“Blender”‘s Purr Seems A Bit Muted These Days

Two weeks ago, word came down that Kent Brownridge was stepping down from his daily duties as chairman/CEO at Alpha Media Group. Alpha is owned by the Quadrangle Group, a private equity consortium that had taken on the American magazines previously owned by Felix Dennis, a British publishing magnate. Brownridge had previously spent 30 years as Wenner Media’s general manager, but was pushed out two years ago by his boss.

During his year at the helm of Alpha Media Group, Brownridge cut costs: he decided that Stuff, an even more boorish spin-off of Maxim, was redundant and best folded into the main mag. But evidently, his partners believed that they should be seeing greater profits in a shorter amount of time.

At the time, Brownridge told WWD‘s Stephanie Smith that he hadn’t been spending enough time with his new wife. But on Wednesday, Brownridge said he will now become the general manager of OK!, an American iteration of the hugely popular British publication and competitor of Us Weekly, a Wenner Media property that Brownridge supervised closely. In the extremely unlikely event that Mr. Brownridge will read this post, Anono-Prick would like to invite him to submit a comment as to what changed in the past two weeks. Did his wife tell him, “no thanks, honey, go ahead and run a magazine,” or was his statement to Smith a face-saving measure?

In any case, if Brownridge’s fellow investors expected greater profit margins from Maxim and Blender within a year of taking them on, it seems likely that they do not understand the magazine business. It may also have been that Quadrangle Group believed that they were purchasing the Dennis Publishing of 1999-2002, a company that virtually monopolized the meager attention spans of every backwards-baseball cap wearer who was too timid or too stupid to secure real pornography. But the unlimited ability to access content for free and/or with greater convenience is what faces every sector of the publishing diaspora, and with every passing nanosecond since that time, men have found it easier to use the Device You Are Currently Gazing At to head down the same path David Duchovny has of late.

Anono-Prick cannot help but wonder what Blender Editor-in-Chief Joe Levy makes of Brownridge’s exit. The two had to have had a fairly good relationship while both worked at Rolling Stone, since Brownridge hired Levy away from a job that he held for 11 years.

For the cover of its October issue, Blender turns to the Pussycat Dolls, five women who have parlayed the performance tropes of strippers into international stardom. The story, “Real Dolls,” is written by Deborah Schoeneman, a writer who has worked for Page Six and has since specialized in chronicling the doings of various fabulous people. (She also dated a good friend of AP’s for a very short time; AP only spoke to her twice.) Schoeneman follows the Dolls around Los Angeles for a bit: she begins with a party in Beverly Hills that finds a Russian banker paying for his trophy wife to join the Dolls for the evening, and otherwise does her best to make the expensive drudgery of the members’ working lives seem interesting.

Schoeneman asks Alpha Doll Nicole Scherzinger about the aborted launch of her solo album Her Name Is Nicole, upon which Blender‘s cover story 11 months ago was pegged. “I decided to hold off,” she punts. “I didn’t want to lose the momentum of the PCD. That train’s been moving so fast.” In last year’s story, however, Scherzinger stressed that the record was her one shot, and that she should not miss her chance to blow, and that this opportunity comes once in a lifetime. Or, alternately, “I need total focus, total concentration, total centering, because this album is everything I’ve been working for my whole life. You get one chance, and this is my chance.”

While “Real Dolls” is a pretty short story, the remainder of what used to be understood as the “feature well” is protracted. “The Geek Squad” is a photo essay concerning the participants in Nerdapalooza, which was held in Orlando, Fla., in July. Associate editor Mark Yarm’s text commences with one of AP’s last favorite magazine-writing tropes: he compares the goings on there to “the set of a Fellini film–if Fellini had been a ’80s baby weaned on Nintendo NES, Star Wars and superhero comic books.”

And for the first time in Editor-in-Chief Joe Levy’s nine-month tenure, Blender sallies forth a list! The list’s bailiwick? “The 33 Most Overrated People, Places, Trends and other Junk in Rock.” From the premise (damning this or that as “overrated” is an ancient magazine tactic) to its execution (complaining about “Freebird” and Timbaland isn’t novel), the piece doesn’t stand up to the kind of amused assemblages that the mag made its name on. But of course, the list has already has been picked up all over the place for the temerity to suggest that Tupac’s reputation is inflated (AP agrees), and a nice lil brushfire has resulted. Which justifies the entire exercise, AP supposes.

The rest of the mag is similarly protracted. The component of the Guide devoted to new albums is down to six pages; the customary two pages devoted to film reviews is down to one page and one review. Now, a shrinking ad market is simply the hand that Levy has been dealt, but almost every aspect of this issue of Blender lacks the confidence that marked it before his tenure.

When Levy took over in January, he had two or three months to figure out what worked and what didn’t. It seems that, since he has kept virtually every editorial gimmick that Blender had developed in its seven-year lifetime, he likes Blender the way it was. His single formal addition is his pal Rob Sheffield’s Station to Station column, which this month examines Baltimore’s DIY scene, which is the kind of subject Sheffield should tackle all the time, instead of waxing incoherent about reality TV or his ’80s faves.

The one deviation from “the way Blender has been” is the animating imprimatur of his predecessor, Craig Marks, who, as second in command to Andy Pemberton from 2001 to 2004 and then as the boss until early this year, turned the mag from a American version of Q into the liveliest music rag in the US.

(Here, AP should say that he worked under Marks at Blender in 2002-2003 under the alias “Rob Kemp”; I did not befriend Marks at the time and have had no contact with him for five years. My admiration for what he accomplished, and his great talent and intellect are untainted by anything resembling a personal relationship. I’ve only spoken to Levy a few times and never had a significant professional interaction with him.)

It seems like Levy is stuck. Above, his paymasters look over his shoulder. To his left, he sees the departure of a boss he got along with. To his right, his intended readership is consumed with pictures of naked breasts they did not pay for. And below is the legacy of his predecessor, the guy who came up with the tricks that now lack much in the way of spark.