Sizing Up The Slimmed-Down “Rolling Stone”

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 Rolling Stone:

And so, the reformatted Rolling Stone has hit the newsstands. The mag’s publicist did their job properly, since the announcement of this transformation was dutifully picked up by another hallowed media brand that adjusted the dimensions of its physical product recently. Your Boy would also reckon that many boomer newspaper editors call for reporting on adjustments taking effect in the mag simply because of its totemic significance to the real greatest generation.

The Oct. 30 issue is the first to shrink from 10 by 11 3/4 inches to 8 by 11 inches—or, according to an “Editor’s Note” from Editor and Publisher Jann S. Wenner, “the dimensions of the classic magazine,” by which YB thinks he means “standard.” The mag will also add more pages, and is perfect-bound instead of stapled together. Mr. Wenner could have additionally noted that retailers will likely prefer that RS takes up as much space on their respective shelves as most magazines with which it competes. That the mag was so much larger that it stood out at the newsstand was a source of pride for Wenner… but no longer.

But what this adjustment really does is provide Mr. Wenner multiple opportunities to hit his favorite beats. The new format represents “change,” which, rather than a quality that Rolling Stone has mistrusted when it has occurred in culture after about 1975, is now to be championed, since it’s the linchpin of the message of the man adorning the cover of this issue. After all, Bob Dylan said “he not busy being born is busy dying,” a phrase Mr. Wenner quotes in the note, alongside a Lovin’ Spoonful reference he first paraphrased in the first issue of RS 41 years ago (“we believe in the magic of rock & roll and the magic can set you free”) and a note that Barack Obama has appeared on the cover three times in seven months, “a record equaled only by John Lennon.”

Mr. Wenner references Dylan, Lennon, and the words of John Sebastian as compulsively as the likes of Sarah Palin cite Biblical scripture: their verities are fixed, eternal, and not subject to flights of fancy. But YB doubts that Sen. Obama, should he not become POTUS, will join such august company. He’ll likely be consigned to the same purgatory to which RS has dispatched former Wenner crushes as Howard Dean and John Kerry.

While he admits that it’s a little disconcerting to see Rolling Stone’s visual templates slotted into a smaller package, it makes no difference to YB what physical format the magazine happens to adopt. For whenever he buys a particular issue so that he can write this column, he is somewhat anxious that someone he knows will spot him with such a bourgeois artifact. Why, the other day YB was slightly ashamed that the guy in front of him at the store purchasing a New York Review of Books might notice his choice and thus think him a bit of a cretin.

YB’s pitiable insecurity is premised on commonly held—not to mention correct—views that Rolling Stone concluded long ago that music produced during the heyday of Dylan and Lennon is the gold standard and that current popular music merits attention mostly because of long-standing ties to major labels with which the mag has been entangled for its entire history, as well as a propensity to chase a quick buck with covers awarded to the likes of Lindsay Lohan. Frequent readers of RCC can see that this tendency has been kicked around in this space consistently for the past 19 months.

But here’s the thing. Six years ago YB, using the nom de plume “Rob Kemp,” worked at Dennis Publishing’s Blender, a magazine that scared the wits out of Wenner Media. At the time, Blender’s rapid gains in circulation succeeded in prompting Rolling Stone to, ahem, “change.” Since Blender’s editor was English and was importing Fleet Street values to American magazines so as to attract increasingly distracted young men, RS needed an English executive editor.

So Ed Needham, a Briton who had worked at Maxim competitor FHM, was hired that year. Someone who worked at RS at the time described to me how Needham had declared in a staff meeting that RS was “at war” with Blender. Effective immediately, staffers were to punch up their captions, include more pictures of generously endowed women–as well as charticles, sidebars and other “points of entry”–and, most controversially, shorten all articles and scale back long-form investigative reporting. And boy-o-boy, did the “times they are a-changin'” crowd come out swinging, bemoaning the mag’s lost soul with invective that makes the current hubbub seem as picayune as it is.

Since contempt toward Rolling Stone was the accepted posture at Blender, this turn of events greatly satisfied some of my superiors. One of them, however, said that his “heart sank” when he heard that longer articles on more substantive topics than, say, the wolverines living Jessica Simpson’s t-shirt would be poleaxed.

The Blender-ing of Rolling Stone did not last very long. Needham left in 2004, and Wenner reinstalled gravitas quickly thereafter. His interest in post-James Taylor popular culture being nil, Wenner has since left his other main magazine US Weekly alone. But the Bush era has been one of the periods when he identifies deeply with Rolling Stone; letting the mag exclusively celebrate famous people fecklessly and cover modern music listlessly during the past four years was not an option.

This is all a roundabout way to say that the music content of this issue—not to mention most issues—is not the point. Long form articles advocating Wenner’s views are the point: this issue’s cover story, “Obama’s Moment,” by executive editor Eric Bates, is a more wide-ranging and substantive interview than a preceding piece in July, authored by his boss, who turns into a star-struck stenographer when faced with one of his many crushes. And as much as YB finds Matt Taibbi’s scorn for non-Eastern elites troubling, his “Death of a Red State,” which details Colorado’s changing electorate, is vividly reported. And RS gives 12 pages to “The Lost Years & Last Days of David Foster Wallace” by David Lipsky, a worthy requiem. (YB would cite more, but he realizes that Idolator readers get bored when he doles out compliments.)

Ultimately, YB’s sociopolitical views dovetail with the majority of Mr. Wenner’s. But it’s not just that he agrees with the aims of much of the advocacy journalism in RS. Mr. Wenner finances worthy, deeply reported journalism that even its ideological opponents must acknowledge is substantive. It’s what he evidently cares about; the sense that he uses long form pieces to impress his fellow limousine liberals is incidental.

And then comes Jenny Eliscu’s “Elvis Costello & the Attraction,” wherein the titular boomer icon appears to be mildly bemused as to why he’s conversing with Nick Jonas, a young man he may never have heard of prior to this sitdown. In light of Rolling Stone’s current M.O., it’s quite telling: why is this older fellow bothering with this whippersnapper whom he barely understands? Does he not think he has something better to do?

YB should admit that the current political and financial climate is influencing the lack of ad hominem bitchiness in this post. He hopes to go back to mocking Rolling Stone very soon.

[Photo: AP]