“Alternative Press” Hands The Mic To Its Readers

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 jump, he looks at the year-end wrapup published by the bible of the Hot Topic set Alternative Press:

So! The new year a-borning finds Your Correspondent having assessed the year-end issues of Blender, Rolling Stone, Spin, and Vibe in the past half-month. So his pickings look to be pretty slim for the next couple of weeks, huh?

YC’ll begin this year with a crack at the February 2008 edition of a music mag produced outside the confines of New York City: specifically, Cleveland. He’s mentioned more than once before that he wished more music publications based outside the centrifuge of major media had a spring in their step indicating a rugged independence, and he thinks that Alternative Press fits the bill.

AP was started in 1985, and rather like hundreds of other fanzines at the time it covered the SST/Homestead diaspora. But president/founder Mike Shea eventually forged a viable business in the very early ’90s, emphasizing the likes of Soundgarden and Nine Inch Nails at a time when Spin and Rolling Stone simply wouldn’t bother.

As “alternative music” went in the 1990s, so went AP: Everclear, Veruca Salt, and the Toadies were covered with gusto. While the late ’90s/ early aughts found the pub covering butt-rock (which evidently caused the editorial staff substantial heartburn), AP has for the past five years focused on commercially viable derivations of punk along the lines of AFI and Dashboard Confessional. Which is to say, if a band could possibly score a spot on the Warped Tour in the past five years, then it could reasonably expect AP to come calling.

Which is also to say that, much more than the pubs mentioned above, Alternative Press is currently premised on rock and roll music as it experienced by lotsa suburban teenagers. If anyone reading these words is older than 19, it stands a good chance that that someone is scornful of such signifiers as Hot Topic, asymmetrical haircuts, jeans-designed-for-but-not-worn-by-chicks, and alternately heart-on-sleeve/bratty songs recorded with a intimidating amounts of compression. YC will only suggest that that someone recall the signifiers they enjoyed at an equivalent time in their lives and the scorn that greeted them from older folks.

Alternative Press does not condescend to teenagers. In the article linked above, the staff credits talking to kids at the Warped Tour a few years ago as key to the abovementioned refocusing. It’s de rigeur for music magazines nowadays to ape multifarious online communities based around music–but the current incarnation of AP succeeds at community-building better than most, simply because readers’ voices are featured very prominently. There’s a sense that the mag takes kids by the hand, embracing their interests and aesthetics while gently nudging them towards what lies past Saves the Day and its discontents. It’s a starter kit for rock and roll.

Let YC get something out of the way posthaste: whether in the current or in past incarnations, AP‘s art direction has been gawdawful. Nearly every page in the issue under consideration includes colors clashing in the manner of a crazy quilt, irretrievably compromising already very busy page layouts. YC should say that his preferences are likely to mean a lot less to AP‘s design braintrust than those of the teenagers to which AP is devoted and who are known to clutter their MySpace pages with every available distraction.

The scribbling? Ain’t much happening there. Contributing writer Jonah Bayer’s cover profile of Paramore hits all the beats that are meaningful to their fans: Hayley Willams is a small-c christian, she isn’t dating guitarist Josh Farro, message board goons want to “nail” her. No mention is made of how the band is the harbinger of the 360 deal, seeing as a typical AP reader probably has no investment in emerging business practices.

This being the mag’s year-end wrap-up, Paramore is trumpeted on the cover as AP‘s “Band of the Year,” having been voted as such by its readers. Where the big boys tend to descend from Olympus to emphasize their august choices for “best this or that” and render reader choices as an afterthought in their annual wrap-ups, AP emphasizes the opposite: Chiodos (whose Bone Palace Ballet is voted album of the year) and Paramore ride high via reader opinion, whereas Fall Out Boy are rebuked for dalliances with Ashlee Simpson and Jay-Z (“I’m almost ashamed to say they were my favorite band three years ago,” writes San Lorenzo, Calif.’s no doubt wizened, battle-hardened Monica Vastaneda). Readers also swarmed the mag’s Web site to vote for MySpace-enabled, unsigned Hometown Heroes; I was charmed by a photo of Clifton Park, N.Y.’s largely symmetrically coifed, seemingly-unconcerned-with-looking-cool band of 13-15 year olds Enigmatic Heart therein.

The editors’ 2007 lists are deferential and are introduced thusly: “Please move quickly and calmly towards your nearest exit as our crack-critical AP edit team takes aim at all that was more lovely and than lame in our 2007.” Editor-in-chief Jason Pettigrew reps for non-Hot Topic faves Holy Fuck and Grinderman (as well as, for no particular reason and deep in the reviews section, a survey of YC’s beloved Mountain), while copy editor Rachel Lux acknowledges that AP‘s readers would not much care for Wilco’s Sky Blue Sky.

There’s more of a sense in AP that playing music is something you and your peers can do than with the big boys. At a time when Rolling Stone/Spin/Blender leave content regarding musical instruments to the downmarket likes of Guitar World and Modern Drummer, AP includes “Gig Bag”–in which Crate’s Profiler 5 Guitar Combo Amp and a Rhythmsource Metronome are assessed–in its service well and asks musicians like Between the Buried and Me drummer Blake Richardson about the act of playing drums. Clearly, the presence of ads from musical instrument manufacturers influences this, but surely encouraging kids to learn about playing instruments is a fine thing (YC guesses that Guitar Hero and Rock Band will speed the process) so it’s nice to see the tools of music making included in service round-ups alongside Triple Five Soul’s winter jackets and Conair’s Infiniti Hair Designer.

AP‘s approach could seem rather craven, nakedly catering to teenagers with a somewhat narrow frame of reference that involves believing that mall-punk and the emo disapora retain much of a countercultural charge. But YC doesn’t think there’s much sense in auntishly berating kids for not knowing their history. (Many will figure it out for themselves elsewhere.) He does think it’s just fine to focus on a particular variety of guitar music with which tons and tons of teenagers identify with viscerally–no other music magazine does so. It may be all for naught, in the sense that the online communities that AP evokes will only become more evolved while print media withers.

In any case, YC will add that, given what was probably an early December deadline, he salutes the mag for a nimble response by including the first major magazine reference he’s read as to 2girls1cup.com (page 89).