“Mojo” And Its Neverending Supply Of Rock-Nerd Porn

anono | June 12, 2008 1:00 am

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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 a writer who’s contributed to many of those magazines, as well as a few others! In this installment, he looks at the new issue of Mojo:

Some years ago, Anono-Prick was walking around one day with a copy of the magazine he assesses this week. He ran into an acquaintance, who noticed the issue. “My boyfriend can’t live without Mojo,” she snorted. “It’s porn for rock nerds.”

Indeed it is. AP had been a longtime Q reader in 1994 when he noticed its new sister publication, which was emblazoned with the visage of Frank Zappa. A few feet away from where AP writes is a closet containing about 100 issues of Mojo that, despite taking up space better used for irreplaceable family heirlooms, he cannot bear parting with.

It would seem likely that Emap, the former mag’s publisher, noticed that issues of Q bearing images of classic rock acts (or however artists are thus described in the UK) on their covers sold well. So, one year before Q would get in the tank for Oasis and Blur, came Mojo, ready to go to the well for Pink Floyd, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin multiple times. (Mojo is now owned by the massive German publisher Bauer.)

But Mojo wasn’t just an enterprise based on challenging Rolling Stone for the title of “magazine that puts the Beatles on the cover for the most cynical, flimsiest of reasons whenever it needs a circulation boost or is otherwise short on ideas” (9 times since 1993, tied with Pink Floyd and not counting issues devoted to post-Fab careers). AP certainly had no problem whatsoever slapping down eight bucks a month for a magazine that, for no apparent reason other than it would probably be interesting to rock nerds, put out a Krautrock issue in 1997, the same year that brought a pre-Volkswagen campaign Nick Drake cover feature. Or would publish career retrospectives of AP’s beloved Todd Rundgren and Roxy Music. AP could forgive the mag’s fascination with Gomez, an English band that wished desperately to turn into Ry Cooder circa 1969.

Alone among British music publications, Mojo didn’t indulge as in nearly as much quasi-nativist Britpop cheerleading (although Oasis has appeared on six covers since 1994). If rock nerds on both sides of the pond were rediscovering Lee Hazlewood or Scott Walker, then Mojo was there with a 30-page retrospective. Mojo has to sell pretty well stateside, since a common practice is for a particular issue to have one cover for the UK and another for the U.S. (Last month, Paul Weller and Slash split the difference.)

And it must be said that, like an issue of Vanity Fair or Wallpaper, there’s a significant heft to Mojo; you can walk around with an issue, or leave one conspicuously around your home, and it’ll signify to others that your taste in music is superlative. A given issue will BE assembled with great care: in particular, AP has long been impressed with its design and art direction.

But roundabout 2002, AP had had it with Mojo (and with Q, too). He wasn’t sure this was because Mojo had run out of popular music history to mine, or because of his irrational disaffection for British people at the time. So he was interested to revisit the mag.

The July 2008 Mojo runs with interviews with each of the four Sex Pistols, a band with a new DVD and a series of British shows this summer to promote that signifies for English people the Britain of 1977 as vividly as the Beatles did a decade prior, and thus probably can be relied upon to sell magazines in the UK. Two of these men, John Lydon and Paul Cook, look like AP’s great aunt and grandmother, respectively, and all four do not say anything of much interest to Sylvie Simmons, a writer who’s been reliably and gushingly more fannish than her ’70s pop scribe peers.

You can count on Mojo to dutifully note the current, major label-financed doings of pop legends. So, in the front-of-book featurette “Yes Minister,” Gabe Soria (with whom AP worked at Blender) checks in with Al Green at JazzFest and discusses Lay It Down, his new, ?uestlove-produced record that will be referred to as his best since The Belle Album for the next couple of months. And Simmons speaks with Neil Diamond about his Rick Rubin-helmed Home Before Dark for the “Mojo Interview.” AP is listening to the latter as he writes, and it’s the kind of solemn, ponderous record that bears Rubin’s recent imprimatur and thus which Mojo can duly laud as a late-period masterpiece. But there are no drums on record, so AP, who has never cared for the author of the one karaoke staple (“Sweeeet… Care-Oh-Lahn, BAM BAM BAM”) that never fails in boiling his blood, don’t dig it.

But the reason AP picked this issue for consideration was the inclusion of two longform pieces that, again, have no particular product peg of the sort commonly regarded as necessary in entertainment journalism. “Jungle Boogie” details the rise of August Darnell, the Bronx English teacher who left the employ of his brother Stony’s Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band to found Kid Creole and the Coconuts. AP is familiar with Darnell’s “Endicott,” and only a few of his other tunes, so Mojo has succeeded in making him want to examine Darnell’s catalog in grater detail.

“Double Trouble” concerns the often fractious relationship between former schoolfriends Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart, which has long fascinated AP. He thinks that, after 1970, Zappa’s work in the rock music arena was pitched to chops-a-holics and devotees of excretory humor, and may have financed the “serious” music that truly interested him but which also cast him as a cynical, heartless misanthrope in the eyes of many rock critics. Beefheart, on the other hand, was all heart, all the time: his shit was “outsider music” before the term existed, and it inevitably appealed to critics sympathetic to neo-primitive authenticity or somesuch claptrap. According to Dave DiMartino’s reporting in this piece, the Captain resented what he considered Zappa’s marketing of him as a “freak,” and disliked being thrown a bone vis-a-vis a guest spot on Zappa’s Bongo Fury and 1975’s subsequent tour. Highly recommended for them interested in either artist.

Mojo, to be sure, has its easily identified and mocked traits. Of course Fleet Foxes’ debut album is going to praised to the skies in this issue’s marquee review in the Filter section, penned by Simmons: the band’s 22-year old frontman Robin Pecknold believes that “Van Dyke Parks is rad” and thus fulfills every requirement of what a Mojo staffer wants a young musician to be. And of course the reissue section’s marquee review of Dennis Wilson’s Pacific Ocean Blue (which AP really really digs), written by London’s Dreaming scribe Jon Savage, cites Gene Clark’s No Other and Neil Young’s On The Beach as “dark night of the soul”-style precedents. And of course the recent doings of hippie standbys like Gong and Hawkwind are bestowed with great import.

So yeah, Mojo has an Apollonian ideal: music of the late ’60s and the ’70s can’t be topped, only emulated. AP’s irritation with this kind of thinking is well known to regular readers of this column, but, perhaps since he’s not often confronted with the English iteration of that kind of thinking, the mag doesn’t vex him. Besides, the level of trainspottery detail common to Mojo is pitched to the obsessive and the omnivorous more than it is towards the self-satisfied survivors of the ’60s and the ’70s.

He’s not gonna start buying it again all the time. Too goddamn much $$$.