“Vibe” Goes The Tabloid Route

Once again, we present Rock-Critically Correct, a feature in which the most recent issues of Rolling Stone, Blender, Vibe, and Spin are given a once-over by an anonymous writer who’s contributed to several of those titles–or maybe even all of them! After the click-through, a look at the new issue of Vibe:

And so, Vibe is the first of the four magazines assessed regularly in this space to hit the stands with its year-end roundup. Your Correspondent finds himself particularly grateful to the magazine’s editorial staff and their colleagues in the ad department for the simple fact that it took him less than an hour to read the entire January 2008 issue.

Which is to say that, at 96 pages, it is not a taxing read. Perhaps ad sales have declined; two prior issues topped out at 144 pages. It’s possible that it was determined that lemons be turned to lemonade, and thus for its year-end “Tabloid Issue,” Vibe would imitate a class of magazines that still exudes boundless energy–despite chronically anemic ad quotients in a flagging marketplace.

YC speaks of Wenner Media’s Us Weekly, American Media’s Star, and Bauer Publications’ Life and Style Weekly. It is very seldom that a few days go by without YC seeing a gal or or three reading Us Weekly on the subway, or during the summer, on the beach. A female friend of YC’s once described the appeal of the genre: “They’re like going to a huge party. ‘Hey, what’s up? How have you been? Oh, wait a second, I have to go say hello to someone… My gawd, I haven’t seen you in such a long time, but hold on, I have to get a drink,’ etc., etc.”

What she described is the hectic design, clashing color schemes and nanite-proportioned attention span of Us Weekly and its ilk. One page features photographs of actresses in casually assembled street clothes at a Starbucks, the next depicts actresses in gowns that an assortment of bitchy “experts” find alternately scrumptious or wanting, the next after that encompasses a breathlessly reported story regarding the suspicious bump in another actress’ midsection… you know the drill.

So, two months after Halloween, Vibe dresses up as Us Weekly. The dominant cover image is a candid shot of Kanye West, and it’s abutted on the spine by candids of Jay-Z and Beyoncé, Rihanna, and T.I. Just like Us!

In the front-of-book V-Mix section, Rihanna’s sartorial progress in ’07 is lauded, while in “Dope or Nope,” Ashanti and Beyoncé’s frocks for the MTV Video Music Awards are lamented. “So You Think You Can Dance” is notable more for the Perez Hilton-style toddler-scrawl adorning its photos than for the photos themselves, which include a shot of Akon’s ill-fated onstage encounter with a 14-year-old preacher’s daughter and the “MC Rove” incident. Based on the design of these pages, it could be construed that several of Vibe‘s designers are making a naked ploy for jobs at the publishers mentioned above: Each looks just like Us!

What passes for the feature well is dubbed “Flashing Lights.” Kanye West, Jay-Z, and 50 Cent are each allotted two pages in which the conventional narratives of their doings in 2007 are recounted: West’s Graduation prevailed over 50’s Curtis and he said arrogant things; Jay’s American Gangster recaptured artistic capital lost with last year’s Kingdom Come; 50 hasn’t yet retired despite his promise to do so if West outsold him, but he is still rich as Croesus. Then the rivalry between Beyoncé and Rihanna (both deny it exists) is recounted; the musical and extralegal activities of T.I. and Lil Wayne are reprised; a recap of l’affaire Imus, the congressional hip-hop hearings, and the Jena 6 protests comprises a rundown of how hip-hop played out in the larger culture; and a kaleidoscopic photo assemblage matches celebrity and street couture trends with each letter of the alphabet. Just like Us! Also, none of the above articles are bylined.

The review section is the only one in the issue not to be Us-ified: music editor Jon Caramanica’s essay “The Changing of the Guard” reveals to some of the magazine’s less attentive readers that “hey, albums ain’t the be all/end all of the music industry,” which may go some distance in explaining why Vibe declines to present a list of the year’s best albums; Soulja Boy’s “Crank That” is picked as the best dance of the year; Hoffa of OnSmash.com picks UGK and Outkast’s “Int’l Player’s Anthem” as 2007’s best viral video; and a bunch of writers pick the best records from artists who passed this year. (Your Idolator curators have already noted Vibe‘s top singles of 2007.)

What to make of this? YC kinda likes that Vibe foregoes the often windy “what did it all mean” tack common to other music mags this time of year and seems to be having fun with this conceit. Indeed, for a staff used to a leisurely monthly schedule, taking the events of a year and summing them up Us-style is probably a cakewalk–certainly more so for them than for the staffs of Us and Star, who evidently must sweat over how to address each week’s celebrity minutiae and employ a microbiologist’s focus to the presentation of photos and captions 52 times a year.

At the same time, it seems like it would be best for a year-end issue to emphasize what a given magazine, y’know, is: maybe the summer or Halloween would have been better for a frothy little exercise such as this. What does it say for the staff’s confidence in its brand that Vibe concludes the year by becoming just like Us?