred Mills writing is interesting. Sometimes directly onto what Im thinking and othertimes miles away. Its a purely personal issue but one that tend to gets me to read his reviews when I do stumble into a Chapters.

These days, most of my rock-crit reading comes from reading this board and perusing alt-weeklies on-line, though I've lately developed a habit (which I believe someone else on this thread mentioned) of flipping through review sections of magazines to see what's being reviewed without actually reading the reviews (hello, Blender).

I guess of the mainstream mags I'd still choose Spin, though I let my subscription run out a while back. Their review section is less namby-pamby than Stone or Blender, and they've got some writers there who I enjoy and/or respect (Chuck Klosterman, all those City Pages alums). But it sure isn't my ideal -- coverage too limited, tone too desperately hip, all those pictures of Sia Michel hanging out with the Strokes. I can't get with the indie/alt-rock specialty mags like Magnet or CMJ (yeah, I know Spin and Puncture fit that description too, but whatever) or British mags.

To attempt to take Keith's question seriously: I'd want coverage that was general and wide-ranging rather than genre or scene specific, yet not as conservative or wishy-washy as something like Blender. I'd want it to be a music magazine and not a generational or subcultural lifestyle journal masquerading as a music magazine. I'd like lots of reviews and room for plenty of long-form criticism and less interview/profile pieces. I'd also like it to be more responsive to readers and driven by the sensibilites of its writers and editors than driven by the wants and needs of publicists and labels, but now we're really getting utopian.

Basically what I'd want is a forum for lots of good writers with lots of freedom writing about lots of music and not something geared towards a specific subculture or dedicated to prescibing a code of cool. Actually, if there were a music-magazine equivalent of Film Comment I'd be pleased as punch.

Belated data reports, amethyst amphetamines, Dynamite MC, we were promised the beginning of the world and we were getting it, Madd Anju, sore thighs, dilletantes, and fanatics, roasty throats, Medium-Dry Cava, no Thomas Kuhn, people who rewind tapes by reversing them and pressing fast forward, Associates, May 13th, music, blisters, wind grimaces, campaign for the change of the slant on italics, track 8 of the CD you are listening to now, Frank Kogan, illustration, theses of cute...

Frank?

I don't know what they are like now but when they started that was one of the reasons why I could not stand reading that rag. Little Bob was trying a bit too hard to be the number one hipster that he lost all sight of good reporting and having a critical view on things.

also "Sounds" magazine in the 80s - always had a writers listening list, this was always good for gaging what the writers were into, therefore you could get a grasp which writers were on a similar wavelength.

So let's say that my dream magazine reads like those performers sound, but in doing so partakes of the analogic and analytic and incendiary and story-telling capacities of text.

(I actually wrote a great piece a couple years back about why this wasn't happening, but no one would pay me for it. This is not a dig at you at all, Keith, since there are reasons why no one would pay me for it. But those reasons might explain why magazines like Blender and Stone and Spin fundamentally suck.)

Anyway I understand the points you bring up, Frank. (And I went back and read the piece you mention. It’d be cool if you’d bring some of the relevant ideas up here--they're good ones--so everyone can play.) But rather than address them I thought I’d fly off on a tangent.

Why do we (some of us) like corporate pop (some of it) but not corporate rockmags? It seems like a common complaint throughout this thread is that the voices of writers are not coming through on the page. So, why do we assume the autonomy of the writer to be an unquestionable Good? I don't expect to hear Avril Lavigne’s authentic self in “Complicated” or a true expression of 50 Cent’s worldview in “In Da Club” but I still dig the songs.

A suggested analogy--
writer: editor
singer: producer

So I like the idea of a pop song, where a performer is squeezed into a certain format by a writer and producer for my pleasure. But as a writer, I am prickly and resistant to being edited into a pop format like, say, a Blender review. I know there are obvious differences, but I just wanted to throw this out there as a point to bat around. I'd argue that someone like Sheffield (at his best) works within and expands the corporate blurb form as well as someone like Eminem does the corporate rap form.

Of course, pop music is a livelier creative world than pop magazines. There is no editorial equivalent of Timbaland at the glossies. (Or is there?) And why is that? Maybe because there’s less of a discerning mass audience to demand something more than what they’re given than there is with regards to music. Which brings us back to Matos: No one reads music magazines.

SPIN (like Rolling Stone before it) has always been a lifestyle magazine with a music focus. Blender, at least to a minor degree, is as well. But as Matos alluded to, the lifestyle demo is constantly in flux. Maybe the explanation for SPIN's most successful years--the Lolla years--is that the demo finally found SPIN as opposed to the other way around.

Watching SPIN flounder over the past 3-5 issues has been particularly pathetic. The editorial ideas have been astoundingly borrowed and lifeless, and if this is searching for an identity then the magazine is not only void of soul but completely ignorant of its origins. Everything is going wrong at once. This isn't the "Blenderization" of the music magazine genre as so many have alluded to--let's face it, Blender fashioned a music rag out of a laddie read--it's the face of panic by a bunch of weak-willed editors in a shitty advertising environment.

I for one loved the snarky, holier than thou, New York attitude that oozed from SPIN prior to about 1993. The hype was credible, and the backhanded compliments to shit like Mellencamp always showed a little heart. And judging by the gangs of sarcastic talking heads that ruminate on the Internet in places like this, there's still a demand for a ballsy read like the old SPIN. But it's too late now--while SPIN has sat around trying to figure out what it wants to be, the key demo has given up waiting and gone to their computers instead. I'm a charter subscriber to SPIN but this may be my last year.

