Serve the Masses, Live with the Rich

One of our favorite media writers is Stephanie Zecharek over at Salon. Years ago, she impressed us by seeing the future. In 1999, she griped about the sorry state of American music magazines—particularly Rolling Stone and Spin and similar titles—and predicted a successful English colonization of same. In the years since then, that is precisely what happened. Felix Dennis launched Blender with Q magazine’s Andy Pemberton at the helm (and Spin’s Craig Marks as his flunkie), Rolling Stone hired its own British editor and a Q art director—and suddenly American magazines looked awfully British, which was all to the good, as far as we were concerned. (Folks like Jan Wenner needed more obvious proof—and the, er, rise of Maxim provided it in spades.)

Today, Stephanie writes a thoughtful piece on the new and numbing trend of magalogs—the “shopoholic” titles like Lucky, Cargo, and the new shelter-shopper, Domino. All three of these magazines are Conde Nast titles. Sy Newhouse and his modish army are not worried about competing with themselves. This is because each title is niche-defined, but still trying to reach what is considered general-interest circulation numbers—somewhere approaching a half-million or better is what is considered a comfortable, profitable national circulation. (The real unacknowledged crime here is how Lucky has influenced city magazines across the country. “Lucky” is the new watchword in city-mag offices across the land, and constantly held up as the golden calf of magazine publishing. Publish what your advertisers tell you to publish, they’re the ones paying the bills, duh!)

Being snobs ourselves, but with a streak of prankish irreverence, we like Zecharek for her lighthanded snobishness. She liked British music magazines better back in ’99 because British magazines were a lot better than American magazines. They were funnier, better written, better looking, and much less averse to risk-taking. (They still are, as far as we know.) If we had to guess, we’d say she probably has mixed feelings about what Rolling Stone has become; it is significantly less committed to troglodyte rock, and more willing than ever to tout the latest pneumatic teenage lip-syncer. On the other hand, art rock and alt-rock get more serious coverage, and the venerable old Stone still has some fight left in it when it comes to taking advocacy positions on things like drugs, guns, and Hunter Thompson. It appears to have survived its makeover, and avoided the unfortunate fate of dying with its original readership, cool but irrelevant.

The thing is, it is a rare trick to be both an elitist and a populist and to succeed while you’re doing it. In describing the evolution of Lucky—the progenitor of all these shopping mags—Zecharek laments the slow disappearance of cooler early features that drew her in. Short pieces, for example, about collecting LP covers and vintage scarves. The writer takes this as a sign that Lucky very intentionally shifted toward covering goods and services that were more mass-market than upscale—that is, more mall than boutique. This would be a natural shift, if you wanted to build circulation from the low 100s to the mid 100s, which is precisely what Lucky has done. It does not surprise us much that Zecharek would prefer a magazine in the lower circulation category, which stayed committed to servicing snobs and intellectuals. (We freely admit to being snobs and intellectuals ourselves, and we too would prefer the earlier incarnation of Lucky, if we had to choose.) We would bet dollars to a glossy, two-page spread of all available donuts that Zecharek has a strong distaste for commerical radio for roughly the same reasons. (Carp all you want, say the big boys at Clear Channel: Science—or Arbitron’s version of it—proves that most people are not snobs, and they really do want to hear “That Smell” thirty times per day into perpetuity.)

Then, too, we think maybe the populist approach is a purer form of pornography—sort of a Penthouse or Playboy to the snobbish erotica of Nerve or Libido. Better yet, shopping magazines operate like porn-browsing windows on the web. You’re waiting for something to catch your eye; so many tastes, so many fetishes—your “thinking eye” lands on something, and from there, your latent consumerism comes over you. Depending on how virulent is your need to have what you covet, and how much money you have access to, you might pursue further. Otherwise, you have the little talisman of the magazine photo—which you’ve bookmarked with the clever little sticker tabs.

Zecharek’s main argument is an interesting one: These magazines use a peer-to-peer voice (as widely attributed to Jane Pratt and Sassy magazine, though we have a pretty good idea the True Crime mags and comic books of the thirties and forties managed to do it pretty well, too) that pretends to be advocating for its readers. But what it actually offers in the way of wallpaper choices, chartreuse vases, kercheifs—is strictly declasse.

There are lots of reasons to hate this kind of pornographic reduction of the reading experience to base appetites—but none that won’t inevitably sound elitist and defeatist and baldly unamerican. A wise man we know says, “Serve the rich, live with the masses; serve the masses, live with the rich.”