Rob Sheffield was bad with his Pop Eye column in Rolling Stone. He's been pretty good everywhere else.

Which explains this:

http://www.spin.com/new/images/magazine/futurama_may_cvr.jpg

And now that I think about it, "teensploitation" actually was a phenomenon in 1999. The Futurama cover was baffling insofar as the point seemed to be, "This show is going to revolutionize television!" -- even though the cover came out before the show even aired (and so reeked of PR), and nobody else was falling all over the show in such a way.

Then:

Rolling Stone, April 21, 1988:
On the cover: "David Byrne: The Rolling Stone Interview"
Flagged on the cover: "Mideast Madness: P.J. O'Rourke on the West Bank"
"Can Tiffany Survive Her Success?"
"Crossroads: Eric Clapton's Greatest Work"
"The Rolling Stone Fashion Collection"
Reviews: Clapton, T Bone Burnett, Joni Mitchell, The Church, The Godfathers, Nick Lowe, 3, Wild Seeds.

Spin, April 1988
On the cover: Latin Hip Hop: The Cover Girls, Noel, and America's Newest Dance Scene [photo of Sa-Fire]
Flagged on the cover: "Talking Heads: Talk, Talk, Talk"
"Special 3rd Anniversary Issue"
"Exclusive: William Burroughs' Unpublished Interview with Patti Smith"
"Megadeth"
"Echo and the Bunnymen"
"L.A. Guns"
"Legs McNeil's Miami"
"Sisters of Mercy"
"The Lost Issue of Spin"
"AIDS: Why Are Researchers Ignoring Other Causes of Immune Deficiency?"
Reviews: Live Skull, The Communards, John Zorn, Foreigner, Firehose, Spoonie Gee, Django Reinhardt, Will Sexton, Branford Marsalis, The Young Rascals, E*I*E*I*O, James Taylor, Keith Jarrett, Ofra Haza [not counting shorter reviews, John Leland's singles column, or Byron Coley's Underground column].

Now:

Rolling Stone May 29. 2003
On the cover: "Ashton Kutcher: Prankster of Love; The Newly Single 'Punk'd' Star on the Nonstop Party He Calls Life"
Flagged on the cover: "Eddie Vedder Exclusive! His First RS Interview in Ten Years"
"All-Girl Smackdown: Inside the World of Pro Catfighting"
"Eminem Vs. Ja Rule: An Underground Rap War Heats Up"
Reviews: American Idol, Deftones, Caitlin Cary, The Blood Brothers, Boz Scaggs, Prince Paul, Wilco, Alkaline Trio, Live, Richard Thompson, Death in Vegas, Marilyn Manson, Elefant, Rooney, Jesse Harris and the Ferdinandos, the Detroit Cobras, the Isley Brothers, the Thorns. [Not counting short reviews, "Buy These Now," compilations, "Update," "Also Released," reissues, or David Fricke's recommendations.]

Spin, June, 2003
On the cover: "75 Sleazy Moments in Rock" [picture of Sid and Nancy] "Secret Sex Tapes! Stripper Fights! Dirty Doctors! Voodoo Curses! Shocking Tales On: Fred Durst, Courtney Love, Christina Aguilera, Michael Jackson, 50 Cent, Sum 41, and the Craziest Marilyn Manson Interview Ever"
Flagged on the cover: "Zwan: Billy Corgan Tells All"
"Rivers Cuomo: We Read His Diary!"
"Lil' Kim Gets Nasty"
"Take the Red Pill! The Matrix Returns"
Reviews: Madonna, Blur, Alkaline Trio, The Black Keys, the Gossip, Prince Paul, the Majesticons, Turbonegro [Not counting reissues, short reviews, "Playlist," "Breakdown"

I mean.. "Can Tiffany Survive Her Success?"!!!!

Not with a review of the 3 album it doesn't.

No lovin' for the semicolon; what the hell?

does anybody still read spin (or rolling stone) anymore?

Does it still come out?

I think I saw a copy of Spin in a store while I was waiting for a prescription a few months ago. I don't think I have actually opened a copy in 8-10 years.

i still dig rolling stone from time to time tbh -- i think it gets a bad rap because of its covers & reviews section, but who listens to their reviews anymore & covers is all business anyway. they very often run good to great political or general interest features, and they're about the only mag left that gives pop artists the journalistic treatment that pop artists were given back when pop really mattered. ie the lady gaga cover.

SPIN on the other hand is almost a complete mess

Spin's review section seems better or at least more interesting (when I glance at it in the grocery store sometimes)

matt tabbi is cool

For just under a year, I subscribed to RECORD magazine, until it went under in '85. It was pretty good, sort of like a more mainstream version of Option, kind of like what Paste feels like today but was fresher back then. A new magazine called SPIN took over the subscriptions, so I got the first several months. I didn't like it as much and didn't re-subscribe. That was the magazine at it's best. It's had some good issues now and then, but it seems to always fail.

Currently, it seems to be trying to do the same thing as Rolling Stone, but not as well. I actually subscribe to RS because it's cheap, the tabloid parts are even entertaining, and the political articles are still good.

I think SPIN would do well to tap into the American version of the Uncut/MOJO market. But rather than freeze time in the features section in the 60s-70s, do it for the 80s-90s. Continue to cover new music like the others do, but use their resources to write some deeper articles for those in their 30s-40s.

matt taibbi is super cool. loved his football pieces